Thank you. Please be seated. Thank you. You know you’re in a pretty good country when you see a lot of cowboy hats out in the crowd (laughter and applause) and when you got horses guarding the perimeter. (Applause.)

We just toured two fires that are burning in the area. It’s hard to describe to our fellow citizen what it means to see a fire like we saw. It’s the holocaust, it’s devastating. We saw the big flames jumping from treetop to treetop, which reminds me about the brave men and women, what they have to face when they go in to fight the fires.

I first want to start by thanking those who put their lives at risk to protect our communities, to protect our people, to protect our national treasures, the U.S. forests. I appreciate our firefighters. (Applause.) All those firefighters know something that I’ve come to realize, that we can thin our forests, that we can use common-sense policy to make the fires burn less hot and protect our forests….

The forest policy, the conditions of our forests didn’t happen overnight. The experts who know something about forests will tell you that the condition, the overgrown and unhealthy condition of a lot of our forestland happened over a century. It’s taken a while for this situation to evolve.

It may interest you to know that today there’s 190 million acres of forests and woodlands around the country which are vulnerable to catastrophic fire because of brush and small trees that have been collecting for literally decades. A problem that has taken a long time to develop is going to take a long time to solve. So what we’re going to talk about today is the beginnings of a solution. But we’ve got to get after it now. We have a problem in Oregon and around our country that we must start solving….

We’re going to focus on areas where thinning is the most critical, where the damage can be most severe by caused by fires. We’re working with the Western Governors Association to determine projects of the highest priority in each state. In other words, we’re setting priorities, and we’re getting after it. (Applause.)

We are speeding up the process of environmental assessments and consolations required by law. Look, we want people to have input. If somebody has got a different point of view, we need to hear it. This is America. We expect to hear people’s different points of view in this country. But we want people to understand that we’re talking about the health of our forests, and if there’s a high priority, we need to get after it before the forests burn and people lose life. (Applause.)

We’re expediting the administrative appeals process so that disputes over thinning projects are resolved more quickly….

The problem has existed for years. Now let us be the ones who start solving the problem. And that’s what I’m going to ask Congress to do when they come back….

I thought our government response to the power outage out East and the Midwest was a good response. You know, after September the 11th, we came together in a way to be able to better deal with emergencies that affected America.

The federal government, the state government, the local governments all work in a very close way, and the communications was good. The system survived. The system responded well. We had a lot of good people who didn’t panic and dealt with the problem in a very professional way….

And yesterday, Secretary of Energy Abraham and the Canadian Minister of Natural Resources met in Detroit. It’s the joint effort to find out what went wrong. We’re going to try to find out as quickly as we can exactly what caused the rolling blackout.

But this rolling blackout and the problem we’ve got here with hydropower, the problem in California recently, should say loud and clear to members of the legislative branch of government that we’ve got an energy issue that we need to solve in America.

I called together a put the task force together and made 105 recommendations for our government to look at about a comprehensive national energy plan, one that encourages conservation, one that encourages energy efficiency, one that realizes that we’ve got to be less dependent on foreign sources of energy. And part of that was to recognize that our infrastructure the electricity infrastructure needs to be modernized.

We’ve taken some action without laws passed by the legislative branch. For example, there’s a bottleneck that plagued California for years in other words, electricity wasn’t able to move as freely from south to north, north to south, as we wanted. And we’re now permitting line so that that bottleneck can be removed. And the Department of Energy is working with the private sector to get the lines up and running so we can move more electricity.

And we’ve been dealing with the shortage of hydropower. As you know, you’ve got an issue in the Basin and we’ve been trying to come up with reasonable policy so that people can farm the land and fish can live at the same time. (Applause.)

But Congress needs to act. I don’t know if you know this or not, but for many years the reliability of electricity in America depended on companies observing voluntary standards to prevent blackouts. I don’t think those standards ought to be voluntary, I think they ought to be mandatory. And if there’s not reliability back up for electricity, there ought to be a serious consequence for somebody who misuses the public trust. And Congress needs to have that in the law. (Applause.)

We ought to authorize the federal government to step in as last resort to put up new power lines where it best serves the national interest. We ought to make investment new investment in a transmission of electricity easier to make. We’ve got some old laws that were passed a long time ago that make it harder for people to invest in new electricity lines, new transmission lines. That doesn’t make any sense. If we’ve got a problem, let’s deal with it.

The law that passed out of the House of Representatives deals with it. I’m confident and the Senate passed a bill in other words, out of the two bodies, they need to get together. I talked to Pete Dominici, the Senator from New Mexico. I talked to Bill Tauzin, the Chairman from Louisiana. They both agreed on what I’ve just described to you as necessary in a new bill, so that we can say we solved the problem, we’re modernizing our electricity system so the people of America don’t have their lives disrupted like what happened during the rolling blackout that took place last week.

So we’re going to get us a good energy bill. We need an energy bill, an energy strategy, and we need the will to implement it. (Applause.)

Let me conclude by telling you that I’m incredibly proud of our country. You know, we’ve been through a lot. We’ve been through a recession. You’re still in it here in Oregon. We had these people attack us because of what we stand for. We love freedom in America, and we’re not going to change. (Applause.)

We stood tall and strong. We’re a determined country to not only protect ourselves, we’re determined, as well, to protect ourselves by spreading freedom throughout the world. We know that free societies will be peaceful societies. We believe in America that freedom is not America’s gift to the world, it is God’s gift to every single human being on the face of the Earth. (Applause.)

We’ve been through some tough times, and these tough times came to the right nation. Our values are strong; our people are courageous and strong and compassionate. I love being the President of the greatest nation on the face of the Earth.

May God bless you all.