|
Future Energy eNews IntegrityResearchInstitute.org May 7,
2006 |
1) Global
Warming and Climate Change Banned by White House - Deliberate censorship finally exposed
2)
Valone Reinstated by the Patent Office - Article by Science & Government Report makes
up for 1999
3) Wave Power Gets a
Boost from a Ferrofluid - Magnet
field concentrator & lubricator = wave electricity
4) The Snapper Grabs
Up Wave Power - UK invention
uses parallel magnet chains that pulse electricity
5) Alternative
Fuels Ensure a Strong Future
- Former CIA Director says hybrids will eliminate oil imports
1) Climate
Researchers Feeling Heat From White House
By Juliet Eilperin, April 6, 2006, Washington Post Staff Writer, p. A27 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/05/AR2006040502150.html?referrer=emailarticle
Scientists doing climate research for the federal government say the Bush
administration has made it hard for them to speak forthrightly to the public
about global warming. The result, the researchers say, is a danger that
Americans are not getting the full story on how the climate is changing.
Employees and contractors working for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration, along with a U.S. Geological Survey scientist working at an
NOAA lab, said in interviews that over the past year administration officials
have chastised them for speaking on policy questions; removed references to
global warming from their reports, news releases and conference Web sites;
investigated news leaks; and sometimes urged them to stop speaking to the media
altogether. Their accounts indicate that the ideological battle over
climate-change research, which first came to light at NASA, is being fought in
other federal science agencies as well.
These scientists -- working nationwide in research centers in such places as
Princeton, N.J., and Boulder, Colo. -- say they are required to clear all media
requests with administration officials, something they did not have to do until
the summer of 2004. Before then, point climate researchers -- unlike staff
members in the Justice or State departments, which have long-standing policies
restricting access to reporters -- were relatively free to discuss their
findings without strict agency oversight.
"There has been a change in how we're expected to interact with the
press," said Pieter Tans, who measures greenhouse gases linked to global
warming and has worked at NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder
for two decades. He added that although he often "ignores the rules"
the administration has instituted, when it comes to his colleagues, "some
people feel intimidated -- I see that."
Christopher Milly, a hydrologist at the U.S. Geological Survey, said he had
problems twice while drafting news releases on scientific papers describing how
climate change would affect the nation's water supply.
Once in 2002, Milly said, Interior officials declined to issue a news release on
grounds that it would cause "great problems with the department." In
November 2005, they agreed to issue a release on a different climate-related
paper, Milly said, but "purged key words from the releases, including
'global warming,' 'warming climate' and 'climate change.' "
Administration officials said they are following long-standing policies that
were not enforced in the past. Kent Laborde, a NOAA public affairs officer who
flew to Boulder last month to monitor an interview Tans did with a film crew
from the BBC, said he was helping facilitate meetings between scientists and
journalists.
"We've always had the policy, it just hasn't been enforced," Laborde
said. "It's important that the leadership knows something is coming out in
the media, because it has a huge impact. The leadership needs to know the tenor
or the tone of what we expect to be printed or broadcast."
Several times, however, agency officials have tried to alter what these
scientists tell the media. When Tans was helping to organize the Seventh
International Carbon Dioxide Conference near Boulder last fall, his lab
director told him participants could not use the term "climate
change" in conference paper's titles and abstracts. Tans and others
disregarded that advice.
None of the scientists said political appointees had influenced their research
on climate change or disciplined them for questioning the administration.
Indeed, several researchers have received bigger budgets in recent years
because President Bush has focused on studying global warming rather than
curbing greenhouse gases. NOAA's budget for climate research and services is
now $250 million, up from $241 million in 2004.
The assertion that climate scientists are being censored first surfaced in
January when James Hansen, who directs NASA's Goddard Institute for Space
Studies, told the New York Times and The Washington Post that the
administration sought to muzzle him after he gave a lecture in December calling
for cuts in emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. (NASA
Administrator Michael D. Griffin issued new rules recently that make clear that
its scientists are free to talk to members of the media about their scientific
findings and to express personal interpretations of those findings.
