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Friday, May 05, 2006

Terror-Free Oil

By Joe Kaufman
Front Page Magazine
May 5, 2006
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=22335

"We as American citizens can actually boycott Mid East oil.
And the way you do that is you go to a gas station whose company doesn't import the oil."
- Bob Bevelacqua, former U.S. Army Green Beret
August 23, 2005, Fox News Channel

In December of 2001, an e-mail was widely distributed across the internet calling for a boycott of all gas stations that purchase crude oil from the Middle East*. While the e-mail consisted of much emotionally charged language - understandably so, given the proximity to 9/11 - and while some of the information provided was faulty, the point that was being made was a valid one and should be revisited.

The e-mail began: "Nothing is more frustrating to me than the feeling that every time I fill-up the tank, I am sending my money to people who are trying to kill me, my family, and my friends. It turns out that some oil companies import a lot of middle eastern oil and others do not import any. I thought it might be interesting for Americans to know which oil companies are the best to buy their gas from."

The piece then proceeded to list major gasoline companies that import Middle Eastern oil and those that do not or "do not import much." Included on the list of importers were Shell, Chevron, ExxonMobil and Marathon. As stated in the e-mail, for the period of September 1, 2000 through August 31, 2001, the companies ranged from importing just under 118,000,000 barrels to just under 206,000,000.

Included on the list of non-importers were Citgo, Sunoco, Conoco, Sinclair and Phillips (which merged with Conoco in 2002). BP Amoco made the bottom of the list (as a "not much") with just over 62,000,000 barrels. [In later versions of the e-mail, further companies would be listed.]

According to the United States Energy Information Administration (EIA), in its 'Crude Oil Imports From Persian Gulf** 2001' report, Middle Eastern oil was indeed purchased by all of the companies listed in the e-mail as importers. However, many of the "non-importers" were listed as importers, as well. In fact, the only two that did not make the official government list for 2001 were Sunoco and Sinclair. And Chevron, which was listed on the e-mail as "not much," made the top three!

But that was then. With the advent of the War on Terrorism, surely the gasoline companies, especially American-based ones, would begin to recognize and work to rectify this all too important matter. Surely something would be done to curb the amount of Mid East oil these companies import. That's only common sense, but that never happened.

Nearly five years after the tragedy of September 11 th, little has changed. The companies that were importing Middle Eastern oil still are, and the companies that weren't still are not. This is according to the latest information
available from the EIA. And it should be noted that, of the companies that are, BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Marathon and Shell get crude straight from Saudi Arabia - the same Saudi Arabia that produced 15 of the 19 hijackers - the same Saudi Arabia which gives millions to Hamas - the same Saudi Arabia that actively spreads its radical jihadist/Wahhabist ideology throughout the world, including the United States.

Besides Saudi Arabia, a number of other Middle Eastern nations, where oil is imported from, have dubious track records. Information derived from the U.S. State Department's '22 nd annual Report to the Congress on Voting Practices at the United Nations,'
underscores the antipathy towards the United States these nations harbor. The following are facts found within the report:

    • Algeria (where Citgo and Shell get crude oil from), in 2004, out of 79 possible U.N. votes, voted against the United States 63 times.

    • Iraq (BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Marathon and Shell) voted against the U.S. 51 times [and that was even after liberation].

    • Kuwait (ExxonMobil and Marathon) voted against the U.S. 63 times.

    • Libya (Shell) voted against the U.S. 65 times.

    • Oman (BP and ConocoPhillips) voted against the U.S. 64 times.

    • Tunisia (Shell) voted against the U.S. 63 times.

On average these countries voted against the United States, in the year 2004, nearly 78 percent of the time. In the case of Saudi Arabia, it was 81 percent against.

The countries that have been discussed here are more in line ideologically with Iran, which shouts "Death to America," than they are with the United States. In fact, five of the countries mentioned, along with Iran, make up the majority of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), which sets the price of crude for the rest of the world, which tells us how much more money we have to spend on gas any given day.

In October of 1973, our dependence on Mid East oil brought us an embargo from the Arab world. The Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC), which, at the time, consisted of the Arab members of OPEC plus Bahrain, Egypt and Syria, called for an oil embargo against the West to coincide with the war they were preparing for Israel. This had
a devastating effect on the economy, as America was held hostage to the whim of our "friends." Why wait for a repeat performance, embargo or otherwise?

