Two e-mails from their mailing list:
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Idea of the Week: Putting Clean Cars On the Fast Track
To a remarkable extent, America's security, environmental, and economic interests are converging on a single imperative: cutting our use of carbon-based fuels, and moving quickly toward a clean energy future. Even the oil-besotted, science-denying Bush administration is coming around to at least a rhetorical recognition of the challenge.
But while the airwaves and newspapers are full of impressive and laudable goals for reducing dependence on carbon-based fuels, along with dramatic calls for "Apollo" or "Manhattan" projects, it's critical that we get serious about means as well as ends. And it's increasingly apparent that the single most important practical means available to the United States is to get a lot more clean cars on the road, and fast.
How to do that is the subject of two groundbreaking reports released this week by the Progressive Policy Institute. One is Plugging Into The Grid: How Plug-In Hybrid-Electric Vehicles Can Help Break America's Oil Addiction and Slow Global Warming, by Joseph Romm of the Center for American Progress, and Peter Fox-Penner, Chair of the Brattle Group. The other is The Promise of Biofuels: A Homegrown Approach to Breaking America's Oil Addiction, by former deputy interior secretary David J. Hayes, former chairman of the White House Climate Change Task Force Roger Ballentine, and PPI's Jan Mazurek. Together these reports provide a strategy for speeding up the development and mass commercial use of two "next generation" clean technologies, plug-in hybrid cars and advanced biofuels.
As Romm and Fox-Penner explain, the oil-use reductions achievable through today's "hybrid" vehicles could be vastly expanded by adoption of rechargeable battery "plug-in" hybrids that use more electricity and less of other fuels. "Plug-in" hybrids could get between 80 and 160 miles per gallon, compared to about 45 m.p.g. for today's hybrids. Moreover, electricity is readily available in every home; the massive distribution issues associated with hydrogen cell technologies just don't exist.
As Hayes, Ballentine, and Mazurek point out, the transformative impact of clean cars could be radically increased if the gasoline used in plug-in or existing hybrids could be substantially replaced by advanced biofuels. A plug-in hybrid car using biofuels could travel 500 miles on one gallon of gasoline blended with five gallons of ethanol and in doing so dramatically reduce petroleum use and all the security and environmental problems associated with dependence on oil.
The authors argue that the key to making both plug-ins and advanced biofuels widely available and commercially viable is to use price signals to drive the market toward cleaner fuels and cleaner cars. That requires dealing with a basic economic problem: In the current order of things, the price of oil on global markets is artificially low. It only reflects the direct costs of finding oil, pumping it out of the ground, refining it, and transporting it to consumers. It doesn't reflect all the other "external" costs of actually burning the stuff -- most notably the environmental cost of adding massive amounts of carbon dioxide to the Earth's atmosphere. If those external costs were more fully taken into account, the price of oil would go up, car makers would have greater incentive to build vehicles that use less gasoline, and alternative biofuels would immediately be more competitive.
Hayes, Ballentine, and Mazurek suggest three possible ways to set oil price signals that would point the market in the right direction: The first approach, long advocated by PPI, would be to use a "cap-and-trade" system to put a price on CO2 emissions. A second option, favored by many economists, would be to simply tax carbon consumption. And a third approach would be to impose a price floor on oil at $50 a barrel.
There are other steps government can and should take in partnership with the private sector to speed up adoption of clean cars and clean motor fuels, including investment in the bigger and more sophisticated batteries required to power plug-in hybrids, investment in advanced biofuel research, and incentives for retailers to install ethanol and biodiesel pumps.
If the PPI strategy were to be adopted, then some of the utopian-sounding goals often heard for energy security and action on global warming could become entirely realistic. Within 10 to 15 years, most new cars sold in the United States would be hybrids, plug-in or conventional, running on electricity and biofuels. The impact that would have on reducing dependence on imported oil, on improving the environment, and on re-establishing U.S. leadership in the vast new domestic and global markets associated with clean energy, could be incalculable.
Clean cars truly represent the fast track to meeting the national energy challenge.
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Idea of the Week: A Progressive Energy Platform
Energy policy is no longer a wonky backwater of American politics and government. As a recent Democracy Corps survey showed, "reducing dependence on foreign oil" was perceived by likely 2006 voters as the number one national security priority for the nation, well ahead of "combating terrorism" and "the war in Iraq."