Two weeks later, Hansen suggested to an audience at the New School University
in New York that his counterparts at NOAA were experiencing even more severe
censorship. "It seems more like Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union than the
United States," he told the crowd.
NOAA Administrator Conrad C. Lautenbacher Jr. responded by sending an
agency-wide e-mail that said he is "a strong believer in open,
peer-reviewed science as well as the right and duty of scientists to seek the
truth and to provide the best scientific advice possible."
"I encourage our scientists to speak freely and openly," he added.
"We ask only that you specify when you are communicating personal views
and when you are characterizing your work as part of your specific contribution
to NOAA's mission."
NOAA scientists, however, cite repeated instances in which the administration
played down the threat of climate change in their documents and news releases.
Although Bush and his top advisers have said that Earth is warming and human
activity has contributed to this, they have questioned some predictions and
caution that mandatory limits on carbon dioxide could damage the nation's
economy.
In 2002, NOAA agreed to draft a report with Australian researchers aimed at
helping reef managers deal with widespread coral bleaching that stems from
higher sea temperatures. A March 2004 draft report had several references to
global warming, including "Mass bleaching . . . affects reefs at regional
to global scales, and has incontrovertibly linked to increases in sea temperature
associated with global change."
A later version, dated July 2005, drops those references and several others
mentioning climate change.
NOAA has yet to release the report on coral bleaching. James R. Mahoney,
assistant secretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere, said he decided in
late 2004 to delay the report because "its scientific basis was so
inadequate." Now that it is revised, he said, he is waiting for the
Australian Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority to approve it. "I just
did not think it was ready for prime time," Mahoney said. "It was not
just about climate change -- there were a lot of things."
On other occasions, Mahoney and other NOAA officials have told researchers not
to give their opinions on policy matters. Konrad Steffen directs the
Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University
of Colorado at Boulder, a joint NOAA-university institute with a $40 million
annual budget. Steffen studies the Greenland ice sheet, and when his work was
cited last spring in a major international report on climate change in the
Arctic, he and another NOAA lab director from Alaska received a call from
Mahoney in which he told them not to give reporters their opinions on global
warming.
Steffen said that he told him that although Mahoney has considerable leverage
as "the person in command for all research money in NOAA . . . I was not
backing down."
Mahoney said he had "no recollection" of the conversation, which took
place in a conference call. "It's virtually inconceivable that I would
have called him about this," Mahoney said, though he added: "For
those who are government employees, our position is they should not typically
render a policy view."
Tans, whose interviews with the BBC crew were monitored by Laborde, said Laborde
has not tried to interfere with the interviews. But Tans said he did not
understand why he now needs an official "minder" from Washington to
observe his discussions with the media. "It used to be we could say,
'Okay, you're welcome to come in, let's talk,' " he said. "There was
never anything of having to ask permission of anybody."
The need for clearance from Washington, several NOAA scientists said, amounts
to a "pocket veto" allowing administration officials to block
interviews by not giving permission in time for journalists' deadlines.
Ronald Stouffer, a climate research scientist at NOAA's Geophysical Fluid
Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, estimated his media requests have dropped in
half because it took so long to get clearance to talk from NOAA headquarters.
Thomas Delworth, one of Stouffer's colleagues, said the policy means Americans
have only "a partial sense" of what government scientists have
learned about climate change.
"American taxpayers are paying the bill, and they have a right to know
what we're doing," he said.
Researcher Eddy Palanzo contributed to this report.
========================================================================
2) Patent Office To
Reinstate Fired Cold-Fusion-Believing Examiner
Science and Government Report: The Independent Bulletin of Science
Policy, Volume XXXV, Number 15/October 01, 2005 http://newenergytimes.com/Inthenews/2006/PatentOfficeToReinstate.htm
Cold
fusion must have at least nine lives, or so it must seem to the vast majority
of physicists who consider it pseudoscience. Last year, two events brought cold
fusion back into the spotlight, if only briefly. The Department of Energy (DOE)
completed a secret review of the progress that has occurred in the field since
the sensational 1988 announcement of room temperature fusion in a jar, finding
nothing to merit a change to its hands-off treatment. Also last year, Eugene
Mallove, a cold fusion zealot who founded and published Infinite Energy
magazine, was beaten to death during a robbery near a rental property he was
visiting in Norwich, CT.