Of course, this money, at least in part, goes to fund our terrorist enemies, as well, both locally and abroad. It is this never-ending cycle - gasoline for money, money for terrorism - that could ultimately lead to our undoing, if nothing is done to stop it. And this problem is multiplied every second of the day, as we sink more and more of our hard earned dollars into our gas tanks. The question we all have to ask ourselves, when we go to the pumps, is are we willing to fund our own demise? And if we're not, then we have to ask ourselves are we willing to work towards a solution to the problem.

Terror-Free Oil Initiative

The American Center for Democracy (ACD) has developed a new program called the Terror-Free Oil Initiative (TFOI). The
purpose of the program is twofold:
    1. to cut off the flow of money that goes to terrorists and
    2. to decrease America 's dependency on foreign oil.
As stated on the ACD website, "This project is dedicated to encouraging Americans to buy only gasoline that originated from countries that do not export or finance terrorism."

While gasoline companies won't shift their loyalties from Mid East oil overnight, Americans have to start somewhere.
Americans must, once and for all, take a stand and support companies like Sunoco and Sinclair that don't get their
crude from 'the crude.'

So which gas station will you fill up at?


Notes:

* Middle East, as used in this article, includes Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey, United Arab Emirates and Yemen.

** Persian Gulf, as used in this article, includes Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates.

Joe Kaufman is the Chairman of Americans Against Hate and the host of The Politics of Terrorism
radio show.

Read more ...

Tuesday, May 02, 2006

Alternative fuels ensure a strong future

By Hon. R. James Woolsey & Gal Luft
Centre Daily
May 2, 2006
http://www.centredaily.com/mld/centredaily/news/opinion/14476861.htm

President Bush's call for America to end its "oil addiction" sparked a debate about whether the goal is attainable -- or even desirable. Some say that policies to promote energy independence would hinder prosperity. They claim that attempts to meet this goal after the 1970s oil shocks were expensive failures. These assertions are wrong.

Between 1979 and 1985, when oil demand reduction was a high priority, the typical U.S. car's fuel efficiency nearly doubled. Electricity generated from oil dropped from 17 percent of the nation's power output to 2 percent. The share of homes using heating oil went from 31 percent to 10 percent. Total oil consumption in the United States decreased by 15 percent, and oil imports fell by 42 percent.

Away from petroleum

The impact on the nation's economy was positive. Energy expenditures' share of the Gross Domestic Product fell by 50 percent while real per-capita share of the Gross Domestic Product grew by 10 percent.

Today a majority of the world's capacity to export oil is in the hands of autocracies and dictatorships that can use that wealth to destabilize the international system. Thus, the future of our economic and national security is more than ever coupled to our energy policy. The democracies' ability to prevail in the long war in which we are engaged will be compromised so long as such states control this part of the world's economy.

To ensure stability we must commit ourselves to diversifying our fuel supply and shifting the transportation sector from the conventional petroleum, which comprises 97 percent of our transportation energy, to a robust system based on next-generation fuels and vehicles.

The United States is no longer rich in readily recoverable oil, but it has a wealth of other energy sources from which transportation fuel can be safely, affordably and cleanly generated.

Among them: vast rich farmland, hundreds of years' worth of coal reserves and billions of tons a year of agricultural, industrial and municipal waste.

Each of these can generate alcohol fuels -- such as bio-diesel, ethanol and methanol -- at a price cheaper than current gasoline.

Large-scale deployment of flexible fuel vehicles running on alcohol, gasoline or any mixture of the two will allow Americans to choose secure domestic fuel over problematic foreign oil. Since the additional per-vehicle cost associated with flexible fuel vehicles is currently under $200, fuel flexibility should become a standard feature in every car -- like seat belts or air bags.

Plug-in hybrid vehicles, unlike standard hybrids, can draw charge not only from the engine and captured braking energy, but also from America's electrical grid. They can make efficient use of such clean electricity sources as solar, wind, geothermal, hydroelectric and nuclear power.

Plug-in hybrid electric vehicles can reach economy levels of 100 miles or more per gallon.

