This is a guest post by Peter Lehner, Executive Director of the Natural Resources Defense Council.
The unfolding Gulf tragedy underscores the dire consequences of scraping the bottom of the barrel for energy. As the President noted in his speech this week, the unavoidable fact is that we have a paltry 2% of the world’s oil reserves but account for 20% of global consumption. Slaking this enormous thirst, the President noted, drives companies to drill in deep ocean waters since “we’re running out of places to drill on and in shallow water.”
We need a new direction that moves America beyond oil and other dirty fuels. This is admittedly a huge challenge: The U.S. consumes the equivalent of the 19,000 or so barrels of sludge released daily by the BP geyser in less than two minutes. Yet this eye-popping consumption level also affords opportunities to address our energy needs by focusing on saving oil rather than scouring the ends of the earth for more.
The good news is that we’ve already made progress thanks to the Obama Administration, which took a big step forward with the new national vehicle greenhouse gas emissions and fuel economy standards adopted last year. For the first time in decades, the fuel economy performance bar for the national fleet of cars and trucks is rising, which is projected to save about two million barrels of oil a day by 2030, or about 10% of current consumption. New standards for renewable fuels and heavy trucks are being developed as I type this, and they will drive our oil dependence down too.
But we can go much, much further. As I have said and written before, the first order of business is a comprehensive clean energy and climate bill. In his speech this week, the President mentioned the House bill championed by Congressmen Markey and Waxman, a bill that would squeeze oil imports further via investments in electrification of our vehicle fleet, new transportation infrastructure such as commuter rail, and firm limits on heat-trapping pollution that would encourage enhanced oil recovery by making the injection of carbon dioxide into dry wells — a tried-and-true technique — more economically feasible.[SButtonZ button="digg"]
What few realize is that Congress has another set of powerful tools available in other pending legislation: The transportation law is one of the nation’s biggest investment policies ($70 billion per year, or more than one-fifth of the nation’s total investment in transportation). This law expired last September, and Congress has moved slowly to renew it. This is bad news since current law promotes our addiction to oil. It is a massive highway-centered regime that includes a confusing tangle of 108 programs often separated into separate fiefdoms with thousands of earmarked pork-barrel projects further complicating the picture.
To its credit, the House Transportation Committee unveiled a re-authorization proposal last summer that diverges from the status quo by eliminating or consolidating wasteful programs, focusing more on energy and climate issues, and devoting more resources to fuel-efficient transportation infrastructure. But even that proposal doesn’t go far enough. What we need is an entirely new direction in transportation, as advocated by Transportation for America, the largest, most diverse transportation group in the United States made up of such groups as AARP, the American Heart Association, the National Association of Realtors, the National Association of City Transportation Officials, and our organization, NRDC.
Transportation for America groups believe it’s time to build a modern transportation system, one that runs efficiently, is funded wisely, and provides all of us with more options that ensure we all can get where we need to go regardless of age, ability, or income.
Our blueprint, the Route to Reform, prioritizes energy efficiency and security. It includes programs to complete the transportation system by building networks of intercity rail and buses, green freight and ports projects, transit projects in cities and towns, and nationally significant projects. And it makes a strong case for boosting national investments in transit to $500 billion over six years using a variety of financing tools such as a National Infrastructure Bank as proposed by President Obama.
There’s real potential to save oil by adopting such policies. Analyses have found that by following our recommendations we could cut oil consumption by more than a million barrels a day by 2030.
To sum up, we must use every tool at our disposal given the massive scale of the challenge. This means focusing on reforming our outdated, wasteful transportation law. I look forward to working with Congress and the President on this goal, for the sake of the Gulf, the planet, and future generations.
From their banner : Transportation For America .
The upper nav. bar has a link called “The Blueprint” that leads to their “The Route to Reform” page.
You need to run fast to chase an ambulance, but you seem to have your track shoes on.