The public's right. It's become increasingly apparent during the Bush presidency that America faces an energy policy challenge that vitally affects our environment, our economy, and our national security. And it's also obvious that progressives must offer national leadership on energy policy, given a Bush administration and a Republican Party that alternates between denying the problem, denouncing constructive proposals as too expensive, or offering "solutions" that dress up inaction in nice-sounding rhetoric.
But it's also obvious that progressives have so far fallen short in the task of galvanizing the public with a sensible and comprehensive agenda for doing something about the energy challenge. While efforts like former Vice President Al Gore's educational campaign on global climate change are highly praise worthy, advocates for action on energy policy need to quicken and broaden the energy debate and unite on a practical and comprehensive platform.
That's the goal of an important new report from the Progressive Policy Institute, "A Progressive Energy Platform," by PPI scholars Jan Mazurek, Roger Ballentine, Randolph Court, and Will Marshall. Aimed at distilling and distributing the best current thinking on energy policy for decisionmakers, this platform should help inform the debate on energy issues during the current political season, and in the presidential election cycle that will begin in November.
The case for a comprehensive energy strategy was well-summarized last week by DLC Chairman Gov. Tom Vilsack of Iowa (who knows what he's talking about, given his impressive record in Iowa for expanding electricity generation and energy alternatives), in a major speech to the Council on Foreign Relations.
First and foremost is the opportunity that energy security, if we really embraced the notion, provides for an innovative and creative economy that generates better paying jobs and better opportunity for the future of this country.
Secondly is the opportunity for this country to re-engage with the international community in a meaningful discussion about climate control and climate security and global warming, allowing the United States to reclaim moral leadership on that issue.
[Finally] energy security is about a stronger national security stance in terms of our relationship with countries that provide us oil that currently are disregarding our interests, whether it's Venezuela or Iran, and with countries like China where we would like to have greater influence on them but have difficulty in doing so because they are so much dependent on oil from [other countries as well].
As the PPI "Platform" notes, "the Bush administration and the Republican Congress have responded with an astonishing series of obfuscations, evasions, and failures of leadership." That means:
It is time for progressives to fill the leadership void by offering a realistic plan that begins in the here and now and leads quickly to a clean energy future.
The plan must address America's two distinct energy needs: fuel for transportation and power to generate electricity.
For transportation, the United States must dramatically speed up development of renewable alternatives to oil. For electricity, it must adopt a "no fuels left behind" strategy. The country's electricity grid must draw on a wide array of power sources and avoid becoming overly dependent on any source that is not plentiful and clean.
The "Platform" offered by PPI has the following 11 planks:
Cap carbon dioxide emissions now, beginning with utilities, to create a profit motive for companies to burn less oil and other fossil fuels;
Replace politically gridlocked auto fuel economy standards with a "tailpipe trading" system that gives auto producers a profit motive to produce cleaner cars and trucks, and that could save 2 million barrels of oil a day -- roughly the amount that America imports from the Persian Gulf;
Substitute homegrown biofuels for oil by requiring vehicle manufacturers to offer every model of car and truck with the option of an engine that runs on gasoline or ethanol -- a modification that would only cost as little as $25 per car;
Capture the "clean tech" market. Any national economic strategy should focus on the global market for alternative energy, which is expected to quadruple $40 billion in 2005 to nearly $170 billion by 2015;
Increase natural gas supplies and diversify into other energy sources that generate electricity while reducing greenhouse gas emissions;
Expand nuclear power, which produces no greenhouse gas emissions. New plant designs can produce power more safely and economically than first-generation facilities;
Bring "clean coal" plants online through a federal funding stream to commercialize the industry;
Aggressively expand the use of renewable energy such as wind, solar power, and geo-thermal heat, which can help create jobs, clean the air, and enhance energy security;
Build smarter, greener buildings, which could save up to 70 percent of energy used in the commercial sector;
Modernize the electicity generation grid to create a greater capacity and stability to support a new generation of plug-in hybrid-electric vehicles; and
Generate more power closer to consumers to reduce the need for larger plants and long-distance power delivery wires.
We are fast running out of time to meet the energy challenge in a way that maximizes American leadership and minimizes costs, not just to our economy, but to our way of life, and to our security in a world where dependence on oil is fueling despotism, terrorism, and instability.
Perhaps some day Republicans will agree to acknowledge, and maybe even help meet the challenge. But for now, it's squarely up to us. |