  • If a plug-in is also a flex-fuel car using 85 percent alcohol and 15 percent gasoline, fuel economy could reach the equivalency of 500 miles per gallon for a gasoline-powered vehicle.

  • If a diesel engine burns clean fuel derived from waste, it would be using no conventional petroleum at all.

By 2025, if all cars on the road are either diesels burning fuel from renewables or flexible fuel hybrids, and half of the hybrids are plug-ins, U.S. oil imports would drop by more than 12 million barrels per day -- or more than what we import today.

These technologies exist. There is no need to wait for technological breakthroughs, invest billions in research and development or embark on massive infrastructure changes.

What is needed is congressional action to build on the president's call by enacting the necessary incentives for producers to make, and consumers to buy, cars that offer fuel choices while encouraging the development of a mass market for alternative fuels, along with the modest necessary changes in the distribution system. Such policies would make the U.S. economy more resilient and put it on a trajectory toward oil security.

R. James Woolsey, a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, is co-chairman of the Committee on the Present Danger, which advocates an aggressive stance in the war against terror. Gal Luft is a member of the committee.

Read more ...

The War on Terror: The Energy Front

James WoolseyBy James Woolsey
FrontPageMagazine.com | May 2, 2006

The following speech was given as part of Restoration Weekend 2006, at the Arizona Biltmore in Phoenix, Feb. 23-26, 2006 -- The Editors.

I'm honored to be invited but, to tell you the truth, since I was a Washington lawyer for 22 years and then I was with the CIA during the Clinton administration, I'm pretty well honored to be invited into any polite company for any purposes whatsoever.

I was not the originator of the phrase "World War IV." As far as I know, that was my friend Elliot Cohen in Wall Street Journal op-ed immediately after 9/11. I have mixed feelings about it. Sometimes I use that phrase and sometimes "the long war," which a lot of people are now starting to use.

The main point is that we should regard this war we're in as a long one. If you call it the World War IV, the analogy in a sense is to the Cold War, which I call World War III.

But the main idea is that this is a long contest of decades, not years, and it's one that's going to require us to do some very innovative and different things, just as the Cold War required us to do some things very differently than we had done in either World War I or World War II.

Just to give you a quick idea of how different things are, let me list seven more or less pieces of conventional wisdom about the Cold War, at least from today's perspective, and how different it was from this long war we're in now.

In the Cold War, the overarching struggle with our principle enemy, the Soviet Union, was a struggle with a large and very rigid bureaucratic empire. Today, our struggle is far more confusing. Instead of a single empire, we have at least three different types of groups with relationships to governments. In the case of Iran, we have the fanatic Ahmadinejad regime with its nuclear weapons program and its ties to the world's most professional terrorist organization, Hezbollah.

Al-Qaeda, quite a bit different from being an empire, has twice had relationships with states: Sudan for a time and then Afghanistan, in which one had more or less a terrorist-sponsored state, as distinct from a state-sponsored terrorism. Both al-Qaeda and the Islamists had a lot more resources available to them than either Sudan or Afghanistan at that time.

Wahhabis call themselves Salafists, which suggests allegiance to the very old forms of Islam. Salafism is the state religion of sorts of Saudi Arabia, but the Salafist relationship with some parts of the Saudi state is tense from time to time. They buy off the staet with phenomenal amounts of money, which they then use to run madrassas in Pakistan and the rest, teaching hatred of all things Western and all things non-Wahhabi.

So in contrast to dealing with a Soviet Union, what are we deterring? What are we holding at risk? How does one deter an Ahmadinejad whose objective is to bring the Mahdi back as soon as possible and, in his view, hopefully then the end of the world? How do we deter an al-Qaeda terrorist who is willing to die with a suitcase nuclear weapon in his hand? By threatening what? By holding what at risk?

There's a second major difference from the Cold War. During the Cold War, some people, in particular Daniel Pipes' father, understood that, by the '50s or '60s and certainly by the '70s, Soviet Communist ideology was dead. There was not fire in the minds of young men as there was in the streets of Petrograd in 1917. Soviet Communists were not getting ideological converts. It was a rigid bureaucratic movement that stood as a justification for thuggery.

