09 Oct 2005 HEADLINE

Time to Set America Free

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 there a model to give us confidence we can achieve this transformation? Yes!