Politics & Power Quote by Chris Van Hollen

The line lands like a bureaucratic tautology on purpose: it turns a moral argument about climate and infrastructure into a commonsense complaint about waste. Van Hollen isn’t trying to dazzle; he’s trying to recruit. “Awful lot of energy” does double duty, naming both literal fuel and the national effort we squander by clinging to inefficient systems. It’s a politician’s neat trick: frame a contested agenda as basic housekeeping.

The intent is coalition-building. By leading with “as a Nation,” he elevates energy efficiency from a niche environmental concern to a civic performance issue, inviting voters who care about jobs, costs, and security to see themselves in the problem. “Inefficient use of energy” is deliberately bloodless language that avoids triggering the culture-war tripwires around regulation, fossil fuels, or lifestyle change. No villains, no sacrifice, just a leaky bucket we can all agree to patch.

Subtext: energy policy is about competence. Efficiency becomes a proxy for good governance, the kind that fixes grids, upgrades buildings, and modernizes transportation without asking people to radically reorganize their lives. It also quietly nods to national vulnerability: wasting energy means wasting money, wasting competitiveness, and depending more on unstable supply chains and geopolitics.

Contextually, this is the post-2000s Democratic energy script: sell decarbonization through the language of savings and modernization. It works because it recasts climate action as pragmatism, not penance, and because “waste” is one of the few bipartisan emotions left.