    [House Hearing, 110 Congress]
    [From the U.S. Government Printing Office]

     GEOPOLITICAL IMPLICATIONS OF RISING OIL DEPENDENCE AND GLOBAL WARMING

    =======================================================================

                                    HEARING

                                   before the
                              SELECT COMMITTEE ON
                              ENERGY INDEPENDENCE
                               AND GLOBAL WARMING
                            HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

                           ONE HUNDRED TENTH CONGRESS

                                 FIRST SESSION

                                   __________

                                 APRIL 18, 2007

                                   __________

                                Serial No. 110-1

                 Printed for the use of the Select Committee on
                     Energy Independence and Global Warming

                            globalwarming.house.gov

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                    SELECT COMMITTEE ON ENERGY INDEPENDENCE
                               AND GLOBAL WARMING

                   EDWARD J. MARKEY, Massachusetts, Chairman
    EARL BLUMENAUER, Oregon              F. JAMES SENSENBRENNER, Jr.,
    JAY INSLEE, Washington                   Wisconsin, Ranking Member
    JOHN B. LARSON, Connecticut          JOHN B. SHADEGG, Arizona
    HILDA L. SOLIS, California           GREG WALDEN, Oregon
    STEPHANIE HERSETH,                   CANDICE S. MILLER, Michigan
      South Dakota                       JOHN SULLIVAN, Oklahoma
    EMANUEL CLEAVER, Missouri            MARSHA BLACKBURN, Tennessee
    JOHN J. HALL, New York
    JERRY McNERNEY, California
                                     ------

                               Professional Staff

                         David Moulton, Staff Director
                           Aliya Brodsky, Chief Clerk
                     Thomas Weimer, Minority Staff Director

                                C O N T E N T S

                                  ----------
                                                                       Page
    Hon. Edward J. Markey, a Representative in Congress from the
      Commonwealth of Massachusetts, opening statement...............     1
        Prepared statement...........................................     4
    Hon. F. James Sensenbrenner, Jr., a Representative in Congress
      from the State of Wisconsin, opening statement.................     7
    Hon. Jay Inslee, a Representative in Congress from the State of
      Washington, opening statement..................................     8
    Hon. John Shadegg, a Representative in Congress from the State of
      Arizona, opening statement.....................................     9
    Hon. John Larson, a Representative in Congress from the State of
      Connecticut, opening statement.................................    10
    Hon. Greg Walden, a Representative in Congress from the State of
      Oregon, opening statement......................................    10
    Hon. Emanuel Cleaver II, a Representative in Congress from the
      State of Missouri, prepared statement..........................    12
    Hon. John Hall, a Representative in Congress from the State of
      New York, opening statement....................................    13
    Hon. Candice Miller, a Representative in Congress from the State
      of Michigan, opening statement.................................    13
        Prepared statement...........................................    15
    Hon. Jerry McNerney, a Representative in Congress from the State
      of California, opening statement...............................    18
    Hon. John Sullivan, a Representative in Congress from the State
      of Oklahoma, opening statement.................................    18
    Hon. Hilda Solis, a Representative in Congress from the State of
      California, opening statement..................................    18
    Hon. Marsha Blackburn, a Representative in Congress from the
      State of Tennessee, opening statement..........................    19

                                   Witnesses

    General Gordon R. Sullivan, USA (Ret.), Chairman, Military
      Advisory Board.................................................    20
        Prepared statement...........................................    22
    Richard N. Haass, President, Council on Foreign Relations........    60
        Prepared Statement...........................................    63
        Answers to submitted questions...............................   204
    Carl Pope, Executive Director, Sierra Club.......................    69
        Prepared Statement...........................................    71
    Vice Admiral Dennis McGinn, USA (Ret.)...........................    81
        Prepared Statement...........................................    83
        Answers to submitted questions...............................   205
    R. James Woolsey, Vice President, Booz Allen Hamilton............   100
        Prepared Statement...........................................   102
        Answers to submitted questions...............................   210

                              Submitted Materials

    Submitted by Mr. Markey, ``The Power of Green'', Thomas L.
      Friedman, New York Times, April 15, 2007.......................   179
    Submitted by Mr. Walden, California Forests Report from Winter
      2006, Volume 10 Number 1, Global Climate Change--Forestry Never
      Looked So Cool.................................................   136
    Landmark Vehicle and Fuel Choices Legislation: The DRIVE Act
      document, April 16, 2007.......................................   121

     GEOPOLITICAL IMPLICATIONS OF RISING OIL DEPENDENCE AND GLOBAL WARMING

                                  ----------

                           WEDNESDAY, APRIL 18, 2007

                      House of Representatives,
                Select Committee on Energy Independence
                                            and Global Warming,
                                                        Washington, DC.
        The committee met, pursuant to call, at 9:35 a.m. In Room
    1100, Longworth House Office Building, Hon. Edward J. Markey
    [chairman of the committee] Presiding.
        Present: Representatives Markey, Blumenaur, Inslee, Larson,
    Herseth Sandlin, Cleaver, Hall, McNerny, Sensenbrenner,
    Shadegg, Walden, Sullivan, Blackburn, and Miller.
        Staff present: Ana Unruh-Cohen and Michal Freedhoff.
        The Chairman. The committee will come to order. We thank
    you all for being with us for this, the inaugural hearing of
    the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming.
    Today's witnesses have been invited because they have spent
    their lives thinking about what must be done to defend our
    planet and how the twin imperatives of defending our
    environment and defending our freedom have begun to merge into
    a single issue.
        This committee has been given an awesome charge, to press
    the institutions of democracy, to change business as usual in
    an overdue effort to respond to the twin challenges of our
    dependence on imported oil and the looming catastrophe of
    global warming. These problems are intertwined, and this
    hearing today is intended to highlight the fact that just as
    the oil security problem has a major global warming dimension,
    climate change has a major global security dimension. If we are
    to address either problem effectively, we must make sure we
    don't make one problem better by making the other one worse.
        It seems clear that our geopolitical and national security
    posture will only grow worse if we do not act forcefully to
    curb our dangerous dependence on imported oil and reduce our
    emissions of global warming pollution. It is a double threat
    like Orthus, the monstrous two-headed hound of Greek mythology,
    with one head facing backwards and the other forwards.
        Our ever-rising oil dependence is directly attributable to
    a backwards-facing energy policy. While looking forward, we can
    see the threat of rising temperatures and the subsequent
    increasing risk of natural and humanitarian disasters. We have
    become all too familiar with the volatility in gasoline prices
    that occurs as a result of domestic or foreign events, be it
    the capture of British sailors by Iran or the devastation
    brought by Hurricane Katrina. Gas prices have jumped up early
    this year, well before the summer driving season, and are now
    over $3 a gallon for regular at many stations, reflecting once
    again the insecurity and, indeed, sheer folly of tethering our
    economic well-being to unstable foreign sources of oil,
    governed by regimes which are in some cases supporters of or
    participants in the war on terror.
        Forty-five percent of the world's oil is located in Iraq,
    Iran and Saudi Arabia. Events in those countries have a
    dramatic impact on oil prices and our national security. In the
    late 1970s the oil embargo, Iranian revolution, and Iran-Iraq
    war sent the price of oil skyrocketing. And today with Osama
    bin Laden urging his followers to attack Saudi Arabian oil,
    with Iraq descending further into chaos and with Iran marching
    further down the path towards developing nuclear weapons, we
    are seeing the very same sort of pain at the pump because of
    the very same sort of global instability.
        In an article in the New York Times magazine this past
    weekend, Thomas Friedman stated that soaring oil prices are
    poisoning the international system by strengthening
    antidemocratic regimes around the globe. It is no coincidence
    that we have 130,000 young men and women in Iraq right now,
    with at least another 25,000 on the way. It is no coincidence
    that we are spending more than $100 billion a year to keep
    those troops there, in addition to the nearly $300 billion we
    spend each year importing all the oil we use in the first
    place. Much of these funds end up in the pockets of Arab
    princes and potentates who then funnel the money to al Qaeda,
    Hezbollah, Hamas and other terrorist groups.
        Our energy policy has compromised our economic freedom, and
    the American people want action because they know that the
    price has become much too high. We know that we cannot simply
    drill our way to energy independence.
        The United States is home to less than 3 percent of the
    world's oil reserves, but it is itself the world's largest
    consumer and importer of oil. Last year oil imports reached 60
    percent, an average of 12.5 million barrels per day, amounting
    to an annual cost of $291 billion to the American people.
        While moving to renewable fuels that has grown in the soil
    of the Midwest rather than removed from the sands of the Middle
    East can help, the single biggest step we can take to curb
    today's oil dependence and remove OPEC's leverage is to raise
    the fuel economy standards of our automotive fleet.
        I have introduced a bill, H.R. 1506, which would require
    the combined car and light truck fleet to achieve 35 miles per
    gallon by 2018, which amounts to an average of 4 percent per
    year improvement, an increase that is mandatory over this first
    10 years by ensuring that fuel economy standards keep pace with
    technological development. By 2022, it would be an increase to
    40 miles per gallon.
        From the most recent scientific evidence, it is clear that
    we must act now as well on the threat of carbon emissions from
    cars and other sources which pose threats to the environment.
        At the beginning of February, the world's top scientists,
    as part of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on
    Climate Change, provided a scientific smoking gun that human
    activities were unequivocally responsible for global warming.
    Two weeks ago, their second report told us what happens when
    the climatic bullet hits; the developed world will bear the
    brunt--the developing world, rather, will bear the brunt of the
    collateral damage from our historic global warming emissions,
    but the United States will experience its own self-inflicted
    wounds, including threats to our national security and military
    readiness.
        Today we will hear the first congressional testimony on
    this critical issue. Generals and admirals who have spent a
    lifetime on battlefields are telling us that global warming is
    a major strategic weakness. So today I am introducing the
    Global Climate Change Security Oversight Act which authorizes a
    national intelligence estimate to assess the security
    implications of global warming to the United States and its
    military. The bill, the House companion to the legislation
    already introduced by Senator Durbin and Senator Hagel, will
    provide a crucial planning and risk assessment tool as the
    Congress seeks innovative solutions to global warming.
    Developed to assess the most serious threats to the United
    States, NIEs are the most authoritative intelligence judgments
    concerning national security issues. This legislation will also
    fund research by the Defense Department into the consequences
    for U.S. military operations posed by global warming.
        But U.S. military leaders are not the only ones concerned
    about the security implications of global warming. Yesterday
    the United Nations Security Council held a historic debate on
    energy climate and security. Representatives of 55 countries
    discussed global warming's implications for peace and security
    around the world. Hercules eventually vanquished the two-headed
    Orthus. And as we will hear today, we have the tools, the
    technology, and the know-how to accomplish our own Herculean
    task of overcoming both oil dependence and global warming
    pollution.
        Let me now turn and recognize the Ranking Member of the
    committee, the gentleman from Wisconsin, Mr. Sensenbrenner.
        [The statement of Mr. Markey follows:]
        [The information follows:]