Now,
cold fusion has been unearthed once again, as another fusion proselytizer won a
six-year battle to overturn his firing as a patent examiner. Thomas Valone's
1999 dismissal had been the direct result of efforts he had undertaken to
promote cold fusion.
Valone's
boss at the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) alleged violations of
federal regulations in the course of his efforts to locate and schedule a
government facility to house a cold fusion conference he was organizing. In
late July, a federal arbitrator overturned his dismissal, ordering USPTO to
reinstate Valone. He also ordered the agency to pay the salary he would have
received during his six years off.
The
mediator, Robert Moore, didn't try to weigh the merits of cold fusion, though
he did find "nothing wrong in being in the forefront of ideas and theories
whose time may have not yet arrived, and may never." His decision was
based on the fine points of human relations practice; PTO had built its case
for firing Valone in part on incidents that were too minor to have counted
against him, he ruled. Valone had been denied due process, he said, and USPTO
had also failed to sufficiently substantiate its two principal charges against
Valone—that he had repeatedly misrepresented the agency and that his cold
fusion activities had interfered with his job. More about that later.
But
Moore's lengthy narrative of the case and his decision strayed well beyond the
particulars of Valone's case. The reader is presented with an unflattering look
inside USPTO offices, where examiners are expected to meet quarterly
"goals" on the number of applications they process, a workplace
feature Moore said outside observers might view as contributing to a
"sweatshop."
Examiners'
ineligibility for overtime or compensatory time is "fully exploited"
by the agency, he wrote.
Plenty
of evidence was uncovered during the arbitration proceedings showing that
examiners routinely must work in excess of 40 hours a week. Job tension, he
wrote, "is a way of life for examiners." In such an environment, it
was "unimaginable" that Valone had been "counseled" (a
disciplinary action shy of a reprimand) by a supervisor for taking an hour off
to speak during the public comment session of a DoE meeting.
"With
the disruption and destruction of the private and family lives of examiners
caused by the PTO's goals systems, it is amazing to have to chastise [Valone]
over skipping out on an hour of government time," he wrote.
Moore
also took a dim view of a directive issued by USPTO prohibiting Valone from
visiting the examiner who handled cold fusion and other "alternative
energy" patent claims. USPTO argued the ban was needed to keep Valone from
harassing the examiner, but the examiner's own accounts of the meetings seemed
to indicate that he didn't feel harassed.
The
PTO officials' real motives, Moore judged, were to muzzle Valone's cold fusion
beliefs. Moore rhetorically wondered if the same officials would have dared to
prevent an examiner who opposes intrauterine devices on moral grounds from
meeting with and proselytizing the USPTO examiner who processes IUD claims.
But
Moore didn't let Valone off the hook entirely. The "grievant," he
said, was "deceptive" and "manipulative," and was incapable
of owning up to his actions. By naming Commerce as cosponsor on a conference
flyer, Valone had engaged in misrepresentation, he ruled, and for that he
received a 30-day suspension from the job he should have had for the past six
years. As a practical matter, Moore's finding means Valone's back pay will be
reduced by a month.
Moore's
treatise also dwelled at some length on cold fusion persecutors Bob Park, the
American Physical Society (APS) curmudgeon who authors the weekly What's New
column, and Peter Zimmerman, a former science adviser in the State Department's
arms control agency. The pair played a critical role in thwarting Valone's
"Conference on Free Energy," or COFE, which ultimately led to the
firing. The contempt with which the two physicists' treated cold fusion was no
mystery to this arbitrator:
"The
federal government's budget research and development pie in the areas of
theoretical physics and chemistry is limited and, by and large, only
traditional physicists represented by organizations like the APS and its
counterpart for conventional chemists, have been invited to sup on that pie.
The last thing they want is any new guests invited to the table."