A huge step would be returing to a 1-2 car family…just like the early 50-60s My sisters famliy has 6cars! everyone has a car plus a motorcycle!! this is happening all over suburan US ..and is totally not needed
Eric, with all due respect, you are stupid.
You see the evidence all around you why we need to shift out of highway spending to modes that don’t leave us at the mercy of the oil market, and dismiss those who are actually responding to it as opportunists.
You are stupid. That is all there is to it.
Sorry, but there is no ‘cure’ to America’s oil addiction…at least none that would be politically, economically, or socially desirable by an entire generation of consumers, and us Canadians, with billions of barrels of oil, are more than happy to be your hydrocarbon dealers.
Enhanced oil recovery (or even SAGD or THAI for bituman and/or heavy oil) is expensive and requires offensively high levels of natural gas and water. Shale deposits require horizontal drilling and sub-surface fracture, again expensive, all passed along as a higher cost to the end consumer. You can talk about electrification of the American car fleet all you want, but on a BTU basis, it ain’t gonna be wind or solar that electrifies those cars, it’ll be coal. Uranium? Again, us Canucks got plenty of it for you, but with a 10-year lead time for a new nuclear plant (notwithstanding and three-mile-island worries), don’t hold your breath there. And what about your manufacturing base (or lack-there-of), oil powered. Food production? Oil based. And how many petrochemicals are in your closet? It would scare you to know.
The only feasible solutions for your country is a combination of forced conservation/less consumption due to sustained high prices, and a gradual evolution of the way natural gas is employed as a transport fuel.
It’s call the ‘Built Environment’, and eight generations of presidents have not been able to destroy it. Also, it really is a BTU question. Nothing, and I mean nothing, compares to the energy output of burning oil. Sure you can build a windmill, just don’t expect the same qualty of life (at least in the materialistic sense).
Sorry, but your nation’s oil addiciton (and the world’s for that matter) doesn’t change without a lot of pain.
And I won’t even bother with the green perspective. There’s 2 billion Chinese and Indians who don’t really give a damn either way about emissions…just ask the South Africans, they’re running out of port capacity to ship all that coal to Mumbai and beyond.
- A Realistic Canadian
Omri, you are killing my self-esteem. Just killing it.
vancityguy,
like Glen said, we only need to go back about 60 years in terms of living patterns to drastically reduce oil consumption. That doesn’t sound like 8 generations of presidents to me. It’s not about destroying the built environment; it’s about going back to compact, small-town America that we have so thoroughly destroyed with the interstate highway system.
And indeed, there is an entire generation of consumers, those now in their 20′s, that has no money to consume because they are locked into our car-oriented culture and are saddled with the huge debts run up by previous generations. Getting off oil is extremely “politically, economically, or socially desirable” for them, because it would free up so much of their money to spend on what they want.
Compared to now, in the 60′s and 70′s public transit was more widespread and profitable (or closer to profitable). It simply lost out to the massively subsidized, socialist interstate highway boondoggle. It’s the Public Option of transportation – no one can compete with the government. And this all happened not too long ago, and rolling it back is going to be just as gradual as phasing it out.
What this article gets right, and what most people, including Obama, don’t understand, is that it’s not just about removing gas engines from our cars and replacing them with electric motors. It’s about public transit, freight rail, etc. But tied into this is land use, and this something the article omits. If we build a commuter rail line through suburbia where everyone has to drive to the park-and-ride at the transit stop, are we saving that much oil? Such a rail line would never be profitable and provide little service outside of rush hour. Transportation policy has to change so much from what we have now that communities will be forced to build transit-oriented development the way they are now forced to build sprawl, because highway money is all they ever see from the feds.
In other words, it will take more than just a change in transportation policy. Whatever happens has to change local land use policies as well.
[...] Top Enviro: To Kick Our Oil Habit, Rewrite Federal Transportation Law (Infrastructurist) [...]
