Leadership Quote by Lois Capps

Capps frames climate and energy policy as a character test for the country: less about sacrifice than competence. The line is built like a pragmatic to-do list, but it’s doing cultural work. “Really improve” signals impatience with half-measures and with the performative politics that treat standards as bureaucratic trivia. Energy efficiency is the unglamorous first step precisely because it’s measurable: it bypasses ideological theater and forces results.

Then she widens the lens: “develop in full scale renewable and alternative energy.” “Full scale” is the tell. In the late-2000s/early-2010s fight over clean energy, renewables were often praised in speeches and starved in budgets, treated as boutique experiments instead of industrial strategy. Capps pushes against that smallness, implicitly rebutting the fossil-fuel argument that clean power is nice but not serious. She’s also stitching together constituencies: efficiency appeals to fiscal hawks and homeowners; renewables to environmentalists and the innovation economy.

The rhetorical pivot is the closer: “the one resource we have in abundance, our creativity.” It’s a politician’s way of smuggling optimism into a policy argument without sounding naive. She reframes energy not as a zero-sum war over scarcity, but as an American comparative advantage problem: we may not have infinite oil, but we can out-invent the constraints. Subtext: stop romanticizing extraction; start rewarding ingenuity. It’s a clean-energy pitch that aims to feel like patriotism, not penance.