Park,
he noted, was still crowing in What's New about his part in removing a
"heretic" from the patent office eight months after Valone's firing.
And the March 2000 edition of APS News carried a front-page story
congratulating Park for his years of accomplishments in keeping
"non-conventional physicists" away from the federal funding trough.
Moore
chided USPTO, and retired Commissioner of Patents Nicholas Godici—who admitted
during the proceedings that he once had the job of examining mouse trap patent
applications—for continuing to enforce a strict ban on cold fusion-related
patents put in place in 1989. "Certainly, some better understandings and
approaches to cold fusion and its related technologies must have occurred which
ordinarily, and but for the ban, would meet the new and useful criteria for a
patent or constitute what I'll call a 'non-obvious improvement of existing
technology'."
The
events that led to Valone's dismissal began with his diligent attempts to find
a home for a conference on "free energy," including cold fusion, to
be sponsored by his "Integrity Research Institute." Valone had all
but sealed an agreement to use an auditorium at the State Department through a
program known as the "Open Forum's Speakers' Program," whose mission
was "to explore new and alternative views on vital policy issues of the
day."
But
when Park got wind of the event, he alerted Zimmerman. Outranking the official
in charge of the Open Forum, Zimmerman was able to quash the deal, in part by
demanding that only papers and presentations that had undergone peer review
would be presented at a State Department-hosted event.
Undaunted,
Valone turned next to the Commerce Department, which happens to be USPTO's
parent agency. He nearly received the approval of schedulers there for three
days' use of the auditorium and hall space. The schedulers later insisted to
their supervisors that they hadn't been told that the conference was a private
event, but Moore dismissed USPTO's contention that Valone had deceived them
into believing the conference was federally-sponsored. He had in fact been
working to arrange cosponsorship by the Patent and Trademark Office Society
(PTOS), and he had gotten a sympathetic ear from one PTOS official. But those
discussions came to a screeching halt when Park blew the whistle again in his
column on Valone's machinations.
Soon
after that, the patent office began getting its ducks in a row to fire Valone.
The procedures for firing an employee are formalized in the collective
bargaining agreement with the Patent Office Professional Association (POPA).
The agreement calls for binding arbitration to resolve dismissals that are
challenged.
POPA
represented Valone throughout the arbitration process, sparing him what
doubtless would have been huge legal expenses.
Meanwhile,
when it became apparent that DoE wouldn't consider hosting the event, Valone
reserved space at a Holiday Inn in nearby College Park. He's now planning for a
"Victory COFE II" conference for September 2006, also at a
Washington-area hotel.
Interestingly,
Moore's report notes how two other examiners who were well known as cold fusion
advocates have been fired since Valone's removal. While one was dismissed for
misconduct, the other, removed for failure to produce, has charged the agency
with discrimination based on his religious-like belief in cold fusion. The
Equal Opportunity Employment Commission has allowed his case to proceed through
the tortuous bureaucratic process by which such claims are resolved.
Moore
said POPA had attempted to argue a religious discrimination claim for Valone in
spite of his warnings not to pursue that angle with him. He couldn't resist
revealing how he might have ruled in that event:
"Fortunately,
the rest of his case makes it unnecessary to determine whether in the absence
of an alter (sic) and any special vestments, a belief in cold fusion is any
more a religion intended to be protected under Title VII (of the Civil Rights
Act) from discrimination than an equally fervent belief in the curative effects
of the color blue. Both are more the type of subjects protected by the free
speech provision of the Constitution."
Valone
said he has completed a doctoral degree and written several books during his
six-year hiatus, in addition to continuing the operation of his nonprofit
institute. He said he plans to continue campaigning for recognition of cold
fusion patents when he returns to the agency this month.
"Almost
10 years ago, the PTO adopted a motto 'Help our customers get patents,' which
still has not been fulfilled for cold fusion applicants," he stated.
Additionally, he hopes to press for increased funding for the continuing
education of patent examiners. Funding is currently so low that 95% of
examiners are kept from attending outside conferences and seminars to update
them in their field of specialty.
"These
are the issues I fought for while I was there and hope to continue when I go
back," he said.
