In
1973, four weeks after the Arab oil embargo, President Richard Nixon
went on national television to talk about an energy crisis that had
been mounting for two years. He asked Americans to turn off their
Christmas lights.
In a gesture of greater substance, Nixon
also pledged that within seven years the United States would be
independent of foreign oil.
Since then, eight presidents
and 18 congresses have aimed to deliver on this 1973 promise. In the
last four years alone, four ambitious energy bills were signed into law.
Yet
Americans, more than ever, are still at the mercy of foreign oil.
Nearly 70 percent of oil supplies are imported today, up from 30
percent in the Nixon era.
What happened?
John
Hofmeister, the retired president of Shell Oil Co., offered a few
answers — and solutions — to an audience this week (April 1) at the
John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum.
Hofmeister, founder and CEO of
the new education group Citizens for Affordable Energy, acknowledged
America’s 40-year failure along the road to energy independence. He
sketched in some broad answers first.
The first relates to
what he called “political time” — the two-year or four-year cycles of
action permitted by the election process.
Then there is
“energy time, which transpires in decades,” said Hofmeister. “It takes
decades to imagine, to plan, to engineer, to permit, to build, to
construct, to operate, and then ultimately decommission a major energy
project — 30 to 40 years, and sometimes even longer.”
A long time scale like that ensures certainty for investors, he said. “When there is uncertainty, they don’t invest.”
Hofmeister
offered the example of wind power — a promising renewable energy
resource held back for a decade. Why? Because Congress has capped wind
power tax credits to just two years, he said, or sometimes to just one.
“Political time and energy time are contradictory,” said Hofmeister. “They are water and oil.”
Ideology
inflames the problem. Federal policy debates are often just shouting
matches between two extremes, he said — “the drill-baby-drill crowd”
battling those who want an immediate zero-carbon energy system.
A
tangle of federal bureaucracies is no help either, said Hofmeister: In
the executive branch alone, 13 separate agencies (plus the White House)
oversee energy usage.
Add to that dozens of powerful
Congressional committees with energy oversight, and an independent
judiciary whose dockets are crowded with energy-related lawsuits
challenging any project. “If you’re a major integrated oil company,”
said Hofmeister, “you’re in court all the time.”
The
energy industry can’t solve the energy independence problem either, he
said. It is just as fragmented and competitive as the federal
government.
Citizens for Affordable Energy could help, by
applying grassroots pressure on a political model that doesn’t work,
said Hofmeister. “Something has to be done outside the system.”
That something can be summed up in six action steps, he said.
Get
more energy from every available source — coal, oil, nuclear, wind,
solar, and the rest. Energy demand is expected to at least double by
the year 2030. “There is no single approach that will solve our energy
problem” in the short run, said Hofmeister, a champion of hydrogen fuel
systems. “We need it all.”
Why we need it is evident in
the sheer volume of energy we use now, he said: Americans burn a train
car load of coal every second. In that same second, we use 10,000
gallons of oil. And every day we consume 60 billion cubic feet of
natural gas. Stacked up in a tower, those cubic feet would reach to the
moon and back 25 times.
A second solution? Make “big, hard
decisions” on new technologies that will drive energy efficiency, said
Hofmeister. At present, U.S. transportation needs depend on a
technology that is 100 years old and at best 20 percent efficient — the
internal combustion engine.