        [GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T7964A.001

        [GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T7964A.002

        [GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T7964A.003

        Mr. Sensenbrenner.  Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. And
    I want to welcome everyone to this first-ever oversight hearing
    of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global
    Warming. Contrary to some press reports, this is not a new
    issue. As the former Chairman of the House Science Committee, I
    held numerous hearings on this topic. During that time, I heard
    my fair share of extreme predictions, dire forecasts, and
    gloomy outlooks. This committee has no legislative
    jurisdiction. And if we are to find a workable solution to
    climate change problems, I believe we need to be realistic and
    talk about commonsense ideas and commonsense solutions.
    Unfortunately, this debate has not been characterized by common
    sense. It has been characterized by extremism. While this
    extremism hasn't done anything to produce effective solution,
    it has created a lot of hot air, which isn't good for Congress'
    carbon footprint.
        But extremism has produced a lot of fear. Take this story
    from Monday's Washington Post as an example. The headline
    reads, quote, ``Climate Change Scenarios Scare and Motivate
    Kids,'' unquote. In this story one 9-year-old student foresees
    an Earth 20 years from now that will have no oxygen. There is
    no credible scientific evidence to support such a cataclysmic
    fear, but with all the scary news that we all have read on this
    issue, how can you blame children for being afraid?
        I know that this is an area where the science seems to be
    the most skewed, and politicians and pundits aren't doing very
    much to clarify it. While science has taught us many things
    about climate change and greenhouse gas, one area there is no
    scientific consensus, contrary to popular belief, is the
    effects of climate change. Perhaps nowhere is this divergence
    more evident than in some of the claims made by former Vice
    President Al Gore. In his movie he predicts a 20-foot rise in
    sea levels. But what does the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on
    Climate Change predict? A 23-inch rise in sea levels. And data
    was submitted yesterday to a Science Committee hearing that I
    attended that showed that there has been less than a 3-inch
    rise in sea levels in the 42-year span between 1961 and 2003.
    There is a world of difference between 20 feet, 23 inches, and
    less than 3 inches, and no wonder why the poor child who was
    interviewed by The Washington Post is scared. In fact, many
    scientists have questioned Mr. Gore's doomsday scenarios.
        A recent article in The New York Times chronicled several
    scientists' call to cool the hype. One scientist said Mr. Gore
    was, quote, ``overselling our certainty about knowing the
    future.'' One thing that is certain is that some of the
    solutions proposed by extremists would have devastating effects
    on our economy. Europe has adopted these so-called solutions.
    The results: soaring electricity rates, factories slowing down
    because they are too expensive to power, and jobs moving to
    countries like China that aren't subject to regulations.
        Will Europe's environment benefit from the slowdown of its
    economy? I doubt it. The Republican members of this committee
    care about both the environment and the economy. And
    Republicans on this committee know that we can protect both in
    addressing this problem.
        I will have many questions about why global warming has
    suddenly become an issue of national defense. I do agree that
    as a country we need to reduce our dependence on foreign oil.
    We especially need to reduce our energy dependence on countries
    that do not share our democratic values. New technology, along
    with wind and solar power, can help us reduce that dependence.
    So can nuclear power. If done right, we can implement these new
    power sources and reduce our carbon output and dependence on
    foreign oil without devastating our economy, throwing people
    out of work, and outsourcing jobs to Third World countries.
        These are the types of solutions that my Republican
    colleagues and I will be seeking, and I thank the gentleman for
    the time.
        The Chairman. The gentleman's time has expired.
        Now under the rules, each of the members can make a 3-
    minute opening statement. I will reserve their time and add it
    to their 5 minutes to question the witnesses, thereby having 8
    minutes to question the witnesses. It is within the discretion
    of each member.
        The Chair recognizes the gentleman from Oregon, Mr.
    Blumenauer.
        Mr. Blumenauer. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate both
    the provocative statements that we have heard. My preference
    would be to get to our witnesses as soon as possible. So I will
    defer.
        The Chairman. The gentleman reserves his time. The
    gentleman from Washington State, Mr. Inslee.
        Mr. Inslee. Yeah, I would like to say a couple things.
    First of all, it may seem unusual to say that we are lucky here
    this morning. But I think we are lucky for two reasons. The
    first reason, I think it will become very apparent to us that
    we are going to have a way to solve both--two horses of the
    Apocalypse by taking the same actions, and we are going to be
    able to unite Americans around a solution to these two problems
    of energy security and global warming. And I think it is
    important to say that because while this has kicked up a lot of
    storm and controversy, ultimately this country is going to be
    united for a solution to these two problems. I consider us
    lucky in that regard.
        And secondly, most importantly, the reason why I consider
    us lucky, I believe it is America's destiny to lead the world
    into the technological solutions to these twin problems. And I
    just want to share an observation about why I think global
    warming has been controversial. It has been surprising to me
    that people who use a microwave oven that depends on quantum
    mechanics, and a cell phone that depends on quantum mechanics,
    have refused to recognize the scientific consensus on global
    warming. And I think their reason is fear.
        My friend, Mr. Sensenbrenner, related fear of some grade-
    school children. I think there is a lot of fear in Congress. I
    think there is a lot of fear that we aren't smart enough to
    develop the technologies to deal with this problem. And the
    anecdote to fear is confidence.
        And I just want to note a meeting we had last Friday in
    Seattle, Washington, where we brought together some companies
    that are dealing with the technologies, the American
    technologies to solve this problem. The Ramgen Company has
    developed a way to compress CO2 that could help us
    have clean coal. The Verdiem Company that has figured out a way
    to save 30 percent of your electricity in your computer system.
    The Imperial Energy Company that is going to build the largest
    biodiesel plant in the Western Hemisphere. The Finavera Company
    has figured out a way to get energy from wavepower. The
    Prometheus Energy Company has figured out a way not to vent
    methane but to develop electricity. The MagnaDrive Company that
    has developed electrical generating motors that can save 30 to
    40 percent of the energy costs associated with them.
        I suggest that this problem and these two problems are the
    largest economic opportunity America has ever had. And America
    does well when there is economic and technological transition,
    and we are going to do well here. And I just hope that when we
    adopt the new Apollo Energy Act, which I will be introducing
    shortly, that we will get Members to support the idea of
    confidence and optimism. That is what we are going to take out
    of these meetings. Thank you.
        The Chairman. The gentleman's time has expired.
        The gentleman from Arizona, Mr. Shadegg.
        Mr. Shadegg. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for holding this
    hearing. In recognition that today's hearing is the first of
    this select committee, I want to say that I welcome this debate
    on climate change and hope that this committee, along with
    other committees in the House, will investigate the matter,
    weighing the science as well as the costs and benefits of
    various policy options.
        I agree that the United States should consider the risk of
    climate change as a potential national security concern.
    However, I also believe that extreme poverty in developing
    nations is also a potential national security concern, and
    limiting human freedom around the world is a potential national
    security concern, and policies that damage the world's economy
    are potential national security concerns. Indeed there are
    countless potential national security concerns, many of them
    related to our need for energy. Worst-case scenarios should be
    considered and assessed, but that does not mean they should be
    the cornerstones of U.S. policy. There are many tools at our
    disposal, including adaptation that can be effective in
    addressing the potential impacts of a warming climate.
        President Klaus of the Czech Republic, in writing to the
    Energy and Commerce Committee several weeks ago, expressed his
    view that while discussing climate, we are not witnessing so
    much a clash of views about the environment but a clash of
    views about human freedom. Regarding developing nations he
    wrote: They will not be able to cope with the limits and
    standards imposed on the world by irrational environmental
    policies. Their products will have difficult access to the
    developed markets. And as a result, the gap between the
    developing nations and the developed world will widen.
        President Klaus' language should give us a sense of how
    difficult it will be to get these nations to join us in a quest
    to reduce carbon, and of the importance of pursuing energy
    alternatives that will not limit or damage the economies of
    developing nations or the world's economy. These developing
    nations are faced with a moral question. Do they restrain the
    growth of their energy supply demand in their economies
    considering that hundreds of millions of their citizens live in
    dire poverty?
        We have heard testimony in the Energy and Commerce
    Committee that over 300 million Indians live on less than $1
    per day; 700 million live on less than $2 per day. Facing this
    economic reality, can we expect policymakers in India or China
    or other developed nations to limit their nation's economic
    growth? Or must we help these nations grow their economies and
    raise standards of living through alternative energy sources
    and efficiency gains so that environmental and adaptation
    concerns are manageable problems rather than global crises?
        History has shown that countries that can afford to care
    about the environment do. Put another way, as former Indian
    Prime Minister Indira Gandhi once said, the ultimate polluter
    is poverty.
        These are difficult questions, Mr. Chairman, and I thank
    you for holding this hearing that will hopefully help us begin
    to resolve them. I yield back.
        The Chairman. Okay. Thank you. The gentleman's time has
    expired.
        The Chair recognizes the gentleman from Connecticut, Mr.
    Larson.
        Mr. Larson. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And let me commend you
    and also the leadership of Speaker Pelosi for having the vision
    to understand the need to get both sides of the aisle to come
    together and coalesce around the vitality of ideas that can
    deal with this very important issue.
        I am looking forward to the testimony of our panelists, and
    I truly believe that we are in a race between catastrophe and
    cooperation. And I think to the extent that this committee can
    come together and have a robust exchange of ideas and not end
    up being central casting for Inherit the Wind, part 2, I think
    we will be able to move forward in a manner in which the Nation
    will be well served.
        And I yield back.
        The Chairman. The gentleman's time has expired.
        The gentleman from Oregon, Mr. Walden.
        Mr. Walden. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate
    the opportunity to hear from our witnesses today. And I spent
    most of the April break touring around my district, meeting
    with people who are developing alternative energy, a lot of
    which was prompted by passage and enactment of the 2005 Energy
    Policy Act for America which is spurring development of wind
    energy. I toured a 100-megawatt wind energy facility out of
    North Power, Oregon, out of Union that is set to go online. I
    toured a 40-million-gallon-a-year ethanol plant that should
    open this July at the Port of Morrow in Boardman, Oregon. I met
    with the pollen grain growers and talked about their ability to
    produce biodiesel fuels.
        And I am a big advocate of renewable energy, but I grow
    somewhat perplexed at those who say we have become so reliant
    on foreign oil--and I, frankly, agree with them, and that is a
    bad thing for our Nation's security and economy at times. But
    then also they are doing everything they can to stop us from
    developing our own resources available here in the United
    States, whether that is oil or natural gas.
        I spent a lot of time in this Congress over the last few
    years chairing the Subcommittee on Forests and Forest Health. I
    worked closely with my colleague from South Dakota,
    Representative Herseth, on legislation to try to clean up her
    forests. One forest in Oregon that burned in 2003, the B&B
    fire, in a matter of a couple weeks put twice as much carbon
    into the atmosphere in Oregon and other greenhouse gases as the
    entire State of Oregon emits in a year combined. In a year.
        And yet there are those who are advocating for us to do
    everything we can to address this issue of global warming and
    climate change, and I think there are a lot of things we can
    do, and I am actually excited about some of the opportunities.
    But there are also the very people who don't want us to do
    anything to manage our forests.
        And yet overseas, we read in The Washington Post, the
    illegal logging that is going on is eliminating the forests in
    China and Indonesia and other Asian countries, so we can import
    that wood here at a time when we have forests that are
    overstocked, overgrown, subject to catastrophic fire and
    emitting enormous amounts of loads of carbon and other
    greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and we refuse to do
    anything about it.
        So I think there are opportunities here to improve
    management of our Federal forestlands, to encourage and incent
    development of renewable and low-polluting new sources of
    energy, to encourage conservation efforts and more
    efficiencies.
        And I look forward to our hearings and the testimony from
    our witnesses. And thank you, Mr. Chairman.
        The Chairman. The gentleman's time has expired.
        The gentlelady from South Dakota, Ms. Herseth.
        Ms. Herseth. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I will reserve my
    time so that we can get to the testimony. And as a matter of
    personal privilege, a couple colleagues and I will have to go
    to a short markup in the Veterans' Affairs Committee, but we
    will return promptly to hear the testimony of our distinguished
    panelists today. Thank you.
        The Chairman. The gentlelady's time is reserved. The
    gentleman from Missouri, Mr. Cleaver.
        Mr. Cleaver. I reserve my time also, Mr. Chairman. Thank
    you.
        [The statement of Mr. Cleaver follows:]

        [GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T7964A.029

        The Chairman. The gentleman from New York, Mr. Hall.
        Mr. Hall. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Mr. Ranking Member and
    distinguished panel. I am proud to be named to this committee.
    I am eager for the committee to get to work. The subject matter
    for our first hearing could not be more appropriate.
        Our dependence on foreign oil and our changing environment
    constitute nothing less than significant threats to our
    national security that must be met with swift aggressive
    action. Reliance on imported fossil fuels already sends
    hundreds of billions of dollars overseas each year, damages our
    economy with energy prices that burden family budgets and
    creates public health risks by spewing pollution into the
    environment. Left unchecked, our growing dependence on foreign
    sources of energy will leave our Nation increasingly vulnerable
    to the whims of OPEC and the upheaval in the world's most
    unstable regions.
        At the same time, the widespread impacts of climate change
    will enhance the threat of severe weather disasters and create
    global instability.
        Meeting our national security threats posed by the
    dependence on foreign oil and climate change will require a
    concerted national effort. For too long, too little has been
    done by our national leadership to mobilize the American people
    to meet this challenge. Finding the solutions necessary will
    require commitment and difficult choices, but I believe that
    just as the Nation pulled together to support the war effort
    through World War II, just as we rose to meet the challenge
    that President Kennedy gave us of going to the Moon in 10
    years--which we actually accomplished in 9--we can unite now to
    do what is necessary to combat climate change and energy
    insecurity. And, at the same time, those same actions will help
    to reduce asthma and emphysema, especially among our children
    in our inner cities, and to reduce acid rain and to reduce oil
    spills and to reduce mercury contamination and to reduce our--
    to balance the trade deficit and to reduce our difficulties in
    securing oil in parts of the world where they are unstable or
    unfriendly regimes.
        And maybe most importantly, if and when we win this
    particular battle, we meet this particular challenge, I believe
    it will give us as a Nation a psychological boost, not just an
    economic boost, because I believe a lot of these jobs will be
    created in the new industries we are talking about here, and
    that is certainly my hope, but it will give us an emotional
    boost that this country sorely needs.
        So I am excited to be here and look forward to your
    testimony. And thank you, Mr. Chairman. I yield back.
        The Chairman. The gentleman's time has expired.
        The gentlelady from Michigan, Mrs. Miller.
        Mrs. Miller. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I am
    delighted to be a member of this committee. I think both of our
    leaderships on both sides have done an outstanding job of
    picking a very diverse group of our colleagues here, and I look
    forward to working on an issue that has no partisan barriers,
    of course, and that is advocating for our environment and being
    environmentally sensitive.
        And as I understand the purpose of the committee, it really
    is to seek government policy solutions to the problem of global
    climate change. And so I think it is entirely appropriate that
    our first hearing be about the geopolitical implications of oil
    dependence and climate change, because I truly believe that
    energy security and energy independence equals national
    security. And I also sit on the House Armed Services Committee,
    so I really believe this very much.
        And, of course, as the President has said and as has been
    said here today, we are a Nation addicted to oil. And just like
    drug abusers, we buy the product that we are addicted to from
    some very unsavory characters from across the globe. We buy
    energy from nations like Venezuela and Hugo Chavez, who is
    openly hostile to America. We buy energy from some of the
    Middle East where funds are sometimes siphoned off to support
    those who hate America. And let's face it, many of these
    countries would be much less interesting if we did not need
    that oil.
        There has to be a better way, and do I believe that there
    is. In fact, I represent a district in southeast Michigan which
    is home, as you might all know, to the domestic auto industry,
    which is under a microscope for environmental sensitivity. And
    wouldn't it be better for America if we produced automobiles
    that got not only higher fuel economy, but ran on much
    different types of fuel than oil-based gasoline, fuels like
    ethanol or biodiesel or hydrogen? That day is coming and it is
    coming if we stand up and give our domestic auto industry a
    helping hand instead of hitting it with a hammer.
        Wouldn't it be better for America if we could produce
    automobiles that we could plug in to charge in a battery in our
    garage and never have to use the gas engine on a short trip?
    That day is coming if we share the vision with our incredible
    scientists.
        In fact, Mr. Chairman, let me take this opportunity to
    formally ask the committee to consider having a field hearing
    in Detroit, in southeast Michigan, at the home of the domestic
    auto industry where we can actually see all of these exciting
    new technologies and how they are being utilized in the future.
        This technology is coming. The only question is whether or
    not America will lead the way, as we have throughout the
    Industrial Revolution. The geopolitical implications of energy
    independence are clear. In America, where we are not forced to
    fund our enemies but instead support the betterment of our own
    society, that should be the primary focus of our energy policy,
    one that supports American enterprise and ingenuity that drives
    our economy forward. And I think if this goal is accomplished,
    America and the world will be a much better place.
        Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I will reserve the balance of any
    remaining time that I may have. Thank you.
        The Chairman. Great.
        [The statement of Mrs. Miller follows:]

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        The Chairman. And the Chair recognizes the gentleman from
    California, Mr. McNerney.
        Mr.  McNerney. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Today we have a
    rare opportunity to unite our great Nation to develop a
    national mandate to educate and mobilize our country with a
    great national purpose, much like Sputnik mobilized the prior
    generation.
        This committee can be the focus for that change and
    mobilization, and I look forward to participating in that
    transformation. I reserve the balance of my time.
        The Chairman. And the Chair recognizes the gentleman from
    Oklahoma, Mr. Sullivan.
        Mr. Sullivan of Oklahoma. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And
    thank you for holding this historic first hearing of the Select
    Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming. I look
    forward to hearing from our witnesses on the geopolitical
    implications of rising oil dependence and global warming. It is
    an honor to be at the epicenter of the debate on climate
    change.
        Protecting the environment is neither a Democrat nor a
    Republican issue but a bipartisan issue that all Americans
    should discuss and address. Our country has become too
    dependent on foreign energy resources, especially oil that is
    produced in a volatile part of the world. I believe the answer
    to this problem comes from increased U.S. energy independence.
    We can achieve this by expanding our domestic refining capacity
    and expanding our domestic energy production both on and
    offshore.
        It is also important that we look at alternative fuels as a
    viable option for Americans' energy needs. I welcome the debate
    on this issue and commit to this process with an open mind. I
    believe we can work together to find workable solutions,
    commonsense regulations, and address the issue of climate
    change without destroying the American economy or losing
    American jobs.
        Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I yield back the remainder of
    my time.
        The Chairman.  The gentleman's time has expired.
        The gentlelady from California, Ms. Solis.
        Ms. Solis.  Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And I also want to
    commend you and Speaker Pelosi for allowing me the opportunity
    to serve on this very prestigious select committee, and knowing
    that this is our first hearing how important it is to hear from
    our witnesses, so I want to thank them for also being here this
    morning.
        Two months ago I spoke at the Helsinki Commission, on
    behalf of the United States delegation, to address energy
    security and climate change. Parliamentarians from across
    Europe agreed that we must address the issue of security and
    climate change together. Many oil-producing countries lack the
    political will or social framework for good governance in the
    energy sector. Producing countries such as Iran and Russia may
    use energy reserves to attain political objectives and increase
    political influence. In the United States, as we know, we are
    home to less than 3 percent of the world's reserves and more
    than 60 percent of the oil consumed in the U.S. is imported,
    costing our Nation more than $290 billion annually.
        The dependency on oil makes us subject to the international
    risks associated with unpredictable and unstable nations. The
    report titled ``National Security and the Threat of Climate
    Change'' underscored the connection between security, energy
    use and climate change, and clearly outlined the risks of
    inaction. It concluded that climate change is a threat
    multiplier for instability in some of the most volatile regions
    in the world, resulting in already weak and failing governments
    being pushed toward authoritarianism and radical ideologies.
        Globally, food security, transport industry, and human
    health will be impacted, all issues at the root of instability
    and conflict. Failure to take action may result in the United
    States being drawn more frequently into conflict situations.
        And yesterday the Secretary General of the United Nations
    stated and, I quote, ``Compared to the cost of conflict and its
    consequences, the cost of prevention is far lower in financial
    terms, but, most importantly, in human lives and life
    quality.'' and I agree with this.
        The risks associated with inaction are far too great. The
    impacts of global warming, such as heat waves, would
    disproportionately affect low-income and underrepresented
    communities here in the United States. And just this week
    Latino, religious, African American leaders highlighted the
    risks of inaction to the health of vulnerable communities and
    populations.
        Military advisors have also highlighted the risks in terms
    of national security. The development of domestic policies that
    reduce oil consumption and emissions are critical to increasing
    options for protecting our interests abroad and here at home.
    Simply put, we need aggressive action to curtail our thirst for
    energy.
        I look forward to discussing these policy issues with you,
    and thank the witnesses for being here. Thank you.
        The Chairman.  The gentlelady's time has expired.
        The gentlelady from Tennessee, Mrs. Blackburn.
        Mrs. Blackburn.  Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate the
    opportunity to serve on the committee and I am looking forward
    to a healthy and judicious debate over the issue of climate
    change.
        As we look at the causes of climate change, I think it is
    imperative that we look at the whole problem, but we must not
    base our decisions on half truths, inconclusive science or
    media hype. The discussion must be based on testimony on
    science, not on political party or special interest agenda
    items.
        And I want to welcome our guests, and we look forward to
    your testimony that you will share with us.
        We all should be aware that the U.S. currently has several
    existing threats to its national security, such as
    proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and transnational
    terrorism. A question we should ask is, does climate change
    rise to the level of this immediate danger? Another question
    that we should ask, we should ask if it would be unwise for us
    to devote significant time and resources to speculative
    dangers; should we instead focus on the current dangers to our
    national security? It is possible if these are not addressed
    that the global warming issue would be a moot issue.
        I do agree that competition for oil resources in the
    future, especially for the U.S., is going to increase and U.S.
    domestic policies need to address our current and future
    dependence on oil imports, because we are vulnerable to supply
    interruptions and price increases and because much of this
    revenue is going to countries that are not friendly to the
    United States. We must diversify our resources of oil, and we
    can because we have vast reserves of oil and gas on land and in
    the sea that are currently not being tapped.
        We also have trillions of barrels of oil in shale and coal
    on public lands that can be converted to transportation fuel
    and serve our needs for a couple hundred years. And this could
    be accomplished with little disruption to our natural
    environment. Even if the Earth continues to warm and does not
    revert to a cooling cycle and possibly cause events that
    threaten national security, the predicted outcomes are at best
    tentative and the proposed solutions raise problems of their
    own.
        I look forward to discussing how we should proceed and how
    we should appropriately use our resources as we look for energy
    innovation and security. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I yield back.
        The Chairman.  Great. The gentlelady's time has expired.
        We now turn to our exceptionally influential committee
    which has been assembled here this morning. We will begin with
    General Gordon Sullivan who is a former chief of staff of the
    United States Army. He has spent his life serving his country,
    with four tours of duty in Europe, two in Vietnam, and one in
    Korea, and was chief of staff to Secretary of Defense Dick
    Cheney in the administration of George Herbert Walker Bush. He
    joins us today on the heels of the release of a major report
    entitled ``National Security and the Threat of Climate Change''
    which he compiled for the Center of Naval Analysis with 11
    distinguished military leaders.
        Thank you for all of your service, General Sullivan.
    Whenever you feel comfortable, please begin.

