Oct 8, 2005 (From the CalCars-News archive)
-- Speech excerpts, outline of plan and full text of speech in this posting -- permanent link for this message is http://autos.groups.yahoo.com/group/calcars-news/message/170
-- the press release followed by news story in previous posting: http://autos.groups.yahoo.com/group/calcars-news/message/169
EXCERPTS
This reality is bipartisan. My staff and I have spent as much time talking about these proposals with Republicans as with Democrats. My colleagues Senators Sam Brownback of Kansas and Evan Bayh of Indiana are particularly interested in setting America free from foreign oil dependence. We are ready to get serious, set the serious goals that eluded us in the past and take the bold steps necessary to reach those goals.
... we get the flexibility to power a car with fuel made from corn, prairie grass, or agricultural waste from our own heartland that will cost a lot less than gasoline does today.... Making them flexible fuel cars, as I've already said, can save us more than 2 million barrels of gasoline a day.
But we can do even better - dramatically better - with the plug-in hybrid that is just now on the threshold of commercialization. ...Plugging in your car during off peak hours -when power is in surplus and cheaper - would soon just become part of the modern daily routine, like plugging in your cell phone or PDA before you go to bed. And off-peak electricity can be the equivalent of 50 cent a gallon gasoline.
This isn't pie in the sky. These vehicles could be in your garage within a couple of years. Some of the incentives for achieving this were included in the Energy bill signed into law in August. But they did not go nearly far enough. We need to couple these incentives with real performance standards and sales requirements to ensure that as soon as possible new cars are running not just on gasoline but on biofuels and electricity.
http://lieberman.senate.gov/documents/bills/051006gtownspchsum.pdf BREAKING AMERICA'S DEPENDENCY ON FOREIGN OIL
What we can and must do now to break America's Dependence on Foreign Oil and bring down energy prices
Senator Lieberman's proposal will mandate 10 million barrels in oil-savings in 20 years and will also mandate the mass-production of cars that can burn any combination of gasoline and alternative fuels.
In addition, the bill will include:
- An aggressive strategy for pushing the development and mass marketing of hybrid technologies, including hybrids that give drivers the option to plug them in at night.
- A program to ensure an adequate number of alternative fuel retail outlets.
- For the first time, fuel-efficiency standards for trucks
- Standards to ensure fuel efficient replacement tires are offered for cars and trucks
- Financial support for retooling manufacturing facilities for advanced technology and alternative fuel cars and trucks
http://lieberman.senate.gov/newsroom/release.cfm?id=247129
Remarks of Senator Joe Lieberman (D-CT) (As Prepared for Delivery) Loewy Lecture, Georgetown University October 7, 2005
Good afternoon. I want to thank Dean [Robert] Gallucci for that introduction, and Greg Pope and Brigitte Loewy Linz for their gracious welcome and for inviting me to give this year's Loewy Lecture.
Technology is a dominant engine informing our personal lives and driving globalization. Any modern study of foreign affairs and diplomacy must take it into account.
That's why I admire Georgetown for creating this Science, Technology and International Affairs major - or STIA - as part of the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service (SFS) here at Georgetown University. And for hosting the Loewy lecture.
Edward and Ludwig Loewy, for whom this lecture is named, were problem-solving engineers whose work revolutionized the way we build airplanes and rockets and helped us win World War II, the Cold War and the Space Race.
It is people like the Loewys that move us forward. People with the knowledge and vision to see a barrier to break or a problem to solve and say: "Here is how we can fix this. Here is how we can make this better."
When we don't listen to our problem solvers, our nation gets in trouble. Let me give you a recent, painful example.
Just over a month ago we watched a natural disaster - Hurricane Katrina - unfold before us. The storm crept toward the Gulf Coast over the course of six days under the full view of satellites, hurricane hunter airplanes and the world on television and the internet.
All manners of scientists - meteorologists, climatologists, hydrologists, geologists - had been warning us for decades that New Orleans was a disaster waiting to happen. Nevertheless, we were shocked and appalled by the disaster and suffering that followed.
How could we have been so unprepared for an event that had been predicted for decades and for which we had received so much warning immediately before through the technological brilliance of modern meteorology?
As the ranking member of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee - with jurisdiction over the Department of Homeland Security and FEMA - I can tell you we are going to get answers to that question so it doesn't happen again. But I want to talk with you today about a different storm is forming right now off our coasts and in our country. It is forming as we speak over the steaming sands of the Mideast, the frozen tundra of Siberia, the equatorial east coast of Africa, and rain forests of South America and drying up oil reserves in the U.S.
