Excerpts of Rep. Calvin Say's address to the Legislature yesterday:

I believe Hawai'i must face the years ahead confident that our people can stand on their own. We depend too much on the outside world for our survival, and that's a dangerous thing to do.

Almost all our food and consumer goods are imported. Our economy runs on tourism and the military. Our transportation system runs on oil and gas that must cross thousands of miles of open ocean to get here. Our electric systems have few backups, because unlike any other state, we don't have a national power grid to plug into.

If real trouble comes, our current economic dependency will come back to haunt us.

Today, Hawai'i remains the most oil-dependent state in the nation with over 90 percent of our primary energy coming from oil.

It has been said that Hawai'i has more renewable energy resources than any state in the nation. We do have abundant wind, solar, geothermal, ocean wave, and ocean thermal resources. However, converting those resources into usable electricity and transportation fuels is not yet technically or financially feasible.

Many of our renewable resources are most abundant on the Big Island, but most of our state's population is on O'ahu.

Right now, O'ahu's only renewable energy resources are wind, solar and garbage. Wind is intermittent, and building a wind farm has been difficult because of community opposition. We can expand the amount of solid waste we use for energy, but the total increase will take only a small bite out of power demand.

Today, we import ethanol into Hawai'i. In the future, we could make it here from sugar — and that process is more than six-and-a-half times as efficient as corn-based ethanol.

In the next two months, we expect at least two Hawai'i-based companies will move forward with serious proposals to build ethanol plants.

Almost half the energy now consumed in Waikiki is used for air-conditioning. Two Hawai'i-based companies are moving forward with proven technology that could be used to dramatically cut the costs of cooling buildings in downtown Honolulu and hotels in Waikiki.

Another promising development is under way by the University of Hawai'i and a spin-off company, HR Bio-Petroleum. They have undertaken a pioneering effort to produce renewable fuels. Their goal is to generate fuels for transportation from marine algae and to use carbon dioxide from power plant stacks as the nutrient for its growth.

Innovation comes from new ideas like these. Innovation changes the way we act and how we think about ourselves. It helps us to diversify our economy, creating better paying jobs for our citizens. It even helps bring affordable homes within reach.

We must redouble our efforts to diversify Hawai'i's economy, or we will never be able to break our state's economic addiction to tourism.

To achieve this goal we must accomplish two things: First, we must expand the base of existing businesses that pay a living wage; and second, we must better train our workforce for the opportunities of tomorrow.

So we intend to finish what we started — the repair and maintenance of our public schools.

Three years ago we passed the Re-inventing Education Act, and while there have been a few bumps on the road to better schools, we need to give this measure a fair chance to work.

Last year, we had several significant warnings of how unprepared we have become on the disaster front.

When the Ka Loko Dam on Kaua'i burst on the 14th of March, 1.6 million gallons of water came rushing down on unsuspecting residents. Seven people died, homes and land were ruined.

Our courts will decide the liability issues, but we have already learned a tragic lesson about the disrepair and neglect of our state's aging agriculture water systems.

On Sept. 5, a truck hit a freeway overpass on O'ahu and turned the city into a massive parking lot. People heading west on H-1 took eight hours or more to reach their homes.

Everyone had a story to tell the next day, but the real story was how unprepared civil and state authorities were to deal with the mess. Imagine if it had been a tsunami evacuation.

Forty days later, the biggest earthquake to hit Hawai'i in more than 30 years struck off the coast of the Big Island.

Fortunately, no one was seriously injured, but blackouts hit the islands of Hawai'i, Maui and O'ahu, and damages are heading in the range of a quarter of a billion dollars.

An investigation has determined that well over a third of our state's 328 civil defense sirens would not have worked if officials had needed to sound a tsunami alert. The sirens had no backup power supplies.

It must be obvious to everyone now, this level of response is totally unacceptable. The House will introduce a disaster-preparedness bill this year to make sure we are better prepared the next time a sudden emergency hits the islands.

We are long overdue fulfilling another commitment. We must ensure that all Hawai'i's children have adequate health insurance.

We will mark an important milestone this year in preserving important agricultural lands. We will consider incentives to keep these lands green forever.

The final push for important agricultural lands comes as our affordable-housing crisis has reached its breaking point. The number of our homeless is at a record high.

I believe we can better deliver affordable rental housing to Hawai'i's people with two decisive actions: First, we must maintain funding for affordable rental housing; second, and even more importantly, we must act to create a fast-track permitting process for affordable rental housing.

This legislative initiative will provide a three-year window to eliminate most of the permitting logjam. This will remove a significant barrier to building affordable rental housing. We can do this without compromising our local environment, or Hawai'i's health and safety codes.

If the project is built on ceded lands, 20 percent of the rental homes will be set aside for Native Hawaiians.

I stand before you today convinced that if we can find the legislative will, we have a way to meet our challenges.