    STATEMENT OF GENERAL GORDON R. SULLIVAN, USA (RET.), CHAIRMAN,
                        MILITARY ADVISORY BOARD

        General Sullivan.  Thanks, Mr. Chairman. It is an honor to
    be here today with you and your colleagues. As you stated,
    today I am here as the Chairman of the Military Advisory Board
    to the Center for Naval Analysis Corporation and their report
    on national security and the threat of climate change.
        The advisory board consisted of three- and four-star flag
    officers of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps. Our
    charge was to learn as much as we could in a relatively short
    time about the emerging phenomenon of global climate change,
    using our experience as military leaders to process our
    learning through a national security lens. In other words, we
    were asked what are the national security implications of
    climate change.
        When I was asked to be on the Military Advisory Board, I
    was both pleased and skeptical. Pleased because of one simple
    and straightforward fact; that is that I am almost 70 years
    old. I have served my country for over 50 years. I took my oath
    as a cadet at Norwich University in Vermont in 1955, retired in
    1995, and I am now the president and chief operating officer of
    the Association of the United States Army. So I have been in or
    around the defense establishment since 1955. Here I am in the
    later stages of my life, and I feel sometimes as if some of the
    sacrifices I, my soldiers, colleagues, friends and family made
    for America are now being overtaken by a much more powerful and
    significant challenge to their health and well-being and the
    health and well-being of my three grandchildren and their
    children and the future.
        Having said this, I must admit I came to the advisory board
    as a skeptic. There is lots of conflicting information on the
    subject of climate change, and like most public policy issues
    debated here and discussed in America, there are many opinions.
    It is what makes America great. It is what I served for, for
    over 50 years.
        After listening to the leaders of scientific business and
    governmental communities, both I and my colleagues came to
    agree; and we published our report with our agreement that
    global climate change is and will be a significant threat to
    our national security, and, in a larger sense, to the lives of
    our grandchildren and their children.
        The findings of the Military Advisory Board are as follows:
        Projected climate change poses a serious threat to
    America's national security. Climate change acts as a threat
    multiplier for instability in some of the most volatile regions
    of the world. Projected climate change will add to tensions
    even in stable regions of the world. And climate change,
    national security, and energy dependence are a related set of
    global challenges.
        Our recommendations are as follows:
        First, the national security consequences of climate change
    should be fully integrated into national security and national
    defense strategies. The United States should commit to stronger
    national and international roles to help stabilize climate
    changes at levels that will avoid significant disruption to
    global security and stability. The United States should commit
    to global partnerships that help less developed nations build
    the capacity and resiliency to better manage climate impacts.
        The Department of Defense should enhance its operational
    capabilities by accelerating the adoption of improved business
    processes and innovative technologies that result in improved
    U.S. combat power through energy efficiency.
        And last, the DOD, the government, should conduct an
    assessment of the impact on U.S. military installations
    worldwide of such events as rising sea levels, extreme weather
    events and possible climate change impacts over the next 30,
    40, 100 years.
        Climate change, national security, and energy dependence
    are interrelated. Simply hoping that these relationships will
    remain static is simply not acceptable. Hope is not a method.
    We can't sit here and wait to find out.
        Speaking for the members of the Military Advisory Board, I
    am confident in stating we as individuals collectively support
    your legislative initiative to authorize an NIE, National
    Intelligence Estimate, on national security implications of
    climate change.
        Mr. Chairman, I request my statement and the report, which
    I have here, be entered into the official record.
        The Chairman.  Without objection, it will be entered into
    the official record.
        General Sullivan.  Thank you, sir.
        The Chairman.  I thank you, General Sullivan.
        [The statement of General Sullivan follows:]

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        The Chairman.  Our second witness, Dr. Richard Haass, is a
    Rhodes scholar who has received the Presidential Citizens Medal
    for his contributions to implementing U.S. policy during
    operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm, served on the
    National Security Council under George Bush senior, headed the
    policy planning at the Department of State under Secretary of
    State Colin Powell, and is now head of the Council on Foreign
    Relations. His latest book is entitled ``The Opportunity:
    America's Moment To Alter History's Course,'' which could well
    serve as the title for this hearing.
        Dr. Haass, welcome.

     STATEMENT OF RICHARD N. HAASS, PRESIDENT, COUNCIL ON FOREIGN
                               RELATIONS

        Mr. Haass.  Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And for the record, if
    you do choose to use the title of my book as the title of your
    hearing, I would pose no objection.
        Thank you very much for asking me to testify today on this
    critical issue. Let me just note that I will be speaking here--
    the views I will be saying here will be my personal views and
    not those of the Council on Foreign Relations, simply because
    the Council on Foreign Relations does not take institutional
    positions. I will just make a few points and I ask that my full
    statement be inserted in the record.
        America's high dependence on imported oil adversely affects
    our national security in a number of ways. First, it distorts
    American foreign policy by increasing the importance of the
    greater Middle East considerably above what it would be either
    if it did not have much oil or if oil played a less important
    role than it does.
        Secondly, our dependence on imported oil increases the
    vulnerability of the U.S. economy to supply interruptions and
    price increases.
        Thirdly, our current dependence on imported oil exacerbates
    our current account deficit.
        And fourthly, as several of you have correctly pointed out,
    our importing of large amounts of oil funnels massive amounts
    of dollars to producers, many of whom, such as Iran and
    Venezuela, are carrying out foreign policies inimical to
    America's principles and interests, and in other cases this
    massive flow of resources can actually undermine markets,
    undermine the rule of law, and undermine democracy.
        This current state of affairs is a national failure. I
    would go so far to say it is a national scandal that we find
    ourselves in this position more than three decades after the
    first oil shocks. Alas, there are no quick fixes nor is there
    any benefit to be had from further delay.
        Is climate change a national security matter? Here I would
    associate myself with the report and remarks of my good friend,
    Gordon Sullivan. Climate change is a cause of both conflict and
    it is a cause of state failure, which in turn can breed
    terrorism, drug trafficking, slavery and other adverse aspects
    of globalization.
        There is much to do. There is a large number of potential
    remedies. I would just say some of them include diversification
    of oil supplies, maintaining strategic petroleum reserves in
    this country and elsewhere, and instituting new sharing
    arrangements that bring in India and China; increasing the
    resilience of the energy infrastructure and system; increasing
    the domestic production of oil; development of alternatives to
    oil, especially to reduce the use of it in the transportation
    sector in this country; the development of new technologies
    that lead to the clean burning of coal or at least the cleaner
    burning of coal, as well as technologies that would lead to the
    capture and sequestration of carbon, if possible, expanding the
    role of nuclear power, at a minimum, to replace retired nuclear
    plants down the road; and to reduce the demand, especially
    again in the transportation sector, and to increase efficiency
    of energy use more broadly; to develop an international
    framework for the world; to take the place of Kyoto essentially
    for the post-2012 world; to encourage forestation and
    discourage deforestation; and to change the way the United
    States Government deals with these issues.
        Let me just use the remainder of my time to make six
    overarching points, and I will do it as quickly as I can.
        First, the United States needs to adopt a broader
    definition of energy security. The traditional definition,
    which essentially has emphasized reliable access to affordable
    supplies of oil, is simply too narrow and inadequate. It fails
    to take into account the need to stem the flows of resources to
    certain governments, it fails to take into account global
    climate change. What we need is a new definition for energy
    security. Any energy security is and will be a function of our
    ability to manage the amount of energy produced, consumed, and
    imported so that the United States, one, reduces its
    vulnerability to supply and price fluctuations; and, two,
    reduces the flows of resources overseas; and, three, reduces
    the adverse impact on the global climate.
        Secondly, we need a truly comprehensive policy. We cannot
    drill or conserve our way out of the current state of affairs.
    Neither nuclear power nor cellulosic nor anything else will by
    itself constitute a panacea.
        Thirdly, the United States cannot do this alone. We need an
    American policy. We must walk the walk if we are going to
    persuade others when we talk the talk. But the approach must be
    international. Developing and developed countries must
    participate.
        Fourthly, there will be no solution to the energy security
    and global climate challenges for the foreseeable future. The
    calls for energy independence are unrealistic or even
    unhelpful. The challenge is to manage this problem, not to
    eliminate it.
        Fifth, the United States Government needs to change the way
    it goes about business in this area. The National Security
    Council, for example, needs an energy security and climate
    change directorate. We should look at the role and mandate of
    the Department of Energy, and, more generally, we should look
    at ways in which we can better integrate the concerns before
    this select committee and the broader concerns of national
    security.
        Last, we also need to meet the challenge of integration
    beyond the U.S. Government. And we need to find ways to
    integrate not simply the executive branch and the congressional
    branch on this issue, but also what the Federal branch does
    with State and local authorities, with the private sector and
    with NGOs.
        So let me end where I began. I applaud the creation of this
    select committee. I applaud your willingness to devote your
    time and energies to this, and I wish you well in your work
    because, to a large extent, the national security of this
    country in coming decades will depend on how well and how
    successfully we meet these related challenges of energy
    security and climate change. Thank you.
        The Chairman.  Thank you, Dr. Haass, very much.
        [The statement of Mr. Haass follows:]

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        The Chairman.  Our next witness, Carl Pope, is one of
    America's most influential and effective environmental leaders.
    He was appointed executive director of the Sierra Club,
    America's oldest and largest grassroots environmental
    organization in 1992. He is a veteran leader in the
    environmental movement. Mr. Pope has been with the Sierra Club
    for the past 20 years. He graduated summa cum laude from
    Harvard and spent 2 years as a volunteer in the Peace Corps in
    India. Welcome, Mr. Pope. Whenever you feel ready, please
    begin.

        STATEMENT OF CARL POPE, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, SIERRA CLUB

        Mr. Pope.  Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, members of
    the committee. I am Carl Pope, the executive director of the
    Sierra Club, and it is an honor to appear before you today. The
    Sierra Club believes that this select committee can be the
    pivot which moves America's national government from lagger to
    leader on the issue of climate change.
        Today we are addressing the national security implications
    of oil dependence and climate change. Lincoln said in the Civil
    War that slavery somehow caused it. I think we all know that
    dependence on oil somehow is related to our war in Iraq.
        While oil addiction is the closest nexus between national
    security and global warming, global warming itself is a bigger
    threat than oil addiction alone, because climate change can
    produce insecurity in regions of the world which have no oil.
    Indeed, climate change has historically been one of the world's
    major sources of violence and instability.
        For 1,700 years the drying out of the Asian steppe lands
    sent Ghengis Khan, Atilla the Hun, and wave after wave of
    nomadic invaders to topple Rome, unseat Chinese imperial
    dynasties, and finally topple the Arab caliphate with the
    sacking of Baghdad.
        But today we have the solutions to solve both our addiction
    to oil and the threat of global warming. Indeed, replacing our
    reliance on oil and other fossil fuels will create a new energy
    economy, relieve us of dependence on unstable parts of the
    world, and reduce the threat of global warming pollution.
        In January the Sierra Club released a report in cooperation
    with the American Solar Energy Society in which we capped the
    expertise of America's leading government scientists and
    researchers on energy who found that simply by exploiting
    existing energy efficiency and renewable technologies, we could
    reduce our emissions of carbon dioxide by 2 percent a year,
    every year between now and 2030, and be on the pathway with new
    technologies emerging from those national laboratories to
    complete the task of reducing our national emissions of global
    warming by 60 to 80 percent by 2050. In the Sierra Club, we
    called that the 2 percent solution.
        We are asking the American people and the Congress to
    embrace that solution. It has four principle pathways and one
    blind alley. The first pathway, get more efficiency out of the
    cars and trucks that we make, whether we make them in southeast
    Michigan or in Tennessee. We can save consumers money, reduce
    oil dependence, revitalize the American auto industry by
    improving fuel efficiency by 4 percent a year as the President
    has called for. Taking this step alone, by 2025 would save over
    3 million barrels of oil, more than we import from the Persian
    Gulf. For this reason the Sierra Club supports the Markey-Platt
    CAFE legislation.
        We also urge Congress to support the development of
    cellulosic ethanol and other renewable fuels. Ethanol and
    renewable fuels and auto efficiency multiply their impact. We
    need to do both of these things. We can't solve our
    transportation fuels problem with only one of the two
    solutions.
        Next, in the utility sector we need to embrace the
    renewable energy possibilities so many of you mentioned. The
    State of Minnesota, where I was this weekend, has already
    adopted a very ambitious renewable energy standard, one that
    would achieve 30 percent renewable standards by 2025 for its
    largest utility. Congress should join that by adopting a 20
    percent national standard by 2025.
        We also need to recognize that we waste an enormous amount
    of the electricity that we generate. We should adopt an
    national energy efficiency standard that would put the Nation's
    electric sector on a dependable track towards greater
    efficiency. Utilities can and should become at least 10 percent
    more efficient by 2020.
        The blind alley which has been suggested recently by the
    President is the idea that we can back out oil from--gas from
    oil with gasoline made from coal. If you look at the numbers,
    it is overwhelmingly likely that such a strategy would actually
    double the amount of carbon dioxide put out by the average
    vehicle and would also cost the taxpayers enormous sums of
    money for very little return. So we urge the Congress not to
    follow the seemingly attractive but, if you look closely at the
    numbers, ultimately unworkable strategy of using coal liquids.
        What we should be doing instead is sequestering the carbon
    dioxide from electricity generated from coal and then using
    that electricity to plug--to plug in the hybrids that
    Congresswoman Miller suggested. That is a pathway to use coal
    responsibly to back out oil imports.
        We can do this job, the American people are ready to do
    this job, and I want to underscore what many of you said, we
    must do this job in a responsible way and in a way which not
    only doesn't hurt the American economy. I think that is far too
    low a standard. I believe that this Congress has the
    opportunity, by designing effective energy policies which
    unleash American ingenuity and entrepreneurship, to actually
    create a new industrial revolution in this country, to add
    millions of new industrial jobs which we badly need to reduce
    our trade deficit, and to enable us to say to our children when
    they ask us, mommy or daddy, what did you do in the great
    warming, to respond with pride: We led.
        Thank you very much.
        The Chairman.  Thank you, Mr. Pope.
        [The statement of Mr. Pope follows:]

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        The Chairman.  Next we are going to hear from Vice Admiral
    Dennis McGinn who served in the United States Navy for 35
    years, where he commanded aviation squadrons in the Coral Sea,
    the aircraft carrier USS Ranger in the Western Pacific and the
    Indian Ocean, and rose to become commander of the U.S. Third
    Fleet in the Pacific.
        In 2000 Admiral McGinn became the Pentagon's first deputy
    chief of Naval Operations, Warfare Requirements and Programs.
    Upon retirement he joined Battelle as Vice President for
    Strategic Planning. Welcome, Admiral. Whenever you are ready,
    please begin.