Valone
is also worried about what he says is the "glut of allowances" that
are now being given to patent applications in the nanotechnology area. The
relative ease with which such patents are being awarded is liable to encourage
patent litigation, he frets.
3)
Everlasting Power in the Offing
Caroline Williams, 24 March 2006, Exclusive from New
Scientist Print Edition.
http://www.newscientisttech.com/channel/tech/mg18925441.600.html
"IT LOOKED like a slug moving along the
lab bench," says Jeffrey Cheung, a materials scientist at Rockwell
Scientific in Los Angeles. "My first reaction was - oh my goodness
someone forgot to turn off the sprinkler outside, and this thing has crawled
into the lab. The strange thing was, when I moved to the right or the left, it
always followed my movements." Then he leaned over to take a closer look.
To his surprise, the slug shot off the workbench and rocketed straight at his
midriff.
That day, Cheung had been doing some experiments
using a commercial ferrofluid. As fate would have it, he made two crucial
errors. First he lost a bar magnet, which he had borrowed from a colleague for
the experiment. Then he spilt a beakerful of the fluid over his lab bench,
leaving it covered with a thick layer of reddish-brown goo.
What happened next led not only to the acrobatic
slug, but the beginning of an intriguing new technology which could soon be
used for anything from constructing executive toys to large-scale electricity
generation.
"I was a mess," says Cheung, recalling
the accident. "My lab coat looked like exhibit A from a crime scene."
But already the possibilities opened up by the gloop-covered magnet were racing
through his head. "Instead of going to wash my face I grabbed a piece of
paper and a pencil and started to jot down a lot of ideas - I think I wrote
about two pages."
The slug, it turned out, was the missing magnet
with globs of ferrofluid tightly bound to each end. Ferrofluids are simply a
suspension of magnetic nanoparticles in an inert liquid of some kind. Pour a
little fluid around a magnet, and it quickly migrates to the magnet's poles and
stays there, in the same way as iron filings cling to the ends of a bar magnet.
It was the coating of liquid on each end that dramatically reduced the friction
between the magnet and the bench, so when Cheung's metal belt buckle came into
range, the attractive force faced little resistance and the magnet launched
itself straight at it.
Cheung's eureka moment came with the realisation
that the ferrofluid can act as a super-efficient lubricant, and that there are
a wealth of ways to exploit it. One of his favourites is to use a
ferrofluid-covered magnet as the heart of an electricity generator that needs
no input except gentle motion.
The idea relies on simple high-school physics: move
a magnet close to a copper coil and the changing magnetic field experienced by
the coil will induce an electric current to flow through it. Cheung placed a
magnet in a tube filled with ferrofluid, wrapped a coil around the tube, and
stuck a magnet at each end to keep the magnet inside moving. The result is a
system that turns random motion into electricity, with almost no loss of energy
to friction. The key is the exceptional slipperiness of the ferrofluid coating
- around 40 times as slippery as ice.
Now Cheung needed to test out his device in a place
that would provide free random motion, and that is not difficult to find.
"The ocean waves are always changing," he says. So, armed with a
grant from the Pentagon's Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, Cheung and
his team set about designing a system to provide power for the buoys used for
oceanographic monitoring.
Existing buoys use battery packs or solar panels to
power their monitoring and communications equipment. Clean solar panels work
well when the sun is high in the sky, but have to be backed up by batteries for
the rest of the day and all night. After a while, the spattering of guano from
perching sea birds will cut down their efficiency even in bright sunlight.
Batteries are bulky, need reliable waterproofing and eventually have to be
changed - not an easy option for a buoy in the middle of the ocean. Cheung's generator,
by contrast, will run day and night on the smallest waves in the glummest of
weather, and since it is hermetically sealed corrosion should not be a problem.
Oceanographers at the Scripps Institution of
Oceanography in La Jolla, California, tested the design in the summer of 2004.
