(By phone) Perhaps there is one broad concept, and it’s that everything we do has to be viewed through the lens of reducing our carbon footprint. We need to ask – does this policy increase or decrease our carbon footprint?

We don’t have much time to turn this around, from a national security standpoint of working towards energy independence, and from the standpoint of that global warming is real, and it’s accelerating as we sit on our hands and do nothing.

There are transportation issues, where the federal government should be helping communities west of the Mississippi to get transit. We need help dealing with the railroads in using their rail corridors to speed up mass transit solutions.

We need to go to the car manufacturers and get higher fuel efficiency standards, and change out the internal combustion engine. One of the compatible things between electric vehicles and renewable energy is the wind that blows at night can fuel the cars as you plug them in overnight.

One of the sad things that happened is that California had a very advanced fleet of electric cars, and then they crushed them. It’s pretty stunning to think of where we could have gone, but we backed away from it.

We also need to incentivize conservation, like we did here in Colorado. We need to do something about demand side management and holding down our energy consumption, which keeps increasing yearly.

For example, (state Rep.) Claire Levy and I passed a bill that enabled the publicly regulated utilities to give rebates to people for switching out inefficient old appliances, and it also extended to industrial users.

We passed a very aggressive state renewable energy portfolio standard. We mapped the state of Colorado for renewable energy potential, and the U.S. should map itself to show where the best places for wind, solar and all of the renewable resources are – and create a comprehensive policy.

Government also ought to be leading the way on energy efficiency in the construction of new government buildings, and the retrofitting of old ones.

When it comes to what we did in the state, it was not just one bill or one thing. It was a compendium of bills, all building on other bills, to change how we do business. And that’s what the federal government needs to do – we need to change how we do business.