          STATEMENT OF VICE ADMIRAL DENNIS McGINN, USN, (RET)

        Admiral McGinn.  Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Mr.
    Sensenbrenner, members of the committee. It is an honor for me
    to appear along with my fellow witnesses at this inaugural
    hearing of this very, very important panel. I believe that our
    dependence on oil in general and, in particular, imported oil
    from unstable areas of the world does in fact constitute a
    national security threat and one that is growing every day.
        Our Nation uses 25 percent of the world oil supply on an
    annual basis. We have, a best estimate, about 3 percent of the
    oil reserves in the world. If we were to make a sudden
    discovery of a new oil reserve tomorrow and doubled that
    reserve to 6 percent, we wouldn't be much better off.
        So when we start looking for solutions that try to get us
    other sources of oil from domestic sources, we have got to
    recognize that it is only a very, very marginal improvement in
    the situation of our dependence on oil.
        If you consider that in October of this year our Nation's
    population passed 300 million, the world's population passed
    6.5 billion, and those numbers are going up. If you multiply
    those numbers by per-capita energy consumption, particularly in
    emerging areas of the world like China and India where they
    have a very understandable expectation of a higher quality of
    life and a higher economic outcome, it is not a sustainable
    situation for us to continue to use oil and hydrocarbon-based
    energy at the rate that we have been during this very
    successful age of oil that has brought us to today.
        Additionally, in addition to our concern from a national
    security perspective on dependence on foreign oil and our
    nonsustainable consumption rate of oil based against reserves,
    the production of the byproducts of oil, greenhouse gases, does
    in fact constitute a national security threat. It is one that
    we are seeing today in certain manifestations and it is one
    that I can guarantee will get greater and greater with each
    passing year. It is only a matter of time.
        Taken in combination, the fact that we have a national
    security threat due to oil dependence and the fact that we have
    a national security threat that exists today and will grow
    inevitably in coming years makes this a very, very great
    challenge for the American people. It is a challenge that has
    been described as one fitting a solution like the Apollo
    Program or the Manhattan Project or the New Deal. I believe
    that there are aspects of all of those programs that could be
    applied to meeting America's energy challenge and environmental
    challenge.
        But I think that we need to get started now and we need to
    do that in a very, very balanced way. There is no silver bullet
    solution. There is not any specific form of renewable energy
    that is going to lead us out of this dependence on oil. There
    is no energy-efficiency technology, taken in and of itself,
    that will suddenly reduce our greenhouse gas production
    nationally and globally.
        It is the right kind of technologies, the right kinds of
    solutions, taken in combination with the right kinds of
    national leadership and policy that will allow us to meet this
    challenge. And it isn't a challenge that I view negatively; it
    is a challenge that I think has tremendous potential for great
    outcomes.
        It isn't zero sum; if we solve our dependency problem, then
    we must lower our economic standard of living. If we suddenly
    reduce our emission of greenhouse gases, we must accept a
    reduction in our quality of life. It is in fact an opportunity,
    a challenge that creates enormous opportunities for our economy
    in producing different forms of energy and renewable, different
    technologies and different procedures for squeezing every bit
    of good economic output out of every unit of electric energy or
    liquid fuel for transportation, and it is a challenge that
    creates the opportunity for true global leadership.
        The United States has been very, very blessed by the age of
    oil. The age of oil is not sustainable. We can lead into the
    next age of clean and abundant energy which will solve enormous
    challenges not just in our own borders but throughout the
    world.
        Mr. Chairman, I would like to submit my written testimony
    for the record and I look forward to your questions.
        The Chairman.  Without objection, it will be included in
    the record. I thank you, Admiral, very much.
        [The statement of Admiral McGinn follows:]

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        The Chairman.  Now I turn to our final witness, James
    Woolsey, who was director of the Central Intelligence Agency
    from 1993 to 1995, a Rhodes Scholar. Mr. Woolsey is currently
    the co-chair of the Committee on Present Danger and serves on
    the National Commission on Energy Policy. He is one of
    America's most articulate voices regarding the toxic
    combination of oil and terrorism.
        Thank you for being with us. Mr. Woolsey, please begin.

                     STATEMENT OF R. JAMES WOOLSEY

        Mr. Woolsey. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It is an honor to be
    asked to be here today. We depend on oil for 97 percent of our
    transportation needs, Mr. Chairman, and oil contributes over 40
    percent of the global warming gas emissions that human beings
    put into the atmosphere from fossil fuels. These numbers are so
    large because the world uses approximately 1,000 barrels of oil
    a second and we use in this country approximately 250 barrels
    per second.
        The key here, I believe, is that what we need in the long
    term is a transportation fuel that is as secure as possible, as
    clean as possible in global warming as well as in other terms,
    and as inexpensive as possible. Today oil meets none of these
    three criteria. It is not just foreign oil, it is oil that
    doesn't meet these criteria.
        Oil is a strategic commodity because we depend upon it so
    much for transportation. In a sense, salt was a strategic
    commodity until a little over a century ago because there was
    no other real way to preserve meat, a major share of people's
    intake. Wars were fought, national strategies were developed
    until the late 19th century having to do with salt. Today salt
    is not a strategic commodity. No nation sways world events
    because it has salt mines.
        I think we have to strive for a similar path of decline,
    indeed destruction of oil as a strategic commodity; not
    destruction of oil itself, of course. Like salt, we will find
    lots of uses for it and will be using it for a long time. But
    it is this dependence for transportation that is the heart of
    our problem.
        Now national security requirements certainly, I think,
    dictate us moving away from oil for a number of the reasons
    that have been mentioned: two-thirds of the world's proven
    reserves being in the Persian Gulf area; al Qaeda attacks in
    Abcaiq can risk oil cutoffs; the royal succession in Saudi
    Arabia is going to be a problem in a few years; Iran's
    President is a part of a circle around Ayatollah Mesbah-Yazdi
    that is radical even by Iranian standards; and now six Sunni
    states have decided they need nuclear programs as well as Iran,
    since many of these states have huge reserves of oil and gas.
    One suspects that those nuclear programs, like Iran's, may not
    be limited to electricity generation.
        We borrow over $300 billion a year, nearly a billion
    dollars every calendar day to import oil, which weakens our
    economy and dollar. And if it does that to us, think what it
    must do for developing countries where debt is the central
    problem for economic development.
        The oil revenues that go to Saudi Arabia and other parts of
    the gulf are used, directly and indirectly, to spread Wahhabi--
    the Wahhabi version of Islam around the world. It is
    essentially the same ideology as that of al Qaeda. They and al
    Qaeda disagree only about who should be in charge.
        The fatwas of the Wahhabis are murderous, literally, with
    respect to the Shi'a, to Jews, to homosexuals and apostates,
    and they are horribly repressive with regard to everyone else
    including, particularly, women.
        So as we fund the dissemination of this ideology around the
    world, this is the only war the U.S. has ever fought in which
    we pay for both sides. And as Tom Friedman puts it, the price
    of oil and the path of freedom run in opposite directions.
    There is a good deal of academic learning on this, but one
    needs only to observe Mr. Ahmadinejad, Mr. Chavez, and Mr.
    Putin to see the consequences of that.
        Now, oil in transportation is not going to be particularly
    affected by other steps to reduce carbon emissions by carbon
    cap-and-trade or carbon taxes. That has only a tiny effect on
    oil's use, pennies' worth of effect, say, on the price of
    gasoline. There has to be another approach.
        People can have one set of views, I think quite logically,
    with respect to what you do about carbon going into the
    atmosphere from coal-fired power plants, but another is
    possible with respect to oil's use in transportation.
        I think what is interesting is that the steps we would want
    to take for moving away from oil in transportation for global
    warming reasons are essentially the same ones we want to take
    for purposes of moving away from oil dependence for strategic
    reasons. Indeed, there are a number of steps that can be
    implemented, and let me just say that renewable fuels of a
    number of kinds deserve support.
        Support is also deserved, I believe, for removing barriers
    to alternative fuels, and that has to do with making it
    possible for pumps to be put in at filling stations for
    flexible-fuel vehicles to be produced readily by Detroit and
    other automobile manufacturers, but especially now to move
    towards electricity. Plug-in hybrid gasoline electric vehicles
    are routinely now in their prototypes, dozens in California
    getting well over 100 miles of gallon of liquid fuel because
    one is running on off-peak overnight electricity for 20, 30, 40
    miles before one becomes a regular hybrid vehicle.
        What is often not understood is that because the automobile
    fleet in the United States has 20 times the energy that the
    electricity grid does and is utilized only 10 percent of the
    time, most all cars drive less than 4 hours a day, this creates
    a reserve of ability to fuel automobiles from off-peak
    overnight electricity at very low cost, approaching a penny a
    mile in many circumstances, and it also creates no need for new
    power plants.
        Pacific Northwest Laboratory has said there could be 85
    percent of the cars on the road that can be plug-in hybrids
    before you need any new power plants, so we are not talking
    about building new coal-fired power plants.
        With that, Mr. Chairman, I will stop. I see I have run
    over. Thank you.
        The Chairman.  Thank you, Mr. Woolsey, very much.
        [The statement of Mr. Woolsey follows:]

