Clean Energy Reports
Search
•
RSS Feed
Executive Summary
America
has the technological know-how and the resources to move away from dependence
on oil and other fossil fuels and toward a cleaner, more secure New Energy
Future.
America’s
dependence on fossil fuels poses challenges to America’s environment, economic health
and national security. Each of those challenges is likely to become more
critical in the years to come if we continue along our present path of increasing
energy use and increasing imports of energy from abroad.
A
New Energy Future in which America
is smarter about how we use energy and in which we tap our abundant supplies of
clean, renewable, homegrown energy can address many of those challenges. Achieving
that future will require America
to set clear goals to guide our energy policies and to mobilize the scientific,
economic and political resources we need to meet them.
This
paper examines the benefits, in terms of fossil fuel savings, of achieving a
New Energy Future guided by the following goals:
• Reduce
our use of energy in our homes, businesses and industry by 10 percent by 2025.
• Save
one third of the oil we use today by 2025.
• Harness
clean, renewable, homegrown energy sources for at least a quarter of our energy
needs by 2025.
There
are many ways that America
can achieve these goals. This paper lays out one plausible pathway, which we
call the “New Energy Future scenario,” by which the United States could achieve – and
in some cases go beyond – the goals and save vast amounts of fossil fuels.
By
2025, for example, the United
States could:
• Save
10.8 million barrels of oil per
day, equal to four-fifths of the amount of oil
we
currently import from all other nations in the world.
• Save
9.1 trillion cubic feet of natural gas per
year, nearly twice as much as is currently
used annually in all of America’s
homes.
• Save
900 million tons of coal per year,
or about 80 percent of all the coal we
consumed
in the United States
in 2005.
• Save
1.7 billion megawatt-hours of electricity per
year, 30 percent more than was
used in all the households in America
in 2005.
|
