Sacramento--Democratic Nominee for Congress Debbie Cook (CA-46) was honored today with the Roscoe Bartlett "Speaking Truth To Power" Award at the ASPO-USA Conference in Sacramento.

Randy Udall, an ASPO-USA (Association for the Study of Peak Oil) board member, announced the award at the conference on Tuesday afternoon, citing Cook's willingness to talk frankly about energy issues.

"We honored her for her courage, for speaking honestly about energy realities and for promoting an energy program that makes sense," said Udall, who is the director
of the Community Office for Resource Efficiency (CORE), a nonprofit organization in Colorado that promotes energy efficiency and renewable energy.

Cook, the mayor of Huntington Beach, is a nationally recognized leader on energy, and also a board member of ASPO-USA. She was instrumental in bringing the conference to California for the first time. The conference ends Tuesday evening.

The award was named in honor of Republican Representative Roscoe Bartlett (MD-6), who leads the effort in Congress for an energy policy based on the challenges of peak oil.

Debbie Cook for Congress

Debbie Cook has been speaking out for decades now on behalf of our local environmental issues as an advocate and then as Mayor of Huntington Beach.  I admire the things she's done and why she's running for Congress.  If the local Democrats won't support her, then Daily Kos needs to step up and support this amazing candidate.

Although Cook has hosted dozens of small fund-raising parties and began airing her first campaign commercial on local cable networks this week, she's running low on cash. And while her fellow Democrats consider her to be a qualified and impressive candidate, she isn't viewed as a serious enough challenge by Democratic fund-raisers to earn priority support in the party's "Red to Blue" or "Emerging Races" cash-infusion programs.

But Cook isn't worried. "We're not really counting on getting a lot of money from anyone," she says. "I know I'm an unlikely candidate. I'm not doing this for the retirement package, which I'm told [Rohrabacher] enjoys. I don't have a burning desire to be in Congress. I have a burning desire to make a difference."

Her fight to defeat Rohrabacher, she insists, is simply a measure of her frustration with his aloofness to his own constituents and his legendary antipathy to everything she stands for: preservation of local habitats, "sensible development" that protects resources and a commitment to finding "sustainable sources of energy" to replace fossil fuels. She's infuriated by Rohrabacher's public statement that global warming is a "hoax" and his sarcastic speculation that global warming 55 million years ago was caused by "dinosaur flatulence."

Debbie Cook has already made a tremendous difference for the local environment by helping spearhead the effort to save the Bolsa Chica Wetlands and she's proven that Democrats can be sensible and fiscally responsible as the two term mayor of Huntington Beach.   This is exactly who we need in Congress and even though I'm helping my husband run for State Senate, I want to help Debbie Cook as well by writing about her fight, her passion and her amazing intellect.  I've met her, I've heard her speak in person, she is the real deal here people.  Please, lets support this amazing progressive.

Debbie Cook also released a statement about this bailout plan on Monday, that's right.  MONDAY.  Here is what she had to say about the proposed bailout.

"We must take action to keep our whole economy from collapsing. But if the plan by the Treasury which has leaked out today is genuine, then it's unclear if the plan will work at all.

   "Add in a massive transfer of authority to the executive branch, with no congressional oversight or judicial review, and this plan should be dead on arrival.

   "Handing over taxpayer money to the government with no oversight is always a bad idea and it's especially rotten given the current administration's track record."

Call your representatives today and tell them to stop this blank check.

Calitics

And here is more from the tremendously thorough article at the OC Weekly.

"New airports are not the solution," she says. "Look at the price of gas; airlines are going out of business. We need mass transportation, light rail, not toll roads. We can only solve these things when we work together: water, runoff, transportation, air quality and the port [of Long Beach]. That huge red plume from the port sits over Huntington Beach. We're impacted by all that bad air."

Through SCAG, Cook opposed building a commercial airport at the former El Toro Marine Corps Air Station, as well as a desalination plant slated to operate as an appendage of the aging AES Huntington Beach Generating Station. "One of the things I learned is what a boondoggle ocean desalination is," she says. "The energy intensity is unbelievable. It can't be sustainable as energy prices go up."

Cook's interest in sustainable energy took her to a 2004 conference in Denver held by the Association for the Study of Peak Oil, which argues that global oil production peaked in the 1970s and has been on a steady and inevitable decline ever since. The conference sealed her passion for lobbying for alternative sources of energy. "There is nothing more important to our society than energy," she argues. "America will drill 50,000 wells this year alone. We drill 150 new wells every day. We are drilling like madmen, and it's just a thimbleful of oil out there. But politicians don't stay in office by telling the truth."

Truth to Power, she's speaks it for all of us, not just our district but the entire Country.  Please help Debbie Cook turn Red Orange County a little bit more Blue this November!

Please Donate to her campaign!