Today, however, the ideology of our enemies is vibrant, strong, and religiously rooted. It presents a very difficult problem for us, because the Islamist-Salafist ideology, in the Middle East particularly and some other parts of the Muslim world, it is attracting some of the more talented and able young men and occasionally young women of those societies. There is, in the Salafist world, fire in the minds of men.

In the Cold War, we didn’t believe there was any real likelihood of attack on the United States by our enemy. In this new long war we're in, of course, we've already been invaded. Not occupied, but attacked in New York and Washington. The chief of strategy, Mr. Hassan Abbasi, for Ahmadinejad in Iran, says that he has already had "spied out" 29 sensitive sites in the U.S. and the West and that he is ready to attack them.

During the Cold War, we felt that any hot wars that took place would generally have very short periods of combat. For example, Panama, Grenada, Korea were a few years at most. Vietnam, yes, was an exception. But in this long war we’re in, we may have hot wars, as in Iraq.

In the Cold War, we did not have to worry about screening the clerics who applied to be prison ministers for their ideological beliefs. Yet today, a fair number of Muslim prison clerics, are Wahhabis who teach the underlying ideology of hatred which is the same as that taught and adhered to by al-Qaeda.

We didn’t feel in the Cold War that we needed to deal with terrorism much differently than we did other crimes. Law enforcement would do the job. Terrorists should be prosecuted and imprisoned and that would deter further terrorism. But terrorism of the sort that we see coming from these Salafist movements just simply are not amenable to that type of treatment. To deal with it as a law enforcement problem is effectively not to deal with it at all. Arrest, prosecution, imprisonment mean very little to someone who is not only willing, but eager to die.

During the Cold War, the older among us remember the duck-and-cover drills that we went through in school, to get under the desk to protect yourself from flying glass in the event of a nuclear detonation. Once those were over, we more or less lived our lives during the Cold War secure in the idea that any need to deal with actuqal violence would take place in the world overseas and we wouldn’t have to have any security concerns particularly impinging on our daily lives.

Today, of course, the world in which we are living is one in which we come in contact every day with limitations of one kind or another. Some are major, most are minor, such as removing your shoes at the airport. Limitations that affected our liberties and our behavior during the Cold War were very rare.

Finally, we didn't understand this well during the Cold War, but during its aftermath, we’ve come to understand how much better and more effective our economy was than the Soviet economy. There were those who over-estimated the Soviet economy during the Cold War, but almost everyone now understands what an inefficient and ineffective way of producing wealth it was.

The war we’re in now is a war in which, if you take the 22 Arab states plus Iran, their population approximately equals that of the United States and Canada together: 340 million, give or take 10 million. That area, those 23 states, other than gas and oil, export to the world less than Finland, a country of 5 million people. But the oil and gas earns a very great deal. Saudi Arabia alone earns $160 billion a year from its oil sales. We borrow approximately a billion dollars every working day, $250 billion a year, just for our oil imports. The rest of our imports that we have to borrow to finance because we don’t save enough and don’t export enough. The rest of what we have to borrow, including oil in toto, totals about $2 billion every calendar day; about $740 billion a year.

As we pull into the gasoline pump, we need to look in the mirror and realize who is financing not only our side but also the other side in this war. Then we begin to see what the role of the relative wealth capabilities of the different societies are. We had no real Achilles heel with respect to our economy in the Cold War. We have a huge one right in the hands of our enemy in this current war we are in and it is a three-letter word: oil.

I think the most important thing about the war we are in is the variety of the responses that we have to change our views about and come to terms with. Everything from how we manage our ports to how we manage intercepts of communications between terrorists and abroad and someone who knows them in the United States. All of these are important and difficult policy matters.

There are two aspects of this war that I think go often undiscussed, although the President mentioned the second one, oil, in his State of the Union address. The first is ideology. Americans are people who don’t like to talk about ideology all that much. Americans think someone is crazy if they have views such as, “Hey, let’s all get together and kill billions of people so we can get the Mahdi to return and then that will be close to the end of the world.” Or, "Hey, let’s establish a worldwide caliphate in which a union of mosque and state governs the entire world." Or, "Going back a bit in time, how about a thousand year Reich or how about world Communism?"