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        The Chairman. That completes the time for statements by our
    panel.
        Now we will turn to the question and answer period. The
    Chair recognizes himself for 5 minutes.
        Yesterday at the United Nations Security Council, the
    British Foreign Secretary, Margaret Beckett, said, I quote her,
    ``Climate change is an issue which threatens the peace and the
    security of the whole planet.''
        Would one of you take that and comment upon it? General
    Sullivan.
        General Sullivan. Mr. Chairman, I think what she is
    suggesting is essentially what our conclusions were; that is,
    that in regions of the world like Africa, many parts in Africa,
    climate change, drought; drought causes famine, causes
    governments to fail because they can't provide services for
    their populace, which creates the environment for nonstate
    actors to appear. It is a petri dish for terror and instability
    and obviously creates migration irrespective of borders.
    Nomadic people move to get water and food and so forth and so
    on, and they also move from south to north, from North Africa
    to Europe.
        And I think what she is getting at is what we talk about in
    our report. By the way, in this report we are not just talking
    about oil, petroleum, hydrocarbons, we are talking about
    drought, natural resources, all natural resources. So I see a
    direct link, as do my colleagues. Certainly her comment is well
    taken with regard to our report.
        The Chairman. Do any other of the panelists want to comment
    on that? Mr. Woolsey.
        Mr. Woolsey. Mr. Chairman, I would only add that much of
    the disagreement about the extent of climate change has to do
    with what scientists call positive feedback effects. It is sort
    of an unfortunate term because there is nothing positive about
    these effects.
        They are not modelable so they don't show up in most of the
    model calculations. If the models show the possibility over the
    next several decades of inches of sea level rise and a degree
    or so of centigrade of global warming, a lot of people look at
    what the models say and say well, that looks like it might be
    something we can manage. Even that will have some important
    effects.
        But these feedback effects that are not in the models such
    as, let's say, after 2 degrees increase the tundras start
    melting, the tundra has huge amounts of methane. It is 20 times
    worse as a global warming gas than carbon dioxide.
        So the release of methane in turn creates the release of
    more methane. Those effects are what lead to some of these
    predictions of meters of sea level rise and a number of degrees
    of increase. It is a matter of some uncertainty but there are
    data that suggest some of these things are at risk.
        The Chairman.  Let me ask one final question before my time
    expires. In 1977 the United States imported 47 percent of its
    oil, but we passed a law here and President Ford signed it in
    1975, that actually reduced our dependence back down to 27
    percent fuel economy standards for vehicles by 1986. We have
    had no new laws since then. We have the SUV exception. We are
    now up to 60 percent dependence upon imported oil. It goes up
    year after year, adding 65, 70, 75 percent.
        Could one of you speak to the national security
    implications of that ever-increasing percentage of oil which is
    imported?
        Mr. Pope. Let me respond by saying that actually you speak
    to the national security opportunity of getting back on the
    pathway we undertook in the 1970s. If we can improve the
    efficiency of the average vehicle by 4 percent a year, which in
    engineering terms is well within everybody's capacity, and if
    we simultaneously work seriously at enabling a substantial part
    of the petroleum fraction to be replaced by cellulosic ethanol,
    we will be in a situation in which, as Mr. Woolsey said, oil
    may still be an interesting commodity but it will not drive the
    world and we will have the freedom and flexibility to decide in
    our own national interest how deeply engaged we wish to be in
    places like the Persian Gulf, Venezuela and Nigeria. Right now
    we have no freedom of action.
        The Chairman.  Thank you. My time has expired. The Chair
    recognizes the gentleman from Wisconsin, Mr. Sensenbrenner.
        Mr. Sensenbrenner. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I think all of
    us in this room agree that oil dependency is bad and it has a
    lot of negative impact on our economy, on our national security
    and the like. So I guess the question is how to reduce the
    dependency on oil.
        I also think it is almost a given that the sign of a
    healthy economy is electricity consumption, which is one of the
    reasons why the Chinese are opening up a new coal-fired power
    plant about once a week, because their economy is expanding so
    rapidly.
        Now, to get us away from oil and to provide the electricity
    that we need both to run our economy as well as to transfer our
    transportation fuel mix, as Mr. Woolsey has eloquently
    explained--I guess I would like to ask all five panelists to
    give just a yes or no answer, since my time is limited--what
    about the rapid expansion of nuclear power plants in this
    country, because nuclear power plants do generate electricity
    and they emit no greenhouse gases. Good idea or bad one? I
    would like each of the five panelists to say yes or no.
        General Sullivan. As long as everybody understands that
    that is not in the report and you have asked me a personal
    question, I will give you a personal answer, Congressman. Yes.
        Mr. Sensenbrenner. Mr. Haass.
        Mr. Haass. You are not going to like my answer,
    Congressman. It is not whether it is a good idea or bad idea,
    it is whether it is a feasible idea. And I think there are
    fundamental questions about the feasibility. Give me 30 seconds
    here.
        We have 103 nuclear plants in the United States that are
    operational. Even with service----
        Mr. Sensenbrenner. My time is running out, sir.
        Mr. Haass. I will do it quickly.
        Mr. Sensenbrenner. It is my time, not yours. Yes or no?
        Mr. Haass. Not every question has a yes or no answer, sir.
        Mr. Sensenbrenner. You pass.
        Mr. Pope. With today's technology, no. We ought to see if
    we can find the technology that enables nuclear power to be
    both safe and competitive. Today it is neither.
        Mr. Sensenbrenner. Admiral McGinn.
        Admiral McGinn. Yes, provided we can do it with adequate
    levels of security and in an economic way. Every dollar that we
    spend----
        Mr. Sensenbrenner. Thank you.
        Mr. Woolsey.
        Mr. Woolsey. Nuclear power doesn't replace oil because only
    2 percent of our electricity comes from oil. Nuclear power is
    clean, which is good, but I would prefer an emphasis on
    renewables, frankly.
        Mr. Sensenbrenner. Second question is since the U.S. has
    got about a 200-year reserve of coal, how about clean coal as
    an electrical generating source? Yes or no, good idea?
        General Sullivan.
        General Sullivan. I pass.
        Mr. Sensenbrenner. Mr. Haass.
        Mr. Haass. Not until we can make it clean and not until we
    can capture it.
        Mr. Sensenbrenner. Thank you.
        Mr. Pope.
        Mr. Pope. Coal should be mined responsibly, burned cleanly,
    and its carbon stored safely.
        Mr. Sensenbrenner. Do I take that as a qualified yes?
        Mr. Pope. Qualified yes.
        Mr. Sensenbrenner.
        Mr. McGinn.
        Admiral McGinn. Clean coal for electrical production, yes.
    Coal for liquid, no.
        Mr. Sensenbrenner. Mr. Woolsey.
        Mr. Woolsey. I agree with my friend, Denny McGinn, and
    coal--the question is can you sequester the carbon affordably.
    You can capture it now with IGCC. If you can sequester it
    affordably, it is a reasonable path and the experiments are
    still being worked on.
        Mr. Sensenbrenner. Now I will make an observation in the
    time that I have left. This shows how difficult it is for
    policymakers to figure out a way to wean us from our dependency
    on oil in a way that does not wreck our economy. I think that
    this is really at the heart of the debate, because if we reduce
    the total supply of energy, the same thing is going to happen
    in the United States that has happened in Europe; jobs get
    outsourced to Third World countries where electric generating
    is cheaper. And if electricity is not affordable, then
    factories end up being closed for certain parts of the day, as
    was reported in one of the major newspapers that happened as a
    result of the cap-and-trade policy as it applied to The
    Netherlands.
        Thank you very much. I think you have kind of helped us to
    show at least how difficult this issue is. Nobody wants to
    wreck the economy. I yield back the balance of my time.
        Admiral McGinn. I would like to make the observation that
    the debate has to take place in increments greater than 5
    minutes, because we were all constrained in our answers by the
    rules of the committee.
        Mr. Sensenbrenner. Yes. I think that we are going to be
    doing a lot of debating on that, and I had 5 minutes. But both
    of those issues had to be on the table. I thank the Chair.
        The Chairman. The gentleman's time has expired. The
    gentleman from Oregon, Mr. Blumenauer, is recognized.
        Mr. Blumenauer. Which is why I saved my 3 minutes in terms
    of having the context.
        I would make an observation, with all due respect to our
    Ranking Member, that we are not going to advance the debate
    with yes or no answers. I think you have identified that in the
    course of your testimony here today. It is not yes or no. That
    is the mindset that has backed us into the situation that we
    are in today.
        I would further comment that the notion that electric
    consumption is a sign of a healthy economy, I think, is highly
    questionable. As we look at some of the other countries around
    the world that by any measure are strong economically and rival
    the United States, they do so with a fraction of our energy
    consumption on a per-capita basis or industrially.
        So the notion that we have to burn a lot of electricity to
    show that we are prosperous is, I think, sadly misguided and
    not supported by the facts.
        I had an opportunity Friday to spend a few minutes with
    Douglas Durst who prides himself, I think, as being the largest
    developer of green buildings in the country. I had made a
    reference that Portland had the largest green certified
    platinum lead building; and I said, not for long because he is
    opening the Bank of America Building on 42nd Avenue.
        Those green buildings are not being constructed by Mr.
    Durst, or in my community where Congresswoman Solis was kind
    enough to spend a day for me, a week ago today, where we have
    more green certified lead buildings than anyplace in the
    country. They are not being built because they are losers
    economically. They repay the 2 or 3 percent premium in a short
    period of time and the developers who are now going up and down
    the west coast and other places will tell you that they command
    a premium in rent because smart business people don't waste
    energy, and we are starting to do the same thing with water.
        So I am hopeful in the course of this discussion we can
    adjust our thinking. I thought, Mr. Woolsey, your point about
    this being the only war where we are financing both sides, and
    the testimony here gave, I think, great weight to the notion
    that this is an economic--this is a national security issue. It
    is also an opportunity for economic security.
        Even if the science was not compelling, which the
    consensus, I think, is these are risks that we should not be
    taking and, again, Congresswoman Solis and I had a
    conversation, maybe not as exciting as you had in Seattle, but
    business is rushing forward to take advantage of this.
        I am concerned about two things that weren't mentioned in
    the course of your testimony. One, we are talking about higher
    fuel efficiency. But there was--the same way that we need to
    talk about conservation of energy for electricity or for oil,
    we have not had a word about the trip that is not taken, about
    shorter trips, less frequent trips, being able to locate
    Federal facilities in places where it is a more efficient use,
    where people don't have to burn a gallon of gas to buy a gallon
    of milk.
        I am wondering if any of our witnesses would talk for a
    moment about more efficient transportation systems that aren't
    single-occupant vehicles spread all over the countryside. Does
    that enter into the thinking?
        Admiral McGinn. Yes, sir, it does. It goes beyond mass
    transportation systems. They are certainly a part of getting a
    more efficient economy and a more efficient quality of life. I
    think it goes even more, fundamentally, than that to community
    and regional: by using rail-enhanced development, for example,
    as I know Portland is a great example for the Nation in that
    regard, by reducing the distances between where people live and
    where people work by creating wonderful downtown neighborhoods,
    or by moving appropriate businesses to where people live.
        But the development path and development plans that the
    country embarks on in the future can have a tremendously
    beneficial effect on our energy consumption and our energy
    efficiency.
        Mr. Blumenauer. Mr. Chairman, I am going to lobby you to
    perhaps, as we do some field hearings around the country, to be
    able to look at what we have been doing in Portland to give
    people choices, not force them on bicycles or on streetcars or
    trolleys or buses or car pools, but give people choices, and
    not make illegal by antiquated zoning--which makes it illegal
    in too much of America for somebody who works in a drugstore to
    live in an apartment above it. I think it is worth
    consideration.
        The second question that I would put to the panel speaks to
    government leading by example. We are spending huge sums of
    money as the largest consumer of energy in the world. The
    United States Government is contributing to this, and not so
    much about rules and regulations and what-not for the rest of
    America, but the ability of the United States Government to say
    we are not going to lease or build anything that isn't lead
    certified by 2012; that we are not going to purchase any
    vehicles that do not meet our standards, and particularly for
    the Department of Defense, which is the--I know there is some
    great research that has been done.
        At our first organizational meeting I think I mentioned the
    fact, if I understand it correctly, an aircraft carrier gets 17
    feet to the gallon.
        Admiral McGinn. Those were the old fossil fuels.
        Mr. Blumenauer. Okay. Maybe Mr. Woolsey, Mr. Pope, if you
    have some thoughts about how the Federal Government might be
    able to jump-start this and be able to get some advantage out
    of the process.
        Mr. Woolsey. Congressman, I just chaired the Policy Panel
    for a Defense Science Board look at energy and defense, and
    there are a number of things that have come out of that and
    that can be done. One of the most important is to make it
    possible for military facilities in the U.S.--and also I think
    other places like hospitals and police stations--to be able to
    use locally generated electricity to replace what would come
    from the grid in case there is an attack on the grid or the
    grid just goes down by a tree branch falling, the way it did 3
    years ago for New York, New England, and eastern Canada.
        Most military facilities would be capable, not all, of
    slimming down their requirements by exactly the type of
    building efficiency steps you are talking about, fixing on
    which of those requirements are absolutely essential to
    carrying on the base's activities and then by using locally
    generated wind, solar, geothermal, others, to be able to
    operate for months rather than just days to hours, which is
    what one has with diesel generators.
        This is something that is of real interest in the Defense
    Department right now.
        Mr. Blumenauer. Mr. Pope, any comment on either of those?
        Mr. Pope. The key function the Federal Government plays in
    setting an example is to create a market. If people know, if
    entrepreneurs know there is a Federal market for a certain kind
    of high-efficiency glass, they can build those factories
    earlier than they can--they can demonstrate that they are cost
    competitive and then private builders can take advantage of
    them.
        The Federal Government should be the market creator for
    innovative new technologies of all kinds, inside and outside
    the Defense Department.
        Mr. Blumenauer. Thank you.
        The Chairman. The gentleman's time has expired. The
    gentleman from Arizona, Mr. Shadegg.
        Mr. Shadegg. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to thank all
    of you for your testimony. It has been very enlightening.
        Mr. Haass, let me begin with you. You made the point about
    our definition of energy security. I completely agree with that
    and the point about comprehensive approach. Obviously we have
    lots of alternatives, and looking at any one is ill advised.
        In your testimony you talked about diversification of oil
    supplies, increasing domestic production, clean-burning coal,
    expansion of the role of nuclear. You did mention that in your
    testimony, though I am a little bit in doubt now where you are
    on that issue.
        I guess I would like you to talk to me about what you
    believe are the right ways to look for diversified supplies
    here in the United States, and tell me what ones you are
    referring to and would support.
        Mr. Haass. Domestically in terms of, I think, coastal areas
    off limits, should not be off limits. I think there is some
    potential there, given new modern drilling technology. I think
    we should explore that.
        I think there are two areas that should come through loud
    and clear. One has been alluded to several times, which is
    doing something about replacing oil in the transportation
    sector. There are things that can and should be done in the
    near term.
        But the big long-term question on climate change is coal. A
    lot of this debate comes down to coal. That is where we have
    got to think about not--in terms of Congress and the Federal
    Government only licensing clean coal facilities now, and we
    have got to think about putting out enough money so we can
    figure out how to capture--more important, store, sequester the
    carbon.
        Right now this is a big idea. It has not been proven on
    anything like a commercial scale. That to me has got to be one
    of the priorities for the U.S. Government, is to seed an awful
    lot of experimentation and exploration so we find out the best
    way to do it as fast as we can learn it.
        Mr. Shadegg. One of the concerns I have, I heard a general
    opposition to coal gassification in this panel--that may not be
    a fair characterization--and yet I met over the break with a
    number of such people who believe, in the process of coal
    gassification, we can remove a lot of the carbon dioxide better
    than alternative uses of that coal.
        Admiral McGinn. I am very familiar with a project that is
    sponsored by the Department of Energy called Future Gen. Future
    Gen will produce a coal-fired near zero emission power plant in
    2012. The four sites that are potentially going to be the site
    for the first plants are two in Texas and two in Illinois, are
    chosen for two factors: their ability to access coal for fuel
    as well as the geological formations that lend themselves to
    carbon sequestration.
        There are seven regional projects sponsored by the
    Department of Energy in which carbon dioxide is actually being
    sequestered in deep wells, one of which is called Mountaineer,
    and it is being sponsored by American Electric Power as one of
    the utility companies.
        Mr. Shadegg. Time restrains you and me. One of my concerns
    about CO2 sequestration is it seems to me to be a
    difficult, inefficient process to lock it up permanently as
    opposed to using it in some other way. Would all of you agree
    that other alternative uses we ought to pursue include expanded
    use of hydroelectric power?
        Mr. Sullivan. If we can.
        General Sullivan. Sure. If hydroelectric power is
    available, I suppose it would be great. I am not sure the water
    is going to be available.
        Mr. Shadegg. We have higher technology to use the in-stream
    flow.
        Mr. Haass.
        Mr. Haass. Congressman, I support all of the renewables.
        Mr. Shadegg. Mr. Pope.
        Mr. Pope. In-stream flow and other low technologies, I mean
    low-impact technologies, are very desirable. How scalable they
    are, I don't know.
        Mr. Shadegg. Mr. McGinn.
        Admiral McGinn. Yes. In an environmentally responsible way,
    yes.
        Mr. Shadegg. Mr. Woolsey.
        Mr. Woolsey. Most of the big rivers that can be dammed have
    been dammed and one doesn't want to have any further impact on
    the environment by going that route. But a lot of the existing
    generators from dams are very inefficient, and one can get
    quite a few gigawatts of power out of modernizing the
    generation from existing hydroelectric plants.
        Mr. Shadegg. That takes me directly to an issue. In the
    Commerce Committee we have heard testimony on both the
    limitations on new energy imposed by our current new source
    review policies and by our transmission line setting policies.
    One of the witnesses testified that there is lots of wind power
    potentially in west Texas, but nobody there to consume it, and
    they can't the lines to get it out of that region.
        A number of executives of electric companies came in and
    testified that they could put in much more efficient turbines
    in dams or other plants, including coal and other fossil-fueled
    power plants, but new source review is causing them to find
    that economically unviable at this point in time.
        Would you all agree we ought to examine those policies? Mr.
    Woolsey.
        Mr. Woolsey. I would say absolutely. We have gone beyond
    NIMBY for many transmission lines, to BANANA, Build Absolutely
    Nothing Anywhere Near Anything. We have a lot of stranded
    energy out there, particularly on the Great Plains, huge
    amounts of wind. There may be other innovative ways to get the
    electricity out from that sort of power generation.
        But today it takes about 2 years to permit and construct a
    wind farm and it takes 7 to 12 years to permit and construct
    transmission lines, if you can make it happen.
        Mr. Shadegg.  My time has expired. Is there anybody that
    would disagree we should not, in looking at global warming,
    look at those policies?
        Mr. Pope. You should look at modernizing the grid. You have
    a grid that is outdated and cannot handle and distribute
    efficiently the electricity available to it because of the,
    frankly, poorly designed incentive structures the way the
    industry is deregulated. You need a modern grid as well as more
    grid.
        General Sullivan. Thirty percent of the power at Schofield
