Inslee: Shift to clean energy, 'or China is going to eat our lunch'

Rep. Jay Inslee (D-Wash.) warned Thursday that America needs to embrace clean-energy technologies instead of focusing on oil drilling, "or China is going to eat our lunch."

Appearing on Fox News, Inslee said he supported a ban on drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, arguing that the reserves there would barely make a dent in the country's oil needs.

But he stressed that the U.S. needed to shift the argument from where to drill to what energy technologies can replace drilling.

"China right now is preparing to roll out electric cars, lithium ion batteries, solar cells, cellulosic ethanol. This is where the future of energy is. We've a finite resource in oil, just like we had a finite resource in whale oil, and we made a transition," he said. "And we have to really focus our national energies in a bipartisan way, I would hope, on finding our way to compete with China to really build new energy sources of the future."

The congressman, who sits on the Energy and Commerce and Natural Resources committees, as well as the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, also argued that it was important to "preserve this relatively small space the way the creator designed it."

"We've made some national commitments to our grandkids," Inslee said. "We've done it in Yellowstone National Park. We've done it in Glacier. We've done it in Mt. Rainier National Park. And we've done it in the Arctic refuge."