Any of those totalitarian views of the future strike us as so strange that they’re crazy and who can deal with crazy people? Yeah, we may have to fight them some day but we don’t get into ideology that much. We’ve got a very special problem in this war, though. We’ve only fought one enemy in modern times whose totalitarianism had an important religious component, and that was the Japanese empire during World War II, with its distortion of Shintoism. But these enemies that I’ve described in this long war we’re in now have roots that are I think far deeper and far more involved in the history of Islam than the Japanese distortions about Shintoism.

Certainly as a result of the Cold War, we are not used to dealing with religiously motivated fanatical totalitarian enemies. We tend to think that everybody’s religion is his or her own business. We don’t challenge one another much about our religious beliefs. And we’re accustomed, in this open and democrat society, to a pretty wide range of religions. “Oh, you’re a Zoroastrian! Well, have a beer!” Our way is not the way of even examining, much less being critical, of something someone calls his or her religion.

That has to change. These enemies and their totalitarianism are rooted in a distorted version of a minority view of their religions. Take Shi’ite Islam. Our image of shi’a, much of it dating from the late 1970s with Khomeini’s takeover in Iran, was formed in part by the festival of Ashoura, where people lash themselves. Given what has happened in Iran since 1979, we think of Shi’ite Islam as a theocratically inclined religious group.

In fact, the history of Shi’ite Islam, other than a brief period in the 10th century in Egypt, has generally been one of separation of mosque and state. Khomeini introduced a craziness and a totalitarian and theocratic feature into Shi’ism that is not part normally of its mainstream beliefs. But you see what has occurred with Muqtada al-Sadr and some of the behavior in Iraq, as well as in Iran with Ahmadinejad, and their views, the views of the minority group and the group that is not representative as I think for example Ayatollah Sistani is in Iraq. The group in Iran and some groups in Southern Iraq that are fanatically theocratic totalitarians are not generally representative of the history of Shi’ite Islam. But they are no less dangerous for that because, at least in Iran, they have a nuclear weapons program. They have ties, as I said, to Hezbollah and we have to pay attention to the religious roots and the implications of that for what they are doing.

One implication of religiously rooted totalitarianism is that they are unafraid—and sometimes eage—to die and that opens up tactics and strategies for them, as Mr. Abbasi has said, in terms of the possibility of destroying sites in the West that make things very difficult for us.

It also means that they’re patient. I think one of the reasons we have not seen attacks in the United States since 9/11 is that, with a totalitarian religiously rooted enemy, they really don’t care that much whether or not an attack occurs in 2003, 2004, 2005, or 2006. I think they would very much like for an attack to be more devastating than 9/11. But whether it occurs in their lifetime or not I think is probably not a high priority.

So if we look at, not only the Shi’ite side of the ledger, with theocratic totalitarians such as Ahmadinejad, but also on the Sunni side and the situation that we face with both the jihadis such as al-Qaeda, and the Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia, we see a similar problem. We see a religious view rooted in only a corner of the religion, only a minority view of what it should mean to be a Muslim, but one that is nonetheless there. There are millions of good and decent Muslims in the world. If you want to have an interesting speaker, sometime invite Sheik Kabanni from Detroit, the head of the Sufis in the United States, an absolutely wonderful man. His followers are far from what you would see in some of the organizations like the Counsel of American-Islamic Relations and the Islamic Society of North America. Those organizations leaning toward the Wahhabi view of things tend to ostracize Sheik Kabanni and his Sufis and keep them on the sidelines, because they’re far too moderate from the point of view of those who lean in a Wahhabi direction.

But the underlying views of the Sunni Salafists or Islamists are at least as much a problem for us as those of Ahmadinejad and those on the Shi’ite side of the ledger.

The underlying views of Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabis and the jihadis such as al-Qaeda are essentially the same. They are explicitly genocidal with respect to Shi’ite Muslims, Jews, and homosexuals. They are fanatically hostile to pretty much everybody else: Sufi Muslims, Christians, women, democracy, music, across the board. The Saudis, out of their $160 billion oil income annually, take 3 or 4 billion and give it to the Wahhabi sect in Saudi Arabia. By the way, that’s about 3 or 4 times what the KGB had available to it for active measures in the West during the height of their funding capability during the Cold War.