    Barracks for Army housing will come from photovoltaic cells,
    and the Army community will receive money back from the power
    department for that. It will go into the grid.
        The Chairman.  The gentleman's time has expired. The
    gentleman from Washington State, Mr. Inslee.
        Mr. Inslee. Thank you. Mr. McGinn, I was heartened by your
    comment about the need of something like a new Apollo Project.
    I just want to let you know that I am introducing a bill called
    the New Apollo Energy Project that I think will fit the bill of
    really inspiring the country as Kennedy did.
        I think we really are in a situation like we were in 1961,
    where we had this enormous technology potential ready to get
    tapped as long as we spark it and I hope we are going to spark
    it in the next couple years in Congress. My bill will do a
    whole host of things, a cap-and-trade system to drive
    investment into these new clean energy systems and so when you
    have photovoltaics on your roof, you get paid for it, your
    utility; green buildings standard so that we build buildings
    that are like the ones that Mr. Blumenauer talked about; a
    clean fuel standard so that when we adopt alternative fuels
    they really are from a global standpoint, that we are not going
    to another dirty fuel.
        Last but not least, significant increase in R&D. I was
    stunned; we have cut our R&D budget in energy by 60 percent
    since 1979. At a time where R&D in defense has gone up 10 or 15
    times, we have actually cut it by two-thirds. That is pathetic.
    We have got to increase it. So I was encouraged by your
    comment.
        I want to ask you about the electrification, Mr. McGinn,
    and coals to liquid. I am really encouraged by the
    electricification of our vehicles. I drove a plug-in hybrid, I
    think it was the first one up on the Hill, with 150 miles a
    gallon. It will be available commercially, goes 40 miles on
    plug-in, then runs on gasoline or flex fuel after that.
        You made a comment about coal to liquid, Mr. McGinn. I want
    to ask you about it. I am very high on alternative fuels.
    Electrification, cellulosic, ethanol, biodiesel, all seem to
    have significant savings in global warming gases of one
    dimension or another. Even using the grid today has about a 30
    percent increase if you do a plug-in hybrid because of the
    efficiency.
        Coal to liquid, I just saw an EPA report, coal to liquid
    would have 118 percent increase, increase in carbon dioxide per
    gallon compared to gasoline today; and if you do sequestration,
    if you do sequestration during the process you still have a 3
    percent increase in CO2 according to the EPA.
        Now that is a great concern to me to think we are going to
    start a whole new industry and end up going backwards on a
    global warming perspective. I noticed you mentioned when you
    were asked about this you said no. Is that the reason for your
    thoughts or are there others?
        Admiral McGinn. I think you have got it right, Congressman.
    It is a big assumption that we can produce liquid fuel from
    coal in a zero-emission environment. There is a lot of work
    that is ongoing to produce electricity from coal in a clean,
    near zero-emission type of plant. Even assuming we can do it,
    it is the actual chemistry of the liquid produced that has a
    high carbon content and therefore will negate a lot of the
    advantages that you would have. In fact, if you compare it to
    such alternative fuels as cellulosic ethanol, it isn't even in
    the same ball game.
        The other point you make is a very, very good one. As we
    make decisions about going in one technological direction or
    policy direction or another, there are opportunity costs. If we
    spend billions to produce coal-to-liquid plants, that is
    billions that could be used to increase our efficiency of our
    transportation sector, our electrical utility industry, that
    would extract much more gross domestic product for every unit
    of electricity than whatever you were going to get out of that
    coal-to-liquid investment.
        Mr. Inslee. To my friends from coal regions I am going to
    suggest we need to make our investment the smart place, which
    is in clean coal technology to generate electricity. If we do
    that, we have the capacity of reducing CO2 and,
    importantly, selling this technology to China. This Ramgen that
    has developed compression, they want to sell this to China. We
    all know we have to get China on board. This is an economic
    opportunity if we play our cards right. But if we do it wrong,
    we are going to end up going backwards both economically on
    CO2.
        So for those who have resisted dealing with global warming
    because they are afraid of China or because they are afraid of
    our ability to use coal, I would suggest we need to find a
    bipartisan way to move forward on clean coal research to
    electricity rather than coal to liquids. Anybody else want to
    comment?
        Admiral McGinn. I agree with that. Just one caveat is we
    need to make sure we understand what the full environmental
    impacts of coal extraction or coal mining are.
        Mr. Inslee. As Mr. Pope said, mined responsibly, burned
    cleanly, and forgot the third one.
        Mr. Pope. Carbon sequestered safely.
        The Chairman. The gentleman's time has expired.
        The gentleman from Oregon, Mr. Walden.
        Mr. Walden. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I want to
    thank the witnesses for your testimony today. It has been both
    enlightening and helpful in our efforts.
        I want to touch on a couple of things. One of the things I
    learned during the break regarding ethanol and biodiesel is the
    other side of the story, which is what to do with the wet
    distiller's grain or dry distiller's grain after you produce
    the ethanol. At a PowerPoint presentation at Pendleton Grain
    Growers a scientist there was talking to me about biodiesel.
    And pointed out that for a 100-million-gallon-a-year biodiesel
    plant you would need 900,000 tons of feedstock, using canola
    grown on a million acres, that would produce 540,000 tons of
    meal, for which it would take 570,000 cows to consume, and you
    would have 10, I believe million, 10 million gallons of
    glycerine as a byprod. That is just for a 100 million plant for
    biodiesel.
        This was one of the issues I know we looked at ethanol, was
    the wet distiller's grain, 4 to 7 days before it starts
    fermenting again. And there is this whole downside. I was down
    in Klamath Falls and a rancher said, let me tell you what
    ethanol has meant to me: $100,000 higher cost to finish my beef
    because of the price of corn.
        So I am intrigued by especially the military folks and all
    talking about the displacement that may occur in some of these
    nations as drought sets in. We see the same sort of potential,
    I think, as the price of food goes up. Wheat is now chasing
    corn up over $4 a bushel and even higher in some areas. I am
    just concerned about both what it takes to get the feedstock to
    grow our way into alternatives, as much as I support them, and
    then what you do with the byproduct.
        Mr. Woolsey. This is why it is important to move away from
    food-based feedstocks and toward cellulosic biomass. I serve on
    the National Energy Policy Commission and we did some pretty
    careful studies and calculations on this. If you move to
    something like switchgrass, the prairie grass that was out
    there when the buffalo were there, you can grow enough of that
    over the course of evolution--we looked at the next 20 years,
    and reasonable increases in yield, reasonable improvements in
    automobile mileage--you can grow enough switchgrass on 7
    percent of U.S. farmland, which is what is called the
    conversation reserve program, the soil bank. It is over half
    now planted in switchgrass. If you grew that just in
    switchgrass, that 30 million acres, turned that into cellulosic
    ethanol, you would be able to replace about half of the
    country's gasoline. Now, that assumes some modest growth in
    mileage along the lines of what the Chairman and others of you
    have suggested for automobile vehicles and assumes a modest
    increase in yield.
        Mr. Walden. Let me talk too about--I obviously represent 10
    national forests. Enormous amount of woody biomass. People are
    going to get sick of me talking about forests. You can use
    woody biomass as an ingredient. We have catastrophic fires.
        Mr. Chairman, I would like to put in this record--and I
    will get you a copy of this for that purpose--a publication
    from California Forests. I hope our committee members--I will
    make it available to them individually. A lot of activity going
    on in the State of California on forest management practices as
    a way to use forests as a carbon sink. I don't know, Mr. Haass,
    Mr. Woolsey.
        The Chairman.  Without objection we will include that in
    the record. If you have copies we will distribute it.
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        Mr. Haass. Congressman, I think you are onto a big topic.
    One of the cheapest, potentially, and certainly most available
    aspects or dimensions of a climate control policy has got to be
    to encourage forestation I----
        Mr. Walden. And proper management.
        Mr. Haass. Discourage deforestation. We should be looking
    at our aid policy, what sort of practices in places like
    Brazil, Indonesia, and the rest that we encourage. It is also
    going to have a big impact on whatever takes the place of
    Kyoto. One of the failings of the existing global approach is
    it couldn't figure out how to factor in essentially benefits or
    premiums for sinks. We need to think when we come up with a
    post-2012 global framework how is it we essentially incentivize
    and reward those.
        Mr. Walden. Let me interrupt because I will run out of time
    here. I wish we had hours to do this. I would be happy to meet
    with any of you individually. I also think we ought to go to a
    labeling system so consumers know when they buy a product what
    kind of carbon tradeoffs. Because I think American consumers,
    like most of us if not all of us on this panel, want to do the
    right thing.
        Mr. Haass. Home Depot would agree.
        Mr. Woolsey. Congressman, the point you made about the
    right kind of management of the forest being compatible with
    the production of fuel is exactly right. It is in the forest so
    you don't get bonfires and forest fires. Then that cellulosic
    biomass can either be used to produce ethanol, produce methanol
    if you gasify it, and used to produce renewable diesel in
    thermal processes. There are lots of ways to get at it. I think
    it is a very positive direction.
        The Chairman.  The gentleman's time has expired. The Chair
    recognizes the gentleman from Connecticut, Mr. Larson.
        Mr. Larson. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, before
    you start the clock on me, just a procedural question.
        The Chairman.  Hold on that clock.
        Mr. Larson. Given the time limitations that we have, would
    it be possible, especially for a number of the panelists who
    would like to respond further to an issue, that once posed a
    question that would require, as I am sure some of my questions
    will, further expansion, that they be able to submit to the
    committee further explanation on what their answer might be.
        I am not specifically referring to Mr. Haass, but I know he
    wanted an opportunity to be able to elaborate on what
    oftentimes in terms of yes and no questions become very
    problematic. You ought to have that opportunity for the
    committee, and I would like to be the beneficiary of that.
        The Chairman.  I think, without objection, we will allow
    each of the witnesses to elaborate on any one of these points
    that they would like to, and put it in the record without
    objection.
        I now will recognize the gentleman from Connecticut for 5
    minutes.
        Mr. Larson. With that I have four specific questions that I
    would like to ask. One of them deals with the Kyoto Accords.
    The other deals with the establishment of financial platforms.
    The third deals with hydrogen fuel technology and its
    relationship to nuclear. And the last deals with a carbon tax.
        Let me start with, first and foremost, with Kyoto. In the
    opinion of the panelists, if you were advising the Bush
    administration, should we have pulled out of the Kyoto Accords?
    I realize it is longer than a yes or no answer. If you could
    give me a yes or no answer.
        General Sullivan. It was not a part of our group, although
    what I certainly feel and I think what we feel as a group is we
    need to be participating in follow-on to Kyoto, any
    international organization that is addressing these issues.
        Mr. Larson. Mr. Haass.
        Mr. Haass. Kyoto itself, I would argue, is deeply flawed,
    but the United States ought to be a full participant in its
    follow-on.
        Mr. Larson. So you would have advised to follow up and stay
    with it.
        Mr. Haass. Pardon me?
        Mr. Larson. You would have advised the administration to
    stay with it.
        Mr. Haass. To continue talking about the issues but not to
    accept the specifics of the Kyoto framework.
        Mr. Pope. We went it alone on Kyoto, we were left alone in
    Iraq.
        Admiral McGinn. I think beyond Kyoto is where we need to
    go. There are some downsides to Kyoto that would limit its
    positive effect, but I think we definitely need to be leading
    in these issues and international forums and treaties.
        Mr. Woolsey. The cap-and-trade system has worked well for
    sulfur dioxide in the United States. The international market
    makes it a lot more complex, but either a carbon tax or carbon
    cap on trade along the lines of Kyoto, modernized and updated,
    is going to be essential to getting at coal's contribution to
    global balance warming initiatives.
        Mr. Larson. Are the Kyoto Accords and pulling away from the
    nuclear testimony ban treaties and the whole notion of a policy
    of unilateralism a wise position for the country to continue to
    follow, especially as relates to national security? Start with
    you Mr. Woolsey.
        Mr. Woolsey. Well, it is an intricate question,
    Congressman. Let me say that moving to nuclear power as an
    alternative to coal internationally creates huge problems,
    because the international arms control regime for all of this
    doesn't work. It doesn't bar countries from getting into the
    fuel cycle. And as a result, we could handle substituting for
    coal with nuclear power in the United States if we could ever
    figure out where to store waste, politically. But from the
    point of the view of the world moving toward nuclear power, we
    would have to have a completely different kind of international
    treaty regime than we have now in order to keep that from
    adding to proliferation.
        Mr. Larson. Admiral.
        Admiral McGinn. I agree with Mr. Woolsey.
        Mr. Pope. So do I.
        Mr. Larson. Mr. Haass.
        Mr. Haass. Global problems require global solutions.
    Climate change is one of the quintessential global problems. We
    are going to have to be involved in it, in part if we want
    others like China and India to be full participants as well.
        Mr. Larson. General.
        General Sullivan. Mr. Congressman, I served during the Cold
    War. The bulk of my time in the Army was during the Cold War.
    This Congress spent billions, trillions, on the Cold War. We
    were able to succeed, however you define success. That was a
    conflict which we managed.
        In my view we are involved in an issue here, you are
    discussing here where we could have a climate change or any
    number of things happen, and I think we need to have an effort
    which is equally as global and serious here in the United
    States. I believe that the security of the United States is at
    risk on some of these issues.
        Mr. Larson. Because my time is about to run out, two-part
    question with regard to both financial platforms--several of
    which have been discussed--in terms of the standards that are
    going to be needed, and where is the funding going to come
    from, and what kind of incentives either through the tax base
    that would inspire entrepreneurialism, as Mr. Inslee talked
    about, or in the article that the Chairman started at the very
    start of this, referring to Thomas Friedman, after he went
    through a very lengthy article concludes by saying this,
    essentially; that if we are not willing to focus on some kind
    of carbon-related tax that directly provides the fencing-off of
    dollars that will go to directly assist the goals that many of
    you have outlined from a national security perspective, et
    cetera, we will not be able to move forward. It is just all
    folly and discussion.
        Your comments.
        Mr. Haass. There is going to have to be--if there is going
    to be a global approach here--either a carbon tax or a cap-and-
    trade system or some hybrid involving the two, and the good
    news is there is 4 years or so to work that out on a
    multilateral basis. But first we, ourselves, the United States,
    I think also have to figure out what we are prepared to
    support.
        Mr. Pope. You can do this either by taxing carbon or by
    selling the permits in a cap-and-auction system. Either one
    generates enormous revenues by getting people to stop doing bad
    things, and enables you to lift taxes which are discouraging
    people from doing good things like employing people.
        Mr. Woolsey. A carbon cap-and-trade is essential, or a
    carbon tax or some combination, but it will not solve the oil
    problem. Oil is over 40 percent of the world's emissions of
    carbon, and you do not affect oil substantially at all, and
    especially because we only make 2 percent of our electricity
    from oil today. So oil is a separate issue. One has to deal
    with it separately. Carbon cap-and-trade won't solve it.
        Admiral McGinn. Carbon tax or cap-and-trade is very much
    needed. Take a look at the Chicago carbon exchange for the
    marketplace dynamics. The marketplace and industry are looking
    to the United States Government for some leadership in this
    regard. They want to get out of the uncertainty and get on with
    deploying the right kind of technology and process.
        The Chairman.  General Sullivan, do you want to have the
    last word on that?
        The gentleman's time has expired. The gentlelady from
    Michigan, Mrs. Miller.
        Mrs. Miller.  Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I just
    think this has been a fascinating discussion and a very, very
    interesting and challenging issue. And I am really very hopeful
    of the work that can come out of this committee with the kinds
    of questions that have been asked. And, again, in full
    disclosure here, I do live in southeast Michigan, and I
    represent the domestic auto industry in a very big way. It is
    literally our lifeblood there in Michigan, and we do feel
    sometimes as though we are under attack. And I guess what I
    want to say here is that we want to be partners, not
    adversaries, in getting to where we all want to be.
        And I would mention here, as has been mentioned by many of
    the witnesses, about 90 percent of all of the transportation
    modes are because of our reliance on oil, whether that is cars
    or vehicles or rail or aviation. And if you look around the
    globe and think about how some of the other nations are dealing
    with the challenge of climate change or their energy needs--I
    mean you have in Brazil, which is always highly touted about
    them using such a high percentage of ethanol--and then you can
    go over to Europe and it is interesting to note at this time,
    they still have voluntary mandates--they have no mandates, it
    is voluntary on their vehicles there. And even though they have
    small vehicles, in a lot of ways there are incentives, of
    course, because of their very high tax on gasoline, et cetera.
    Drive by any of those beautiful buildings and they are all
    various shades of gray because of all the emissions that have
    happened in Europe. And, in fact, what they are doing in Europe
    is really focusing on aviation as a huge part of climate
    change, although that is only about 3 percent, they will tell
    you, of what is happening in regards to pollution.
        They are now talking about emissions trading and everything
    else for aviation for all of the links, and I am not quite sure
    how all of that is going to work. But I would say this: There
    has been a lot of talk about utilizing new technologies, et
    cetera, how the government could help with hydroelectric, how
    the government could help with coal, better clean-burning coal,
    et cetera. And I am just wondering whether or not, when you
    look at an industry like the domestic auto industry that spends
    probably more on R&D than any other industry in the nation, and
    yet we are under the microscope again to continue to do a
    number of things, do any of you have any comment, or do you
    think that the Federal Government has any role to play in
    assisting the domestic auto industry with R&D for various types
    of very creative kinds of things that they are coming out with
    now? You can think about the Chevy Volt, the plug-in Chevy Volt
    that was just showcased at the North American International
    Auto Show, or the Ford edge, or some of these different kinds
    of----
        In other words I would say this: When you look at, for
    instance, lithium ion batteries, and we see that the Japanese
    are about to have a corner on that market, and why is that?
    They are being assisted by their government. Is there any role
    for the Federal Government to assist the domestic auto
    industry, which by any definition is absolutely struggling now?
        Again, we want to be proactive about it. I think we are.
    And I guess I would also like to comment, again, Mr. Chairman,
    as we are thinking about field hearings, that I would like us
    to consider coming to Detroit.
        Mr. Pope.  Let me respond to that by saying that I believe
    that if we want to enable the American auto industry to be a
    viable vibrant partner in the future, we need Federal
    assistance, and we need a national compact between the Federal
    Government and the auto industry. We don't just need help with
    R&D. The auto industry actually needs help to accelerate the
    turnover of old infrastructure.
        The American auto industry faces much higher interest rates
    than its foreign competitors. The American auto industry has
    very serious legacy costs, which Germany and Japan do not have.
    And we need to cut a bargain in which the auto industry commits
    to help the Nation solve its global warming and oil dependence
    problems and the Nation commits to help the auto industry
    modernize and become competitive if we are serious about having
    an American auto industry, and I think we have an obligation to
    do so.
        Mr. Woolsey.  Congresswoman, I think this is a very
    important subject, and I believe that there is definitely a
    Federal role, but the Federal Government has not done this well
    in the past. One thing it has done, for example, for the last
    number of years, is encourage, with a great deal of resources,
    hydrogen fuel cells for family automobiles. This is, as far as