That storm is our dependence on foreign oil.
The infuriating story of Katrina - the warnings science and technology gave us, the solutions technology suggest, the actions government failed to take - are a warning and metaphor for our dependence on foreign oil.
This intense storm has been predicted for decades. We have seen it coming. In fact, we are already caught up in its advance squalls.
Our families struggle under the financial strain of paying $30, $40, $50 to fill up their gas tanks.
Businesses as large as airlines and as small as the local delivery service are hurting from sky-high fuel bills.
Schools have had to cut back to four-day weeks or put off hiring teachers and buying needed books and equipment to pay their fuel bills.
Higher energy prices are running up consumers' credit card bills and slowing down their payment.
And last week, consumer confidence dropped 18.9 points, the biggest slide since 1990 at the onset of that year's recession.
What we are seeing is more than just a temporary drain on our budgets - a passing inconvenience and temporary increase in costs. I fear that we are literally watching the slow but steady erosion of America's power and independence as a nation - our economic and military power and our political independence.
We're burning it up in our automobile engines and spewing it from our tailpipes because of our absolute dependence on oil to fuel our cars and trucks.
That dependence on oil - and that means foreign oil because our own reserves are less than 1 percent of the world's oil reserves - puts us in jeopardy in three key ways - a convergence forming a perfect storm that is extremely dangerous to America's national security and economy.
First, the structure of the global oil market deeply affects - and distorts - our foreign policy. Our broader interests and aspirations must compete with our own need for oil and the growing thirst for it in the rest of the world - especially by China and India.
As a recent study in the journal Foreign Affairs makes clear, China is moving aggressively to compete for the world's limited supplies of oil not just with its growing economic power, but with its growing military and diplomatic power as well.
History tells us that wars have been fought over such competition for natural resources. Our growing dependence on foreign oil makes that competition much more ominous.
Second, today we must depend for our oil on a global gallery of nations that are politically unstable, unreliable, or just plain hostile to us. We are now one well-orchestrated terrorist attack or political upheaval away from a $100-a-barrel oil price spike almost overnight.
The Middle East is being roiled by Islamist terrorism, Nigeria by instability, Venezuela by hostility, Russia by resurgent state power.
All that and much more should make us worry because if we don't change - it is within their borders and under their earth and waters that our economic and national security lies.
Third, we are nearing a point at which global oil production will peak, forcing ever higher prices, chronic shortages and more aggressive competition for supplies. Of 12 studies released in the past two years, half say the peak will occur by 2010; three predict by 2016, and three project the peak to occur after 2020.
The only question is when.
At the same time, American own oil reserves are moving rapidly to zero.
Doing nothing about our oil dependency will make us a pitiful giant - like Gulliver in Lilliput - tied down by smaller nations and subject to their whims. And we will have given them the ropes and helped them tie the knots.
We can take on this problem now and stand tall as the free and independent giant we are by moving our nation - and the world - on to energy independence, by setting America free from its dependence on oil.
There is only one way to do this. We need to transform our total transportation infrastructure from the refinery to the tailpipe and each step in between because transportation is the key to energy independence. Barely 2 percent of our electricity comes from oil.
Ninety six percent of the energy used to power our cars comes from oil - about 20 million barrels of oil per day.
This is unsustainable and dangerous. With imagination and leadership we can change. Our progeny have every right to judge us harshly if we do not.
Today I will describe legislation that I will soon introduce that can enable us to cut consumption by 5 million barrels a day in the next 10 years and 10 million barrels a day within 20 years.
First, we need to rethink and then remake our fuel supplies. Gasoline is not the only portable source of stored energy. Tons of agricultural waste and millions of acres of idle grassland can be used to create new fuels.
And then we must remake our automobile engines as well. Vehicles that get 500 miles per gallon - or that use NO refined crude oil - are within our grasp. I know that sounds unbelievable but a little later in this lecture I am going to tell you how we can do it.
The bill I plan to introduce soon -with bipartisan support - begins with two goals and two mandates: that the United States save 5 million barrels of oil a day within 10 years, and 10 million barrels a day within 20 years.
It also requires that within two years 10 percent of our new cars sold in the U.S. be hybrid, hybrid electric plug-in or alternative fuel vehicles and that within 7 years 50 percent of the news cars sold in the U.S. be made up of those combinations.
Hydrogen fuel cells are well on their way to proving to be a key advance in energy and telecommunications. We must continue to support their development as an energy source for cars and trucks. The energy passed last summer provides for additional research and development for transportation fuel cells.
