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After announcing our national New Energy
Future agenda last September, we’ve been
encouraged by the reception it has earned.
The plan, which would save a third of the
oil we use today and cut our energy use 10
percent by 2025, has attracted the support
of members of Congress, leading environmentalists,
energy experts, hundreds of
state and national environmental groups
and thousands of ordinary citizens.
But practically speaking, how do you go
about fixing a broken energy system in
our country? The nation’s leading energy
experts, scientists and engineers share a lot
of the credit for giving our plan the legs it
needs to stand on.
New advances in technology, combined with good old-fashioned common-sense
conservation, have the potential to fix
our broken system. Here are the four ways
we’re encouraging decisionmakers to go
about doing that. The support we built
for these policies at the state level shows
that it’s time for the federal government
to get moving.
Reduce dependence on oil
Our ambitious plan gets us to where we use
a third less oil than we use today by 2025.
Given that our demand for oil has been
skyrocketing—the Department of Energy
predicts that America will use approximately
25 percent more oil in 2025 than
we do today—the goal of using 33 percent
less might sound fantastic. But there are
already some very concrete ways to use less
oil. You’ve probably heard about plug-in
hybrid cars that get 100 miles to a gallon
of gas. So why can’t we take the relatively
modest step of increasing fuel economy to
40 miles per gallon?
Just that one change gets us a quarter of
the way to our goal of using a third less oil
in 2025. And a bill to raise fuel-efficiency
standards to 40 miles per gallon introduced
last year had the support of some formerly
vocal opponents. We’ll get the rest of
the way to our goal through efficiency in
homes and buildings, bio-fuels and alternative
transportation.
For instance, changing our transportation
priorities so that the average American
drives no more in 2025 than he or she
does today could save 3.6 million barrels
of oil per day. Replacing a share of transportation
fuels with plant-based fuels like
ethanol and biodiesel would save about 1.5
million barrels of oil per day.
It probably goes without saying, but saving
a third of the oil we use today by 2025 is
good for national security. We could cut
America’s petroleum consumption by 7
million barrels per day—more than twice
as much as we currently import from the
Middle East. That is a lot of oil, but it’s actually
a conservative vision of what we can
save if we apply our technological know-how
and embrace balanced transportation
policies that offer Americans more choices
for how to get where they need to go.
Clean, renewable, homegrown energy
Our plan lays out the ways to get 25 percent
of our energy from clean, renewable,
homegrown sources by 2025. It sounds
difficult until you start thinking about the
virtually limitless potential our country
has to generate electricity from renewable
energy sources such as wind power and
solar power.
For instance, the wind that blows over
America’s Great Plains could provide enough power for the entire country. Using
plant-based fuels to substitute for oil in
transportation and industry could supply
about 4.5 percent of our total energy use
in 2025. Wind could provide as much as
30 percent of America’s electricity by 2025
and possibly more as new technologies and
practices allow us to integrate more wind
power into America’s electricity mix.
Additional renewable energy from wave
and tidal power, solar hot water heaters
and geothermal heat pumps are in
development right now and show strong
potential. Technological improvements
in these areas would enable us to expand
the amount of energy we get from clean,
renewable sources.
Saving energy
Our plan gets America using 10 percent
less energy than we do today by 2025. Just
like with oil use, the DOE predicts that our
energy demand in our homes, businesses
and industry will continue to go up—23
percent by 2025. But when America has
needed to conserve energy, we’ve figured
out a way to do it. Faced with rolling blackouts
during California’s infamous energy
crisis, the state embarked on an ambitious
energy-saving strategy that cut the state’s
electricity consumption by 6 percent within
a single year. Key to California’s success
were large, timely investments in energy efficiency
improvements and a strong public
education effort, which included financial
rewards for customers who sharply reduced
their electricity consumption. If we followed suit and used 10 percent less energy
by 2025, we’d save more than 28 million
tons of coal, enough to fill rail cars stretching
from New York to Los Angeles.
Looking forward, we can expect savings
in energy use to come from exactly where
you would expect: energy efficiency. We’ll
reach our goal by setting stronger energyefficiency
standards for household and
commercial appliances, requiring utility
companies to meet energy needs through
energy-efficiency improvements instead
of new power plants, and by expanding
efficiency programs.
Investing in technology
Without the appropriate investments in
technology and the markets that sustain
energy-saving and renewable energy products
and services, our plan will exist on
paper, but not in real life. For example,
new homes meeting Energy Star home
standards use 15 percent less energy than
homes meeting even the most rigorous
current building codes. With tax credits
to build such dwellings, office-buildings
and public spaces, we could help meet a
lot of our goals.
And here’s an added perk to the New
Energy Future plan: by developing and
implementing energy efficiency and renewable
energy technologies, the United States
can become the global leader in new energy
technologies, a field that will become
increasingly popular and in-demand given
the threats posed by global warming.
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