Perhaps our greatest contribution to national security would be to challenge the nation to be energy self-sufficient by 2010, cutting consumption of nonrenewable resources by 25 to 50 percent. A large-scale initiative combining conservation with development of renewable and nonrenewable domestic energy sources would remove several critical choke points that put our economy and society in peril. We have as much at stake now as we did when America's first Manhattan Project unleashed the power of the atom during World War II, but a "Manhattan II" project would also lay the foundations of a vibrant economic future.
Just after 9/11, a U.S. study showed that roughly 36 percent of our energy came from petroleum, 70 percent of it for transportation. Roughly two-thirds of the 19.5 million barrels we consumed each day was imported. Meanwhile, our only untapped domestic reserves, the Arctic National Wildlife Preserve, will only produce, at best, an estimated 292,000 barrels per day, offsetting a meager 2.2 percent of our 13 million-barrel+ per-day foreign oil habit.
Electricity is our other lifeblood, and summer's blackouts were a wake up call. Our antiquated, fragile and vulnerable generation and distribution infrastructure is ripe for an overhaul, not just a face-lift. Meanwhile, though domestic coal and Canadian natural gas should last for 25+ years, they carry a significant environmental price.
Alarming as it is, this crisis also represents an opportunity. If just a fraction of the $87 billion we are being asked to spend in Iraq went into a Manhattan II-type project, the results would be transformative. Encouraging commercialization of conservation technologies would yield a bigger reduction in oil consumption than the wildlife preserve could ever produce, even if the most optimistic estimates were used.
Renewable energy-the second half of the Manhattan II project-accounts for 6.8 percent of our overall production, close to the 8 percent supplied by nuclear. If a fraction of nuclear's subsidies went to develop photovoltaic, wind, geothermal, biomass-derived fuels and tidal-generating systems, these industries could quickly bootstrap into economic viability.
The White House energy bill is simply too little, too late. We need a program on the scale of President Kennedy's challenge to go to the moon. Like the lunar landing, Manhattan II will be difficult but achievable, creating technologies that reward us in ways we can't completely understand today. We can expect, at minimum, that strategic investments in research, capitalization of industry and creation of markets for these innovative technologies would strengthen our nation's security, improve our economy and make us a world leader in some of the most significant growth industries of the early 21st century.
Write me at: lgoldberg@green-electronics.com.