    I am concerned, one of the most expensive, most wasteful, and
    least desirable innovations in transportation in a long time.
    Not only to make this work does one have to bring the cost of
    fuel cells down by a factor of 40 to 50, and one would have to
    figure out a way to have a nationwide distribution system that
    one former Republican Secretary of Energy told me would be at
    least a trillion dollars' worth of family fueling stations, but
    one has to get away from the problem that by changing from
    natural gas to hydrogen, one loses about a third of the value
    of the energy, and by changing from electricity to hydrogen
    back to electricity again, one loses about three-fourths of the
    energy. One can put the electricity in the car in the first
    place as a plug-in hybrid, as you said, or one can put the
    natural gas in the bus in the first place.
        So for the Federal Government to get into something and say
    this is the solution, this is the single solution, its history
    has not been good. I think it would have to be something like
    Sima Tech, which changed very much for the better our ability
    to produce and manufacture computer chips in this country for
    things like battery technology.
        The Chairman.  The gentlelady's time has expired. The
    gentlelady from South Dakota, Ms. Herseth.
        Ms. Herseth.  Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
        And I appreciate the written testimony you have submitted.
    As I have reviewed that, some of you have talked a bit about
    corn-derived ethanol. Mr. Woolsey, you mentioned some of the
    limitations of corn-derived ethanol.
        I represent the State of South Dakota, a leader in that
    area. We wouldn't be where we are today with the advantage of a
    potential for cellulosic ethanol without the advancements,
    before a market was truly created in the Energy Policy Act of
    2005 for renewable fuel standards, and what we are able to
    accomplish and the types of companies that have evolved as
    entrepreneurs and innovators to advance cellulosic ethanol
    production.
        I think when we talk about the geopolitical implications of
    warming and climate change in each of the areas where all of
    you have worked and the life experiences you bring to the table
    today, I would imagine that there probably wouldn't be a lot of
    disagreement about the relative stability and economic
    prosperity of a country based on the state of its agriculture
    sector.
        We see how Saddam Hussein has devastated over time Iraq's
    irrigation system, other areas of its agriculture. We know what
    President Karzai is dealing with in trying to move farmers in
    southern Afghanistan to plant something other than poppy.
        So when we look at our objectives of energy independence
    and addressing carbon emissions, I think agriculture, not just
    American agriculture but agriculture across the board globally,
    really presents us with part of a significant solution. And I
    am just wondering if any of you could comment on whether it is
    renewable fuels, whether it is wind energy.
        South Dakota has a wealth of wind energy but the problem is
    transmission. Where you see our policy--our domestic policy and
    facilitating the growth of renewables for our domestic energy
    needs, but also the sharing agreements, perhaps with India and
    China and with others, so that we don't stifle the economic
    growth that some of those countries have faced at the same time
    they are grappling with significant problems in rural parts of
    their countries because of the migration to cities.
        Mr. Woolsey.  I think the renewable technologies you are
    talking about, particularly wind and, increasingly, solar, with
    Thin Film Solar and Nanosolar the costs are going to come down,
    and that is a way for China and everybody to grow without
    negatively impacting the environment.
        And from the point of view of rural prosperity in the
    United States, if we replaced only one-quarter of our oil
    imports with domestically generated energy--so that is, let's
    say, about 80 million barrels--if we replaced that, we would
    create something like 800,000 jobs, most of them in rural
    America, and the $80 billion that was net farm income last year
    would effectively be doubled. And that is just replacing a
    quarter of our oil imports with domestically generated energy.
    This could mean very substantial prosperity for rural America.
        Mr. Pope.  Let me speak to India, because India is still a
    nation, the majority of whose population is still rural. It
    makes absolutely no economic sense to electrify India by
    stringing wires between villages from central station power
    plants. It is nuts. India could electrify much more efficiently
    and much more cleanly if it had available to it the whole array
    of biomass, solar, and wind technologies suitable for small-
    scale village deployment. If the United States would lead the
    way in developing those technologies, we could have a
    phenomenal new industry, and we could be the world leader in
    that industry.
        Admiral McGinn.  I would like to add, the American farmer
    has a key role to play in meeting this energy challenge. We
    need to be careful, though, in trying to solve one problem--
    energy dependence, for example, oil dependence--that we are not
    creating another by introducing inefficiencies of using food
    crops to produce fuel. We need to keep our American
    agricultural economy very much informed by the technology that
    is coming out in terms of crop yield as well as the kinds of
    crops that lend themselves more easily to the process of
    creating a bio-based fuel.
        Ms. Herseth.  General Sullivan.
        General Sullivan.  I concur. This is all interrelated. And
    indeed some of our exports are feeding people who are living in
    countries without a robust agricultural society, and they need
    foodstuffs, and many of those foodstuffs come from the United
    States. So, you know, it is all interrelated. It is a very
    complex equation, and before we rush off, I think, on some of
    these issues, we need to be careful.
        Ms. Herseth.  And I don't disagree with the caution there.
    Although the alternative argument that I will put out is, one
    of the concerns that some developing countries have had with
    the state of their agriculture is that the United States and
    other countries, because of our technology and our high yields
    and our production, have actually been dumping commodities on
    the export market at a loss. It is not good for our farmers. It
    is not good for farmers in developing countries.
        So it is actually the more we use some of those crops for
    value-added fuel production, as well as environmentally
    friendly livestock production with anaerobic digesters that are
    a fully integrated system, that this actually could help as it
    relates to the global agricultural environment and give some
    producers in developing countries an opportunity to get a fair
    price for their commodity, if we are not dumping some of our
    surplus out onto the export market.
        Another question if I might, and I thank you for those
    responses. But I do want to move just quickly, before my time
    is up, to the issue of capturing--carbon capturing
    sequestration.
        Earlier today I was meeting with the CEO of the Southern
    Company and talking about nuclear energy and what happened in
    France and Japan of using the reprocess of spent fuel and
    reprocessing that spent fuel, whereas we made a decision back
    in the 1970s to store it rather than to reprocess it. So when
    carbon--when CO2 is captured in electricity
    generation, for example, what can be done with it besides just
    pumping it back into the ground, sequestering it? Are there
    other potential industrial uses of CO2? And is there
    any way to further process CO2 so that it is no
    longer posing an environmental threat?
        In other words, is there potential in technology beyond
    sequestration that we should be more fully evaluating based on
    what may be happening elsewhere?
        Mr. Woolsey.  There are, Congresswoman. One of the more
    interesting sets of developments has to do with algae that eat
    CO2 and can be used to produce lipids to be turned
    into something very much like biodiesel. There is some work on
    that going on up at MIT, I think, now. Most people believe the
    volumes of CO2 that would be produced if you
    continue to use carbon--use coal for electricity production,
    though, is going to require a relatively cheaper way than we
    have now of sequestering the carbon in the deep saline aquifers
    a mile or two down in the earth. At those depths, the
    CO2 becomes liquid and can dissolve into saltwater.
    It is not entirely clear that that is foolproof from the point
    of view of ever getting out. But to a number of scientists I
    have talked to, it looks good. The question really is the
    expense.
        The Chairman.  The gentlelady's time has expired. The Chair
    recognizes the gentleman from Oklahoma, Mr. Sullivan.
        Mr. Sullivan of Oklahoma. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I again
    appreciate the panelists coming today, and I just have a
    different question for each of you. And I will start with
    General Sullivan. I like your name too.
        General Sullivan, in order to make the U.S. less vulnerable
    to climate change, should Federal and State governments
    encourage building new refineries in different geographical
    locations? You know, I think Katrina kind of underscored the
    fact that we may need to do this with a lot of the refining
    capacity down there.
        General Sullivan. Well that is not an area that our study
    group looked at. I would, just for what it is worth, it seems
    to me that our refinery base is way outdated and we are in
    danger of real problems. But that is a subject that I am not
    prepared to address. Based on our report--that is just an
    observation on my part--technology is way outdated, and,
    frankly, we are very vulnerable.
        Mr. Sullivan of Oklahoma. I agree. We haven't built one or
    expanded one in many, many decades.
        Mr. Haass, I have a question for you. In your testimony you
    say that another way to increase diversification of supply is
    to increase domestic production. Do you support opening the
    Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, ANWR, for domestic production
    of oil? And also what about the Outer Continental Shelf?
        Mr. Haass.  Congressman, I would support opening up coastal
    areas. I would be comfortable in opening up ANWR. I think new
    drilling technology is far more efficient. It is also far more
    reliable. The only caveat I would say is many of the
    proponents--I am not suggesting this in your case--but many of
    the proponents who are doing just this exaggerate the
    consequences for U.S. energy security. It will not have a
    transformational or fundamental effect on our overall energy
    security picture. I think it is important that we do it both
    substantively and symbolically but we shouldn't exaggerate the
    likely results.
        Mr. Sullivan of Oklahoma. Okay. And Mr. Pope, the U.S. will
    be using coal for its electric generation for the foreseeable
    future. Thus, to decrease CO2 emissions, the U.S.
    must develop carbon sequester technology. However, this
    technology is not available today on the commercial side.
    Therefore, what technology, if any, would we replace the coal-
    generated electricity currently produced?
        Mr. Pope. Well, I don't think we are in a situation at the
    moment where we can or should shut down our existing coal-fired
    capacity. We need to replace it over time, and gradually. It
    would be economically quite silly to try to shut it all down.
    We don't favor that. In the short term we believe there are
    enormous opportunities to make our own electricity use more
    efficient, to develop renewables, and to do the research in
    carbon sequestration to determine whether or not it pencils
    out.
        I think it will work out. I don't know whether it will
    pencil out. But our studies show that we could meet all of our
    projected electricity needs between now and 2030--without using
    any new coal-fired capacity, without in fact using any new gas-
    fired or nuclear capacity, although we are likely to have more
    of those--just by deploying existing efficiency and renewables
    within today's price range. So we believe the numbers are there
    to solve the problem between now and 2030, which we also
    believe will give us time to develop the new technology we will
    then need.
        Mr. Sullivan of Oklahoma. Thank you.
        And Vice Admiral, you know the Navy has had great success
    with nuclear power as a fuel source. You did comment on it a
    little while ago, about you thought it was good, safe, and some
    other issues that you discussed. How do you see that playing
    out? What is it going to take for us to embrace that more? And
    do you think we can do it, have the facilities that--and
    environmentally safe and also safe for citizens in this
    country?
        Admiral McGinn. I think the challenge of increasing or
    revitalizing our nuclear power industry lies along the security
    concern, the waste concern, what do we do with the waste? We
    have wet waste building up with our existing legacy plants now,
    yet we can't seem to come to a national consensus on how to
    treat that for the long term. There is the money part of it.
    How much does it cost, real costs to design, build, deploy and
    produce nuclear-powered energy versus other sources that may be
    more economically viable? And I think that that is a key
    question that has to be answered before we go full bore ahead.
        Mr. Sullivan of Oklahoma. Thank you.
        And Mr. Woolsey, global warming is a global problem that
    requires global solutions. How do you suggest that we go about
    getting China and India to actively participate in reducing
    carbon emissions?
        Mr. Woolsey. This is the----
        The Chairman. Please answer the question.
        Mr. Woolsey. This is an issue in which we have everything
    to gain, I think, by close cooperation with both India and
    China. We still are the seat of much of the innovation in these
    areas such as solar and wind and geothermal. And I think that--
    and biomass transportation fuels.
        We have to understand that China and India want to
    economically, and they need to. From the point of view of their
    own internal stability, it is in our interest for China to be
    economically prosperous and stable. But we really need to work
    with them and develop the technology and share it with them and
    market it, that will help them do that without putting a lot of
    carbon into the atmosphere.
        And there is a certain urgency here because they are
    putting out now, I think the last time I saw, a couple coal-
    fired plants a week. So we really need to put on the fast track
    our work on these renewables and renewable fuels, and help them
    move away from oil and help them move away from the dirtier
    forms of coal.
        Mr. Sullivan of Oklahoma. Thank you, sir. I thank the
    gentleman.
        The Chairman. The gentleman's time has expired. The
    gentleman from Missouri, Mr. Cleaver.
        Mr. Cleaver. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
        Let me first of all speak with you, General Sullivan. You
    mentioned at the beginning of your comments that you went into
    this process as somewhat of a skeptic. And my interest was
    piqued because I am wondering if there was some kind of
    defining moment, some defining piece of information you
    received that caused you to want to pursue the report that is
    now being discussed, hopefully all over the country. And I have
    a follow-up from that.
        General Sullivan. That is a terrific question because I
    don't think I am unique in this group, in that none of us--
    there are a couple who are probably more technically qualified
    than the rest of us, but most of us are essentially soldiers,
    sailors, airmen and marines, without any particular technical
    skills in many of the areas you are talking about here.
        I happen to have grown up in the Northeast, and I was in
    Vermont where in January it normally requires about four layers
    of clothes and a stocking cap. And believe it or not, the sap
    had not stopped running, which was not good for the maple syrup
    industry. And then I discovered as a result of this study that
    in addition to that, many kinds of fish that I had fished for
    off of Cape Cod in Massachusetts I no longer could buy in
    restaurants around the United States, and one reason admittedly
    was overfishing.
        Another reason is plankton reduction, which may sound like
    a silly thing for an Army guy to be talking about, but it is a
    fact. And the maple tree is in fact dying out in New England.
    And a lot of those things came right home to me. And I think
    once I started getting interested in this, why is all of this
    happening, it became apparent that, number one--first of all I
    am not a scientist, as I said, and I didn't become one--but I
    looked at what I saw, and I saw the trends. And I said, you
    know, in my former life, I never had 100 percent certainty, and
    if I stuck around waiting for people to give me 100 percent
    certainty, I would get killed waiting for it. So if you want to
    know what my epiphany was, there it was. And it became very
    local, and I didn't like what I saw. And I don't like what I am
    seeing and I think it has huge implications for us, all of us.
        Mr. Cleaver. You ought to write an op-ed piece just
    describing what you just said. I think it would be very helpful
    because I have heard all kinds of reasons of why this issue has
    surfaced. I heard someone on a TV talk show say that this was a
    conspiracy of liberals to get money to college professors. And
    I mean--and that is, I thought, one of the more intelligent
    analyses.
        But as a military--some of you, those of you who are
    military, let's assume that for the most part this is just hype
    and that there is only a 6 percent chance that the scientists
    are correct. How many people in the military do you think would
    give their soldiers a gun and tell them that there is one
    bullet, so you only have a 6 percent chance of blowing your
    brains out if you pull the trigger? How many volunteers do you
    think you would get for that? Thank you.
        The point I am trying to make is that even if there is a
    low percentage that this is some hype, isn't it worth the
    effort not to take that 6 percent chance on doing enormous
    damage to this world that we have inherited?
        General Sullivan. Mr. Congressman, you know, what we were
    really looking at, and it has been stated here, is threat
    multipliers. It is a threat multiplier. And Somalia is probably
    the case in point. I was the Chief of Staff of the Army during
    the Somalia episode where we lost 19 men, they all happened to
    be men. But that is hard. The Somalia issue is related to the
    issue that we are talking about here. It was drought. It was
    drought that caused the original problem. Drought and a lack of
    food. The instability that was created by drought caused the
    warlords to try to control the food that was coming in from
    nongovernmental agencies, to include the United States and the
    U.N., and conflict erupted and people started dying because the
    warlords were controlling the food and they were giving it to
    their tribes. Migration, where we see Somalis moving into Kenya
    and Ethiopia, they couldn't control that migration. One thing
    led to another. The same thing is what is driving Darfur, and
    there has to be some recognition that these issues are, at the
    heart, environmentally related.
        Mr. Woolsey. Congressman, your percentage mention of 6
    percent makes a very solid point, which is that we insure
    against a lot of things in this life that we don't think there
    is an extremely high probability that are going to occur, like
    lightning striking our homes. And the scientific consensus on
    global warming seems to me to be quite substantial now with
    some effect. There is some question to the degree, but the
    consequences are so awful if we don't--if we don't do
    something, that I very much agree with your analogy. And as a
    matter of fact, Thomas Shelling, Nobel Prize winner in
    economics, a few months ago had an op-ed in The Wall Street
    Journal making exactly that point. This is like insurance.
        So I think that is really a very key insight into all this.
    And the key thing for the insurance is that although we have to
    pay a premium with respect to coal and carbon, that might, you
    know, reduce our own consumption or reduce GDP, that happens
    all the time when we buy insurance for the family. But with
    respect to oil, essentially there is no premium because the
    steps we want to make by moving toward renewables and moving
    toward electricity use are the same steps you would want to
    take if you were taking this from the point of view of purely
    national security or any of a number of other--rural
    prosperity, any of a number of other desirable objectives.
        So with respect to oil, people don't even have to believe
    in global warming if they don't want to. I think they are going
    to be driven to doing the same things for a whole host of other
    reasons.
        With respect to coal, they really do need to face that they
    are going to have to pay some kind of a premium, but I think it
    is certainly a justifiable premium, given how disastrous the
    situation could be.
        Mr. Pope. I think, Congressman, we have moved past the
    insurance era. A decade ago we were buying insurance. We are
    now in a situation where the wastebasket is on fire and we are
    sitting around the dining room saying, well, should we do
    anything about it? Well, maybe it will put itself out. Well,
    maybe it will, but maybe it won't. Maybe we ought to get a fire
    extinguisher.
        Mr. Haass. If I could take 30 seconds. It is not something
    that--in many cases we don't have to worry about cost, because
    we can do a lot of what needs doing without incurring an
    economic cost. Indeed, one of the few areas we made progress in
    over the last 10 years has been measures of energy intensity.
        Essentially in the American economy what sort of GDP output
    are we getting for a unit of energy input? We are making
    progress. So actually, it was an area where I take exception to
    what Mr. Sensenbrenner said before. It is no longer a measure
    of a successful economy where electricity consumption or
    production is going up. What we have now shown, increasingly,
    is that we can detach economic performance and economic success
    from greater energy use. That is the great success here, which
    is why over time I don't think you need to sell this again as a
    cost worth paying. If we get it right, we can actually do this
    in ways that make financial sense.
        The Chairman. The gentleman's time has expired.
        Mr. Cleaver. Thank you.
        The Chairman. The gentlelady from Tennessee, Mrs.
    Blackburn.
        Mrs. Blackburn. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
        And, Mr. Haass, I am going to come to you. I could tell you
    were wanting to add a little bit more as my good colleague was
    asking about floods and droughts and crop failures. And the