The focus of the bill, however, is hybrid electric technology and alternative fuels, simply because these technologies can make a decisive impact faster.
My bill will detail how we can get there with available technology and previously unavailable federal government leadership. Coupling these new programs with the explicit oil-savings goals for the federal government is the key to the effectiveness of this proposal.
I can almost hear some of you murmur, "So, Senator Lieberman, what else is new? We've been hearing this for years and nothing has happened."
I can't blame you if you are skeptical. The struggle for oil-independence has been going on at least since Jimmy Carter was president.
Just last June, my colleague Maria Cantwell of Washington introduced a 10-million-barrel a day oil-savings amendment to the Energy bill that received 47 votes in the Senate - four short of passage. It included no mandates to make that goal achievable.
But things have changed since the days of Jimmy Carter and even since last June. There is a new understanding of the depth of the crisis that our oil-dependence is creating.
This summer's doubling of gasoline and crude oil prices hit tens of millions of Americans with the global reality of oil demand and pricing. And Katrina reminded us how vulnerable our supplies can become.
This reality is bipartisan. My staff and I have spent as much time talking about these proposals with Republicans as with Democrats. My colleagues Senators Sam Brownback of Kansas and Evan Bayh of Indiana are particularly interested in setting America free from foreign oil dependence.
We are ready to get serious, set the serious goals that eluded us in the past and take the bold steps necessary to reach those goals.
Now let me give you more details.
The bill I will propose puts our nation's transportation system on a new road - a road where the tanks are filled with more home-grown fuel . . . and I do mean grown . . . not just American corn, but from American sugar, prairie grass and agricultural waste.
We will push harder for more and quicker production and commercialization of biomass based fuels.
The Energy bill signed into law last summer created a new set of incentives for these fuel alternatives, including their commercial production.
What my bill would do - again, by including a mass-production mandate for alternative fuel vehicles - is ensure that the investments would be made in the facilities to produce and market these new fuels by providing big demand for them.
The bill would also create a program to guarantee that filling stations had the pumps to provide the fuel to keep pace with the growing alternative-fuel fleet produced by the mandate.
Is there3"ªuodel to give us confidence we can achieve this transformation? Yes!
Brazil is now enjoying substantial immunity from current high world oil prices, thanks to a long-term strategy, launched during the oil shocks of the 1970's, to integrate sugar cane ethanol into its fuel supply. They started initially with a mandate that all fuel sold in the country contain 25 percent alcohol.
They're now up to 40 percent biofuels. In addition to the fuel mandate, Brazil offered loan-interest loans and tax breaks for the building of distilleries and subsidized a fuel distribution network.
Brazil has the advantage of a substantial sugar cane industry already in place. But we have our own vast potential to develop our own biofuel supply, using feedstock like corn, crop waste, switch grass, sugarcane and fast-growing trees and shrubs such as hybrid poplars and willows.
According to the Department of Energy, if two-thirds of the nation's idled cropland were used to grow these kinds of energy crops, the result could be dramatic. Those 35 million acres could produce between 15 and 35 billion gallons of ethanol each year to fuel cars, trucks, and buses.
That's about 2.2 million barrels of fuel a day from right here in the U.S.A.
What Brazil offers us, more importantly, is a case study of government leadership to combine technology mandates and subsidies to wean its transportation sector from foreign oil to a domestic alternative.
From this January through this July - before this summer's fuel spike -we have sent almost $100 billion out of the country to purchase oil, while the Brazilians are now relying on home-grown fuel.
The key to their success is that they responded, thirty years ago, to the first storm warnings. We did not and now the storm is at our shores, slapping against the levees of our economic strength and national security. We have to mobilize and lead a similar response as Brazil did.
If we do this right, our farmers could soon be measuring production in barrels of energy as well as bushels of food. Our energy would be guaranteed "Made in America" and the profits would be guaranteed "Kept in America."
For all these new fuels to be effective, we need the flexible fuel vehicles that can take advantage of them. Nearly four million alternative fuel vehicles have been manufactured by American automobile companies since 1996, mostly to game the Corporate Average Fleet Efficiency - or CAFÉ - standards.
But that is not enough and it is happening too slowly.
My bill mandates that within three years of passage, 10 percent of all new vehicles sold in America manufactured shall be alternative fuel automobiles, flexible fuel vehicles or electricity plug-in vehicles. And that mandate will increase to at least 50 percent four years after that.
