The Honorable Federico Peña

My fellow Democrats, welcome to Denver! Bienvenidos a Denver! Welcome to our beautiful city in this colorful state in the most incredible country on earth. We in Colorado are proud of our state. But along the way, we’ve had our share of tough times.

When I became mayor of Denver in 1983, everyone knew we had a serious problem with air pollution. On a bad day, you could barely see our magnificent mountains. Some people said we couldn’t fix it. Our economy was in a recession, and we were struggling with the shock of an energy crisis. Sound familiar? But we knew we couldn’t afford more of the same and we made a decision to change.

We started using cleaner fuels. We invested in mass transit. Everyone chipped in and did their part. And a funny thing happened. Our city got cleaner and our economy started to grow. We took our future into our own hands. We built a new airport for the new century.

Today new energy companies are coming to Colorado and building wind turbines and solar plants. We’re creating more and more engineering and manufacturing jobs and paying good wages. But we meet here today in the shadow of a greater challenge, a challenge that goes far beyond Colorado.

Today, our nation faces yet another energy crisis. Every day, Americans all across our land are wondering how they can afford to pay for the gasoline they need to get to their jobs, how they can afford to pay their light bills, their heating and cooling bills. They wonder if there will be anything left for a college education, for a medical emergency or for their retirement. And they wonder: how did this happen?

Our addiction to oil, our dependence on imports and our greenhouse gas pollution are all getting worse every year. America is on a liquid leash, a leash that’s choking our paychecks and the prosperity of our nation. For eight years now, President Bush and Dick Cheney have rubber- stamped an energy policy written by big oil companies and their lobbyists in Washington.

And what does John McCain want to do now? The same old things that keep on failing: more of the same tax breaks for big oil companies making record profits. More of the same roadblocks in front of fuel-efficient vehicles. More of the same refusal to support advanced, renewable energy. Americans who had to pay $4 dollars a gallon for gas this summer know we can’t afford more of the same.

Barack Obama will bring the change we need. To reduce our dependence on foreign oil, to increase our use of home-grown clean fuels, to create 5 million new green-collar jobs. He’ll invest $150 billion over 10 years to build new energy technologies here at home and then export them around the world. He’ll raise mileage standards so our cars can go farther on less gas. He’ll help American industry retool to build the cars of the future and give tax credits to Americans to buy them.

These aren’t just dreams. This is America’s future: taking back our own energy destiny. Putting the best minds of our great universities and research centers to work—just as we did when John Kennedy, a Democratic president, committed us to putting a man on the moon. American energy, American technology, American jobs, ready to be created, right now. That’s the change we need.

And to those who doubt we can solve our energy problems and create new American jobs and economic growth at the same time, I say: come to Denver. Come to states like Pennsylvania, New Mexico and Colorado, all being transformed by Democratic governors building new green economies.

So tonight, I ask each of you, as well as Americans across our great land, to believe that we can wean ourselves off foreign oil. We can create millions of jobs in green industries. We can develop our own energy sources. With Barack Obama as our president, a president who has challenged us to believe in ourselves, we will get the change we need, we will transform our future, and power this country for generations to come.