When those $3-4 billion go to the Wahhabis and the Wahhabis use them to help put prison chaplains into American prisons or to teach hatred in the madrassas of Pakistan, they are spreading essentially the same underlying ideology that is held by al-Qaeda. The substantive views are not different. What they disagree about is who should be in charge. They hate each other with the same kind of hatred that the Stalinists and Trotskyites hated one another during the 1930s. But the Stalinists and Trotskyites agreed, underneath it all, that we should have a dictatorship of the proletariat and the vanguard should rule and exterminate the bourgeoisie and so forth and so on.

So when you see those dollars you spend at the fuel tank heading over to fund the other side in the war, it might give you pause and give you some thoughts about what we should do about it. Let me mention two things. One with respect to ideology, the other with respect to oil.

With respect to ideology, I am of the view that we are going to need to treat the Wahhabi or the theocratic Shi’ite form of Islam somewhat the way we treated Communism during the Cold War. Congress in the late 40s tried to make it illegal to be a Communist. Supreme Court struck the Smith Act down. So the U.S. government turned in another way. They turned to making Communists’ lives as miserable as they possibly could by having everybody register every time they turned around, by infiltrating their organizations with FBI agents. Communism was still present in the United States as the Cold War went on but it was hobbled as an active combative force affecting our ability to wage the Cold War. David knows far more about this than I. We were doing some effective things in putting limitations on what American Communists could do.

I think we have to look at both the Wahhabis and the Shi’ite theocratic totalitarians somewhat the same way. We cannot make it illegal for an American imam in a mosque to be a Wahhabi. But if that set of views is what is being taught and what is being disseminated, I think we have a similar kind of problem to what we had in the Cold War with Communism and should be treated similarly.

The other side of this is the economic power in the hands of our adversaries and that is, as I said, entirely derived from oil. There are a couple of problems about oil. It is obviously a useful way to carry energy. For over a century, it has been a useful way to provide the feedstock for creating gasoline and diesel fuel for powering automobiles. It’s going to be around for a long time.

But there are some ways that we can move a lot more expeditiously than many people believe to make it a good deal harder for oil exporting states, whether it’s Russia or the states of the Middle East, to get political power out of their position as oil and gas suppliers. To make it harder for them to shove the rest of us around. Because once the curves of oil consumption and use that I’m about to describe begin to turn, the people in these oil-exporting nations who control and govern their countries’ behavior will begin to see the handwriting on the wall.

Now, what am I talking about? Am I talking about a hydrogen highway to the future? No, no and no. Hydrogen has a bunch of problems. It is an interesting R&D project and hydrogen fuel cells are an extremely useful way to create stationary power. Power from hydrogen fuel cells for a number of different applications, other than automobiles, makes some real current economic sense.

But those vehicles you see out there advertising a hydrogen future cost each about a million dollars to make and that’s because the fuel cells themselves are something like a thousand times more expensive than they can be in any economic structure and even if we get on top of that. I have some confidence in the next 20 years or so that that might work out. If you’re talking about hydrogen, you’re looking at needing to completely restructure the energy infrastructure of the country. You’ve got to have hydrogen pumps at filling stations. You’ve got to make the hydrogen there. So you’ve got to get natural gas, let’s say, into every filling station. Hydrogen’s extremely explosive. You’ve got to find a way to store it without blowing things up.

You’re talking about massive changes in our energy infrastructure.

We have spent a good deal of money on hydrogen and some of it has been well spent. But my view is that what we need to concentrate on are ways to replace petroleum-based fuels that one can use to quickly, within the existing infrastructure and as inexpensively as possible. The reason we don’t want to go for really high-cost solutions is that the Saudis are capable of doing the same thing they did in 1985, when they turned on the spigot and dropped the bottom out of the oil market. It went down to $5-7 a barrel. The good news is that it bankrupted the Soviet Union. That may have been one of the reasons that they did it. Part of the bad news is it bankrupted the Synfuels Corporation and, indirectly, my home state of Oklahoma which was not good.

But the Saudis had enough control over the spigot to be able to do that. And I think in spite of the notions of peak oil and the rest, OPEC and particularly the Saudis will have some of that type of capability for some years to come.