"Just a few watts of power is all that's required to run most marine
instruments and to transmit their data to a satellite," says Robert
Pinkel, head of the buoy development team at Scripps. The team designed a float
that amplifies its movement to deliver maximum acceleration to Cheung's device,
and electronics to store the electricity it generates in a super-capacitor. The
generator proved itself even in calm conditions: in a gentle sea with waves of
around 60 centimetres it generated 0.3 watts. With further work to optimise the
transfer of wave power to the generator, the team hopes it will be able to
deliver on average 1 watt of electricity.
Cheung's latest design uses coils mounted at right
angles to the direction of the magnet (see below). The challenge now is to
increase the power output by tweaking the design of both the buoy and the
generator. Cheung is planning to work with Malcolm Spaulding and Stephan Grilli
from the University of Rhode Island in Kingston to model the most efficient
designs and test them in a wave tank.
The aim is to generate not merely watts, but
megawatts. "Our goal is to build an energy farm on the ocean," Cheung
says. Stephen Salter, who heads the wave power group at the University of
Edinburgh, UK, thinks that may be a step too far. Though the iron particles in
the ferrofluid maximise the current induced in the coil - by increasing the
flux density around it - Salter is sceptical about the technology's viability
for large-scale generation. "I think this is one technology that's going
to run out of puff as you scale it up." Nevertheless, Cheung says he could
have a prototype of a wave power system ready within three years.
Even if Cheung doesn't manage to scale it up
efficiently, he has dreamed up plenty of other applications for his invention.
So many, in fact, that he has set up a company to commercialise them. They
include self-powered tyre pressure monitors, computer mice and TV remote
controls.
He has an idea for an executive toy, too. Put an even
number of magnets coated in ferrofluid into a doughnut-shaped tubular ring -
with their north and south poles facing each other - and they will shuttle
around chaotically as they repel one-another. The result is somewhere between a
stress ball and a pocket-sized lava lamp.
Cheung's first commercial product is going to be
much more useful. In the coming months his company will launch a holster-style
mobile phone charger. "The first goal is to have enough power to keep the
phone on standby forever," he says. All you'll have to do is shake it.
4)
Snap Up Wave Power With a Magnetic Trick
Duncan Graham-Rowe, issue 2542 of New
Scientist magazine, 11 March 2006, page 28
http://www.newscientisttech.com/channel/tech/mg18925425.900.html
A WAVE-DRIVEN
generator with virtually no moving parts could make wave power a more efficient
and competitive form of renewable energy. The key to the device, dubbed the Snapper,
is the way it converts a slow, steady wave motion into an efficient
current-generating jackhammer-like action.
Despite growing
enthusiasm for wave power in countries such as the UK and Portugal, wave-driven
generators are still dogged by heavy start-up costs and low efficiency.
Generators produce electricity most efficiently when a small force is applied
at high velocity. Waves tend to produce large, slow-moving forces, so most
generators have to resort to turbines or hydraulics to convert the forces into
a suitable form. This adds to the complexity and expense, and also reduces
efficiency.
Now Ed Spooner, a
consultant engineer based in the UK at Crook, County Durham, has devised an
alternative solution consisting of a buoy linked to a generating unit on the
seabed. The buoy is attached to a vertical armature inside the generating unit,
and as it bobs up and down magnets mounted on the armature induce a current in
static coils fixed to the generating unit.
Mounted next to the
armature are a parallel set of fixed magnets, aligned with the magnets on the
armature. It is the interaction between the two sets of magnets that produces
the Snapper's jerky motion. The attraction between the two sets of magnets
tends to hold them in place next to each other. As the buoy tries to rise with
a wave, this attraction initially holds it down. When the buoyancy force
becomes large enough to overcome the attraction between the magnets, the buoy
and the armature attached to it move sharply upwards until the magnets align
again. As the buoy continues to rise this behaviour is repeated. Then as the
buoy descends after the wave has passed, a spring produces a similar effect as
the armature moves downwards.
Spooner told the
World Maritime Technology Conference in London this week that the result is a
sequence of rapid movements that generate pulses of current.
Experiments on a
prototype show the arrangement results in increased current-producing forces
compared with existing wave-power systems, suggesting that much smaller
generators could be built for the same output, reducing costs.
