printable versionEnergy security lies in promoting alternative fuels, speaker says
BY KENDALL MADDEN
America's energy sector faces two serious energy security problems that must be tackled in tandem: "terrorism, the malevolent threat, and global climate change, the malignant one," former CIA chief James Woolsey said at a Feb. 16 talk presented by the Preventive Defense Project of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.
"The United States is like a person standing at the window chain-smoking and seeing a burglar breaking into the apartment," Woolsey said. "Both are threats and if you only deal with one, you are still in danger."
Woolsey, a Stanford alumnus and vice president of the global strategic security division at the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, discussed the implicit support of terrorism generated by America's purchase of oil from the Middle East and the trajectory into environmental destruction the country faces with its "business-as-usual" oil economy. "We are locked into an oil infrastructure that makes us vulnerable," he said, especially as Middle Eastern oil becomes more central to our energy portfolio.
Woolsey argued that America is funding terrorist networks that threaten national security because money from oil that has enriched the Middle East also is being used to support fundamentalist Islamic schools that teach their students to hate the United States. "The path to freedom and the price of oil move in opposite directions," he said.
The problem of energy security is greater than oil, Woolsey continued, because carbon dioxide, the primary greenhouse gas responsible for climate change, comes from many sources and does not recognize geographic boundaries. Energy security also requires the United States to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels, he said, noting that the American transportation sector could and should cut its consumption of oil.
Woolsey promoted the use of electricity and biofuels as an alternative to oil. "This is not just an issue of environmentalists and policymakers, but mom-and-pop America realizing that they can drive for one-tenth the cost," Woolsey said. He noted that a plug-in hybrid car developed by General Motors runs on electricity but can switch to gasoline when the battery runs low, thus bypassing the criticism of the initial electric cars that they could not be used to travel long distances. Plug-ins can be charged at night when electricity demand is low and there is an excess of electricity in the grid, he said, which makes the electricity both cheaper and more efficient. The excess capacity of coal-powered electricity plants is so great that it would take years before there was a need to expand beyond the existing infrastructure, he said.
In addition, Woolsey said, filling the tank of that plug-in hybrid with cellulosic ethanol, which is made from switchgrass and other weedy plants, would boost gas mileage to about 500 miles per gallon. The technology of biofuels still requires some research, he acknowledged, but for these alternative energy sources "we don't need to wait around; this is revolutionary change possible in the next few years."
Kendall Madden is a science-writing intern at the Stanford News Service.