We need to go FORWARD to livable walkable communities that improve our health, cut our carbon footprint, and make us happier! If everything that the federal government funds is required to meet LEED-ND standards or something similar, then we make extra cars less needed, make transit more efficient, and let Americans have more choices about getting around their communities.
We know that walkable communities reduce driving, increase walking, and get people out of cars. We know how to design and build walkable places, we know how to connect them, we have all the research showing that this makes a huge difference in oil consumption, as well as reducing obesity, depression, and death by car.
As a start, we could stop subsidizing cars at local, state, and federal levels. Everyone could demand that cities stop requiring off-street parking, and that all parking has to be charged to the user, so no more “free” parking anywhere. That, by itself, woudl reduce auto use and be more equitable. If you don’t drive, you still pay for parking because the cost of parking is built into the price of anything you buy.
[...] Top Enviro: To Kick Our Oil Habit, Rewrite Federal Transportation Law (Infrastructurist) [...]
Many in Hong Kong would dispute that their lifestyle is 60 years further back in time than Americans’.
And if you want to see profitable transit in the US, you’ll have to go to the 1920s. Even then, many lines were just loss leaders for developers, once the developers sold all the lots made accessible by the streetcars and the interurbans, they had no interest to maintain their lines.
lower speed limits to 12.5 mph. rewrite traffic liability to favor pedestrian/cyclist traffic. That’s all you have to do.
All pat on the back wishful thinking. Where are CNG or LNG cars and trucks? Where is CNG/LNG vehicle fueling infrastructure? With the typical “green” transport shills, why don’t they just outright say to tear down cities and replace them with tents and dirt walking trails so we can all live like in the 3rd world?
Boris,
“those now in their 20’s, [with] no money to consume because they are locked into our car-oriented culture and are saddled with the huge debts run up by previous generations. Getting off oil is extremely “politically, economically, or socially desirable” for them, because it would free up so much of their money to spend on what they want”
It’s a BTU efficiency question boris. By not burning fossil feuls (the best BTU per unit energy source in the history of civilization) a nation puts itself at an enourmous ecnomical disadvantage. You can produce/harvest/travel a lot more/longer on a barrel of oil than you can on a hour’s worth of wind/solar. If America (and my home, Canada) want to stay competitive on the world scale, an aggressive program of untilizing natural gas resources is the best course of action while seriously attempting to develop synthetic fuel alternatives that can at least hope to match oil’s BTU output.
I mean this with no offence, but many Americans have a serious handicap when it comes to conceptualizing the entire energy question, namely they can’t do it, because you’re nation has been the determining factor in energy consumption and world economic growth for several decades. Not anymore. By switching heavily away from fossil feuls, there will be ample replacement for your demand in emerging markets which will benefit from using higher output energy inputs, thus increasing the economic trajectories of their nations versus yours.
Stop deluding yourselves, green energy may turn your lights on, but it can never make your economy competitive with others that will continue to utilize fossil fuels.
That said, never rule out the power of American innovation.
People from Hong Kong, Switzerland, Sweden, France, Denmark, Iceland, and Singapore would beg to differ. They’ll in fact cite great economic progress made in their countries specifically from clean developments, such as high-density urban construction, mass transit, energy-efficient buildings, and various forms of fossil fuel-free energy. Each country has just a few clean tech items, but even that is enough to halve per capita oil consumption from US levels and cut carbon emissions by a factor of 3.
Simple solution. Available right now. Tested and proven. Low-tech. Immediate ROI.
.
free public transit
.
google it and learn… it is the private auto that is subsidized, directly and indirectly.
[...] could not be clearer, says Natural Resources Defense Council Executive Director Peter Lehner, in a guest post for the Infrastructurist. We need a new direction that moves America beyond oil and other dirty fuels. This is admittedly a [...]
[...] the country. And there are also more hopeful chances for change going on in government as well. Peter Lehner of the NRDC points at the transportation funding capability of congress as an area in which a lot of progress [...]
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