Spooner has passed
the patent rights for the device to the New and Renewable Energy Centre in
Blyth, Northumberland. Its director of technology, Keith Melton, says the
increased efficiency of the device should help to make wave-powered generators
competitive with other renewable energy sources, such as wind power, as well as
with fossil fuels.
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5)
Alternative fuels ensure a strong future |
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May 2, 2006 |
Miami Herald Opinion |
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By R. JAMES WOOLSEY http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/opinion/14476861.htm President Bush's call for America to end its
"oil addiction'' sparked a debate about whether the goal is attainable
-- or even desirable. Some say that policies to promote energy
independence would hinder prosperity. They claim that attempts to meet this
goal after the 1970s oil shocks were expensive failures. These assertions are
wrong. Between 1979 and 1985, when oil demand
reduction was a high priority, the typical U. S. car's fuel efficiency nearly
doubled. Electricity generated from oil dropped from 17 percent of the
nation's power output to 2 percent. The share of homes using heating oil went
from 31 percent to 10 percent. Total oil consumption in the United States
decreased by 15 percent, and oil imports fell by 42 percent. Away from petroleum The impact on the nation's economy was
positive. Energy expenditures' share of the Gross Domestic Product fell by 50
percent while real per-capita share of the Gross Domestic Product grew by 10
percent. Today a majority of the world's capacity to
export oil is in the hands of autocracies and dictatorships that can use that
wealth to destabilize the international system. Thus, the future of our
economic and national security is more than ever coupled to our energy
policy. The democracies' ability to prevail in the long war in which we are
engaged will be compromised so long as such states control this part of the
world's economy. To ensure stability we must commit ourselves to
diversifying our fuel supply and shifting the transportation sector from the
conventional petroleum, which comprises 97 percent of our transportation
energy, to a robust system based on next-generation fuels and vehicles. The United States is no longer rich in readily
recoverable oil, but it has a wealth of other energy sources from which
transportation fuel can be safely, affordably and cleanly generated. Among them: vast rich farmland, hundreds of
years' worth of coal reserves and billions of tons a year of agricultural,
industrial and municipal waste. Each of these can generate alcohol fuels --
such as bio-diesel, ethanol and methanol -- at a price cheaper than current
gasoline. Large-scale deployment of flexible fuel
vehicles running on alcohol, gasoline or any mixture of the two will allow
Americans to choose secure domestic fuel over problematic foreign oil. Since
the additional per-vehicle cost associated with flexible fuel vehicles is
currently under $200, fuel flexibility should become a standard feature in
every car -- like seat belts or air bags. Plug-in hybrid vehicles, unlike standard
hybrids, can draw charge not only from the engine and captured braking
energy, but also from America's electrical grid. They can make efficient use
of such clean electricity sources as solar, wind, geothermal, hydroelectric
and nuclear power. Plug-in hybrid electric vehicles can reach
economy levels of 100 miles or more per gallon. · If a plug-in is also a flex-fuel car using 85
percent alcohol and 15 percent gasoline, fuel economy could reach the
equivalency of 500 miles per gallon for a gasoline-powered vehicle. · If a diesel engine burns clean fuel derived
from waste, it would be using no conventional petroleum at all. By 2025, if all cars on the road are either
diesels burning fuel from renewables or flexible fuel hybrids, and half of
the hybrids are plug-ins, U. S. oil imports would drop by more than 12
million barrels per day -- or more than what we import today. These technologies exist. There is no need to
wait for technological breakthroughs, invest billions in research and
development or embark on massive infrastructure changes. What is needed is congressional action to build
on the president's call by enacting the necessary incentives for producers to
make, and consumers to buy, cars that offer fuel choices while encouraging
the development of a mass market for alternative fuels, along with the modest
necessary changes in the distribution system. Such policies would make the U.
S. economy more resilient and put it on a trajectory toward oil security. R. James Woolsey, a former director of the
Central Intelligence Agency, is co-chairman of the Committee on the Present
Danger, which advocates an aggressive stance in the war against terror. Gal
Luft is a member of the committee. For more information visit www.fightingterror.org |
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