Sound ambitious? It's not. It's already happened in Brazil. Several automakers selling cars in Brazil, including our own General Motors and Ford, already manufacture a fleet that is more than 50 percent flexible fuel cars that can run on any combination of gasoline and biofuels.
The technology exists now and adds a negligible cost - about $150 dollars - to the price of each vehicle. For this we get the flexibility to power a car with fuel made from corn, prairie grass, or agricultural waste from our own heartland that will cost a lot less than gasoline does today.
Maximizing fuel efficiency and promoting energy independence even further would be a new generation of flexible-fuel hybrid cars known as plug-ins because you can plug them in at night to recharge the battery.
Hybrids that use a use both a gasoline engine and electric motor for power are already getting 50 miles per gallon. Making them flexible fuel cars, as I've already said, can save us more than 2 million barrels of gasoline a day.
But we can do even better - dramatically better - with the plug-in hybrid that is just now on the threshold of commercialization. Like the present hybrids, it would use both a gasoline and electric motor. But the plug-in hybrid would be able to use the battery exclusively for the first 30 miles of a trip.
Think of that for a minute. Although Americans drive about 2.2 million miles a year, according the Census, the vast majority of those trips are less than 15 miles.
That means a plug-in hybrid would use zero - ZERO - gallons of gas or any combustible fuel for the vast majority of its trips. And experts tell me it could effectively get the 500 miles per gallon on longer trips.
Plugging in your car during off peak hours -when power is in surplus and cheaper - would soon just become part of the modern daily routine, like plugging in your cell phone or PDA before you go to bed.
And off-peak electricity can be the equivalent of 50 cent a gallon gasoline.
I repeat - the equivalent of 50 cent a gallon fuel is feasible.
Of course, electricity does not come magically through the wires to our homes. That power would come from coal, natural gas, nuclear, solar, wind or other sources - sources that we have in abundance here at home - and a little - very little - would come from oil.
This isn't pie in the sky. These vehicles could be in your garage within a couple of years. Some of the incentives for achieving this were included in the Energy bill signed into law in August. But they did not go nearly far enough. We need to couple these incentives with real performance standards and sales requirements to ensure that as soon as possible new cars are running not just on gasoline but on biofuels and electricity.
As always, there is a do-nothing crowd that says the ever-rising price of gasoline and crude oil are the cure - that with higher prices people will reduce consumption and the market will respond with greater investments in the supply of oil to bring prices down.
But all that would do is perpetuate the problem. Market-driven oil-dependency is still dependency on foreign oil, driving us further down the current path toward national insecurity and economic and environmental troubles.
Some say that we can ease the crisis through greater domestic drilling - in places like the Arctic Refuge and other public lands or off our shores.
But that won't make a dent in the problem. In the world of oil, geology is destiny and the U.S. today has only 1 percent of the world's oil reserves. And that small new supply wouldn't matter much in the global market, since the price of oil produced within the United States rises and falls with the global market, regardless of where it is produced.
We just don't have enough oil in the U.S. anymore. And no matter how much more we drill, we will still be paying the world price of oil - not an American price.
Our present energy and transportation systems were born at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th Centuries with the twin discoveries of oil extraction and the internal combustion engine. Those systems have served us well - bringing growth to our nation and the world. But it is now the 21st Century and it's time to move on. The era of big oil is over. It's time to revolutionize our entire energy infrastructure - from the refinery to the tailpipe - and begin a new era of energy independence.
The Loewy Lectures have as their mission the advancement of understanding about the role of technology and innovation.
My purpose today has been to sound the alarm about the multiple dangers posed by our nation's - and the world's - complete dependence on oil. But I hope you also see that in responding to that alarm it is technological innovation combined with political leadership that offers the only hope to avoid these dangers.
The failure to heed the signals and change our energy systems is one of the most consequential failures of America's leadership in modern times. But it is still not too late to secure a better, stronger future for our children and grandchildren by setting America free from our current crippling dependence on foreign oil.
I am here to tell you that on Capitol Hill today, there is a rising bipartisan desire to do just that. But I also want to tell you that it will not happen without the support of you the people.
The defenders of the status quo - at home and abroad - think you don't know, don't understand or don't care. They think you will keep paying them higher and higher and higher prices for gasoline and oil.
It is time to rise up and pull together and prove them wrong. It is time to get mad and begin to fight back. It is time to call your member of Congress, your Senator and your President and tell them you want change.
It is time to set America free.
Thank you.
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE October 7, 2005 Contact: Casey Aden-Wansbury Phone: 202.224.4041