So we want fuels that are alternatives and today, for all practical purposes, there are none. The difference between petroleum for transportation use and almost any other kind of energy or other issue is that you’ve got alternatives. If natural gas goes through the roof, as it has, people are going to work really hard on clean coal and on nuclear and on wind turbines and so forth. But, for transportation fuel, there’s nothing else to move to unless we make some changes in the way our infrastructure operates.

Should you think that the oil infrastructure is not vulnerable, like me, you’ll be pleased at the Saudi repulse yesterday of the attacks on oil fields and oil transshipment facilities in Saudi Arabia by the al-Qaeda terrorists. But that’s not the last time they’ll try.

Bob Bayer’s book, Sleeping with the Devil, opens with a scenario in which hijackers fly a hijacked aircraft into the sulfur clearing towers up near Rastanura in northeastern Saudi Arabia. Take them out of operation, thereby taking about six million barrels a day of Saudi crude off line for a year or more and send oil prices to well over $200 a barrel.

So the vulnerability of the oil infrastructure, as well as this business of our funding the other side in the war, is yet another reason I think that one needs to concentrate on these suggestions about utilizing inexpensive feedstocks, using the existing infrastructure and moving as quickly as we can.

Now, what might one do? The President has, over the course of the last week or two, been mentioning two alternatives time and again and I think he’s right on those. The only thing I would say is that I think he is focused entirely on research and development and these are fields in which the Wright Brothers have already flown. What we really need is not so much invention, but some type of encouragement one way or another to have things move into the market quickly.

One possibility is cellulosic ethanol. The word “cellulosic” is important because it means making ethanol not from corn, which has to be cultivated and fertilized and is expensive to grow and so forth. But rather, as the President mentioned, from things such as switch grass, which is a variety of prairie grass. Or, for that matter, kudzu or corn cobs or any other waste agricultural products.

What’s new is that people have now succeeded in inventing genetically modified microorganisms that can take the place of the enzymes that break cellulose down in cow’s stomachs every day and turn it into sugar that the cows live on. It’s doing that with genetically modified biocatalysts and fermenting the different types of sugar there with genetically modified yeast.

That is now being done commercially by a company called Iogen in Canada with Shell Oil backing it. It does not need to be invented. It needs help to be moved promptly into the marketplace into E85—85% ethanol. But it does not need to be invented.

The same is true of the other way to use inexpensive fuels that the President’s been talking about, which is plug-in hybrids. A plug-in hybrid is a hybrid electric vehicle which, of course, goes back and forth between electric power and gasoline, while the battery’s being charged by the deceleration and by the use of the gasoline motor. My Prius gets about 50 miles to the gallon: a little worse on the road, a little better in town. It likes start/stop driving.

Hybrid gasoline electrics are fine, but what is really interesting is if you can increase the capacity of the battery by about a factor of 6, and today that’s about a $6-7,000 cost, but it ought to be less as time goes on and batteries get cheaper. But if you increase the capacity of the battery, let’s say, in a Prius by a factor of 6, plug it in overnight, top it up fully and then drive for 20-25 miles as an electric car on your overnight power before the hybrid back-and-forth feature cuts in, you turn that 50-mile-a-gallon Prius into about a 125-mile gallon of petroleum-based fuel Prius.

By the way, in most of the country, the average cost of off-peak nighttime electric power is 2-4 cents a kilowatt hour which is the rough equivalent of 25-50 cent a gallon gasoline. So if you have two cars, one kind of stays around the neighborhood and drives less than 25 miles a day, while the other maybe goes on long commutes. The one that goes on long commutes will be getting about a 125 miles per gallon of petroleum as it goes. The one that goes around the neighborhood and around town may go to the gasoline station once every six months or so because it’s running on off-peak overnight power the rest of the time.

Again, the Wright Brothers have already flown. This has been invented. It’s being assembled in kits to modify cars in California beginning next month. People will lose some of their warranties and different car companies are wringing their hands and there’s much Sturm und Drang. But it is not something that needs to be invented. If you have 125-mile-per-gallon, because it’s a plug-in hybrid car and it is running on 85 percent ethanol and only 15 percent gasoline, you have something in the ballpark of a 500-mile-per-gallon car with existing technology.

You want to get the Wahhabi’s attention, that’s the way to do it.

Thank you.

James Woolsey is a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

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