    IPCC report that is out reported that many of these disasters
    already occur from time to time, whether or not global warming
    plays a role.
        So let's talk about this. And shouldn't the disasters, such
    as floods and droughts and crop failures and diseases be faced
    directly, regardless of global warming?
        And then the other part of this question in this report,
    many of our leading economists and scientists have stated that
    these countries need to prioritize funding to deal with some of
    these disasters in health, water, education, hunger, and
    prioritize that first before dealing with climate change or
    global warming. Do you want to go ahead and respond?
        Mr. Haass. I am a great believer that developing countries,
    like anyone else, need to prioritize. But some of those
    choices, it would seem to me, would be false. If we want
    countries--say in Africa--would face a large part of the
    developmental challenge. Intelligent land use, intelligent
    water use are part and parcel of a fundamentally successful
    development strategy. They don't have the luxury of wasting
    units of energy. They need high energy efficiency, particularly
    countries which aren't blessed, like to some extent may be
    cursed, but don't have large amounts of domestic energy. If
    they have to import it, it will simply exacerbate the problems
    they face.
        So rather than seeing these necessarily as tradeoffs,
    Congresswoman, I would suggest in many situations what you are
    essentially arguing for is a comprehensive developmental
    strategy that then involves energy efficiency, intelligent land
    use, intelligent water use and so forth.
        Mrs. Blackburn. One of the things that I think has not been
    lost on any of us this morning is that you all seem to be in
    agreement that there is no silver bullet in addressing the
    situation; that whatever we do, it is going to be a mix. Part
    of you like nuclear, part of you don't.
        TVA is in my district. Of course they are looking at moving
    up to 40 percent of their power generation to nuclear. Some of
    you like the coal to liquid, some of you don't. And some of you
    think that that is going to be an option, some of you don't.
    And I think that it points out why we do need to do some things
    that are going to be comprehensive in nature, that are going to
    take some time and are going to require some innovation.
        And before I turn my time back, I think, Mr. Pope, I will
    come to you on this. Let's talk a little bit about ethanol. And
    you may have addressed this while I was out of the room for a
    meeting. Ethanol does in fact emit more VOCs than gasoline?
        Mr. Pope. Yes, it does.
        Mrs. Blackburn. It does. And don't the VOCs increase smog
    and affect human and animal health more than the gasoline
    emissions?
        Mr. Pope. Well, there are some issues with ethanol in terms
    of air quality. They can be managed with vehicle design. We are
    going to need to redesign a system. If we are going to move, as
    I believe we should and I believe we probably will, to a system
    in which we have a mixture of petroleum-based fuels and
    alcohol-based fuels, we are going to have to redesign system
    components and pollution to deal with that. I believe it is
    manageable. But I don't believe ethanol is the silver bullet
    either. What she said is very important. We are going to need
    to do a number of things and I think ethanol will be one of
    them.
        Mr. Woolsey. Congresswoman, those emissions vary with the
    mixture between ethanol and gasoline. One of the reasons many
    environmental groups have come to support E85, 85 percent
    ethanol, but have not been particularly enthusiastic about
    lower levels of the mixture, is when you get up to that
    substantial share, ethanol does not, the mixture, E85 does not
    emit worse than gasoline. And in any case, one is replacing oil
    with ethanol if one manages the emissions properly. And that in
    turn means that you are not putting other things into the
    atmosphere, such as the so-called aromatics, benzene, toluene,
    xylene, which are extremely carcinogenic and which are present
    in our gasoline today.
        So it does have to be managed. One can't just randomly mix
    wherever one wants. But there is a way to go at this and move
    toward not only ethanol, butanol, renewable diesel and others
    of these renewable fuels without having these negative
    environmental impacts.
        Mrs. Blackburn. Thank you. I yield back.
        The Chairman. The gentlelady's time has expired. The
    gentleman from New York, Mr. Hall.
        Mr. Hall. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
        And thank you all on our illustrious panel. I am sorry I
    missed so much of your spoken testimony, but I did read it last
    night, and it is very informative.
        Just quickly, I want to just comment on the remarks that
    were made by Mr. Woolsey and Admiral McGinn, among others,
    about the challenges of using nuclear power. I have in my
    district a plant which is currently leaking strontium and
    tritium into the groundwater and into the Hudson River, which
    has shut down accidentally twice in the last week, one time
    because of a fire and an explosion in a transformer that was
    not reported to the local authorities for 40 minutes, and which
    was also noted by Mohammed Atta on documents that were found
    after 9/11 as one of the targets that he had speculated about
    flying a plane into.
        Against that backdrop and knowing with the 103 nuclear
    sites currently, commercial nuclear sites operating in this
    country where we have vast quantities of high-level waste being
    stored de facto, where citizens never originally intended to be
    a nuclear waste site in their towns, and knowing that every
    city and State in between there and Yucca Mountain has
    threatened legal action to try to stop transit by rail or
    highway to get there, if we increase the transit of either
    spent fuel or enriched fuel to and from hundreds or thousands
    of new nuclear plants around the world, not just in this
    country but around the world, in reference to that safety
    regime, that security regime that I believe the admiral
    referred to, aren't we virtually guaranteeing that sooner or
    later there will be a diversion and at least a dirty bomb as a
    result?
        Admiral McGinn. It is possible. However, I think that
    nuclear--the generation nuclear plant in your district is very
    much an older one. The experience of the Navy with naval
    reactors has been very, very positive. The evolution of nuclear
    science and nuclear power plant design has proceeded at a much
    lower level than it was back in the 1960s and 1970s, but
    progressed nevertheless.
        So I believe that from an operational safety standpoint, we
    can put out nuclear power plants that are at least 10 times
    safer, perhaps even 100 times safer than the current
    generation.
        That said, there are the security concerns about
    transporter fuel, conversion of fuel, the waste disposal of
    fuel, and attendant to all of those security concerns and the
    design and construction concerns is what does it cost. What is
    the ultimate cost for a kilowatt hour of nuclear power compared
    to other forms? The key point, though, is--and one of the
    reasons I am not ready to reject nuclear power at all--is that
    right now 20 percent of our electricity is from nuclear power
    plants, 2 percent is from renewable fuels. To try to displace
    that is a very, very daunting challenge.
        Mr. Hall. I understand, General.
        Admiral McGinn. We need to have a fair hearing.
        Mr. Hall. Excuse me. I have limited time. I appreciate your
    comments and I am just throwing some ideas out here. We haven't
    talked about low-head hydroelectric at all. The Idaho National
    Laboratory, part of our own Energy Department, says that in my
    State of New York alone there are 4,000-plus low-head hydro
    sites, dams and waterfalls where, every day, tons of water are
    going over, being wasted. And that by putting turbines where
    the water is falling and wiring them into the grid, we could
    harvest greater than 1,200 megawatts of power, which happens to
    be 60 percent of the Indian Point Nuclear Point's peak output.
        So I am just curious about your comments about low-head
    hydro tidal power, wavepower or hydrogen as a storage mechanism
    for off-peak time when the capacity needs to be stored
    somewhere.
        Mr. Woolsey. Congressman, I think the most promising sets
    of developments are the lowering costs going to first thin film
    and then nanosolar and the lowering costs from distributed--
    that is, small-scale wind generators which can operate at, say,
    three or four miles an hour instead of the eight or nine miles
    an hour that you need for the large turbines, which is why they
    are up in mountain passes and out in the ocean. I know of only
    one tidal system. It is functioning on a commercial basis in
    France. It seems to work reasonably well, but I think the tidal
    situation has to be pretty much ideal. And some of the ocean
    current ideas are really very intriguing and there is some good
    research going on on them.
        Hydrogen is not a bad way to store energy if you can't do
    anything else, and it does have--let's say you generate from a
    wind farm in the Great Plains and you can't get the electricity
    out because there aren't transmission lines, turning that into
    hydrogen for, let's say, the chemical industry or something
    like that might have real utility. Trying to use that hydrogen
    to power family automobiles, as I said earlier, I think is one
    of the craziest ideas this country has ever gotten off onto.
        The Chairman. The gentleman's time has expired. The
    gentlelady from California, Ms. Solis.
        Ms. Solis. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And I appreciate the
    testimony that we heard from all of you, from the witnesses
    this morning. And I am intrigued about the discussion regarding
    reliability with renewable energy. And in particular, in the
    State I represent, California, I just learned of a project that
    is underway right now that is looking at wind power being
    provided up in the Tehachapi. And maybe, Mr. Pope, you know
    something about this. But what is occurring is that they are
    going to be working with the PUC and Southern Cal Edison and
    some other folks, and it is actually going back to similar
    lines that have been put in place since the 1920s, so they are
    not actually going outside of what has already been established
    during the past few decades.
        And the reliability there that they are proposing is that
    they are going to be able to provide about 60 percent more of
    our electricity once this project is completed. And it is based
    primarily on wind energy and reliability. And for us in
    California, I think it means a great deal because we have had
    such tremendous problems in the past with shortages, brownouts,
    blackouts, and the whole problems with the grid, and then
    trying to find reliability. And our population continues to
    grow.
        So, Carl Pope, I would ask you if you know anything about
    that or if you want to comment.
        Mr. Pope. Well, one of the interesting things is that if
    you diversify, as California has worked on doing, your
    electricity sources, you are actually building yourself in a
    lot of security against disruptions. So these new retrofitted
    wind systems are very important.
        An opportunity we are not taking advantage of, we have a
    great deal of natural gas capacity in California that needs to
    be repowered. It is wasting half of the gas which it burns
    every day, and at today's gas prices that doesn't make sense.
        Another opportunity we have in California that deals with
    some of the storage issues with renewable is if we can make
    central station solar thermal cost competitive, it is
    relatively easy to store the heat. It is easier to store heat
    than it is to store electricity. So even though the sun doesn't
    shine at night, a central station thermal solar electric
    plant--and we have a lot of sunshine and a lot of desert in
    California where we could do this--those plants can generate
    electricity at night. So we have a lot of opportunities if we
    consciously diversify.
        Ms. Solis. My next question really is for any of the
    panelists. We talk about security, energy security in other
    countries, particularly underdeveloped countries. What can we
    do as a Nation to help provide for leadership, and perhaps that
    partnership that you touch on here, and I am thinking
    particularly in places like the Middle East.
        I recently visited Iraq and saw a project that is underway
    there, a wastewater, waste management system that is being put
    in place right now. And I think, wow, what a great overture to
    folks there to let them know that we are sharing our
    technology. And I just want to get some comments from you on
    that. General Sullivan?
        General Sullivan. I think Nunn-Lugar, I think there are
    some efforts going on, in fact I know there are with the former
    Soviet Union, to get some control of their spent nuclear fuel
    and weapons. I think that is productive, reasonably productive.
    That is in the security arena. Other than that, I am not
    qualified.
        Mr. Haass. I would say, funnily enough, for the oil
    producing countries, many of them, they need help dealing with
    their windfall. There has been a lot of writing about the oil
    curse, and for a lot of these countries, it overwhelms their
    capacity to have the normal evolution of a country, to develop
    normal markets, the rule of law, democracy.
        Demanding that countries such as Nigeria and others put in
    place real accounting, transparency, essentially not allowing
    the oil windfall to become a major source of corruption which
    actually undermines their governance is something that not
    simply the U.S. Government but oil companies and NGOs can help
    with. That is a way that we can essentially help the so-called
    wealthy countries deal with their own energy security
    situation.
        Mr. Woolsey. There is a historical identification in a
    number of these countries in the developing world with local
    self-sufficiency. That is what that spinning wheel is doing in
    the middle of the Indian flag. It was Gandhi's way of saying
    the villages ought to spin their own cotton and be self-
    sufficient.
        And when you look at what is potentially available, I
    think, from solar wind and biomass for villages in India or,
    for that matter, settlements in the Iraqi desert, to be able to
    produce enough energy locally to, say, pump water or clean
    water up, and with battery developments to have some kind of
    capability to use even in areas of the world that don't have
    oil or ready access to it, to use electricity for powering
    vehicles, for plows and the like. These developments are
    coming, and they are coming in part because battery technology
    has moved so quickly.
        And finally, Congresswoman, in California one thing to
    remember is although you all had some very serious problems out
    there with respect to your electricity, California as a whole
    over the last 20 years has held its efficiency with respect to
    electricity such that the average Californian pays about the
    same amount as I do in Maryland for his electricity, but he
    pays at rates that are about double because he is using about
    half as much. And California has been the leader in the country
    with its PUC and the rest, and steering us in a direction the
    rest of the country ought to follow with respect to that.
        Ms. Solis. Thank you.
        The Chairman.  The gentlelady's time has expired. Can I ask
    you--I am going to ask each one of you in reverse order to give
    us a one-minute summation of what it is you want us to remain
    the big point as we are moving forward on the select committee.
        And I would like while we are thinking about that, just
    General Sullivan, could you just talk about Diego Garcia
    briefly? It is in your report, and what is happening to that
    atoll out in the Indian Ocean?
        General Sullivan. You want me to do it right now?
        The Chairman.  Yes. Could you do that?
        General Sullivan. Diego Garcia, as you know, is an atoll in
    the Indian Ocean. It is a strategic base that the United States
    has used for a number of years. Because it is an atoll, it is
    almost at sea level. Any rise in the sea level could obviously
    cause dislocation and dislocation would, in fact, require
    alternative basing somewhere.
        The Chairman.  It has a security implication for the United
    States?
        General Sullivan. Yes. Yes it does. Prepositioned ships are
    kept there and other equipment.
        The Chairman.  And your conclusion is that it is at risk
    now?
        General Sullivan. Well, my conclusion is if the oceans were
    in fact to rise, if what people are suggesting, if they were
    to--if oceans were to rise even inches, it would have an effect
    on Diego Garcia.
        The Chairman.  Okay. Thank you. So let's begin the
    summations with you, Mr. Woolsey.
        Mr. Woolsey. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I think with respect
    to policy and Congress' role of legislation, two things are
    important. One is the CAFE standards, as you have proposed, in
    order to keep progress steady with respect to reducing oil use.
    And the other is removing barriers so that alternative fuels
    can be used--flexible fuel vehicles, pumps and any regulatory
    barriers that might be in the way of plug-in hybrids, and
    particularly the vehicle to grid that is plugging the hybrid
    back in after it is fully charged so it can supply some of the
    power to the grid. There is so much energy in vehicles that
    this really creates remarkable financial and other
    opportunities.
        The Chairman. Okay. Thank you, Mr. Woolsey.
        Admiral McGinn.
        Admiral McGinn. Mr. Chairman, thank you. This is an
    American challenge. It is one that Americans together will
    meet. It doesn't have partisan labels on it. The solutions are
    available today. They need to be guided by leadership and good
    policy which enables us to advance our energy efficiency and to
    increase our choices of clean renewable fuels in order to
    create opportunity for our economy, create opportunity and
    raise our level of national security and also to be a leader in
    the global sense in meeting this energy challenge. Thank you.
        The Chairman. Thank you, Rear Admiral. Mr. Pope.
        Mr. Pope. In order to solve this problem, the twin problems
    of oil addiction and global warming, all we need to do is
    reduce our emissions of carbon dioxide by 2 percent a year and
    improve the reliance of our transportation fleet on oil at a
    rate of 4 percent a year. Those are rates of innovation lower
    than we accept in any other part of the American economy, lower
    than those we experience in any other part of the American
    economy.
        So the big question this committee has to answer is, why
    aren't we doing it already? And I am going to offer an answer
    which may not be welcome. I believe that the largest single
    barrier to innovation and progress, to kicking our oil
    addiction and stopping global warming, is that the United
    States Congress has structured the American energy sector in
    such a way that those who benefit from innovation are
    frustrated by those who benefit from stagnation. I think you
    need to fix the way in which Congress thinks about energy.
        The Chairman. Thank you, Mr. Pope. Dr. Haass.
        Mr. Haass. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The short answer to
    your question is to continue doing what you are doing today.
    The more these issues gain salience and the more people see
    energy security and climate change as integrated in parts of a
    larger whole, I think you are beginning to win the debate. And
    encouraging that policymaking and the organization of
    policymaking come to reflect that will also help.
        Three specific points. One is coal. Real estate is about
    location, location, location. An awful lot of this issue of
    climate change is about coal, coal, and coal. And to the extent
    we can create an environment in which clean coal production, as
    well as thinking through and ultimately realizing technologies
    for storage of the carbon that is produced from coal plants
    happens, that will go a long way towards the problem.
        Secondly, to focus on the transportation sector and the
    sort of legislation you are introducing is good because it
    provides the predictability that Detroit and others need to
    know and innovators need to know so they can essentially--they
    are therefore aware what world they are operating in.
        Lastly, we can't do it on our own. There will be no
    solution to the climate change problem without full
    participation by India and China above all.
        Which brings me back to the importance of coming up with
    guidelines for a post-Kyoto, post-2012 world. Let's put aside
    the debate over Kyoto; love it, hate it. We need to get serious
    about what will be the principles that will inform U.S. policy
    and begin the conversation earlier rather than later with
    China, India, with Japan, with Europe, with Brazil, because the
    4 or 5 years between now and 2012 will barely be enough to have
    that debate settled.
        The Chairman. Thank you, Doctor. General Sullivan.
        General Sullivan. Mr. Chairman, I believe that climate
    change, environmental health, energy dependence and national
    security are all interrelated. I think you are on the right
    track with this panel, addressing these issues. I applaud your
    endeavors to sponsor an NIE, National Intelligence Estimate, to
    look at these issues in depth, broadly, and to come up with a
    way forward.
        The Chairman. Well, we thank you. We thank this
    extraordinary panel for its testimony today, not just for your
    testimony but also for the judgment which you have brought to
    these issues here today.
        I think that two things are quite clear. One, it is the
    size of the problem, and it is no longer acceptable for us to
    act incrementally. We now must find a way for the United States
    Congress and for the United States to be bold to deal with this
    issue. The time has now passed for incremental solutions, and
    while boldness has always been something that is synonymous
    with unpassable in terms of legislation in Washington, I think
    that quickly that time is passing on this issue. And secondly,
    that the solutions are there, and our panel has pointed to so
    many of them from fuel economy standards for vehicles to
    cellulosic energies, renewable sources for the generation of
    electricity, looking at the sequestration of carbon in the use
    of coal and so many others, the gentleman from Oregon pointing
    to the standards that we should have for buildings across our
    country. The list goes on and on but the solutions are
    available.
        This is the kickoff to the 2-year Select Committee on
    Energy Independence and Global Warming. I can't think of a
    greater panel to have begun this discussion. We thank you very
    much. This hearing is adjourned.
        [Whereupon, at 12:30 p.m., the committee was adjourned.]

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