Freedom From Oil | David Sandalow | Talks at Google

Good afternoon. I'm Michael Terrell with google.org it is my great pleasure to welcome David Sandilo, here to talk about his new book, Freedom from Oil. David has a long and distinguished career in helping to shape public policy as it relates to energy and the environment. He currently is Energy and Environment Scholar at the Brookings Institution, also a Senior Fellow. And he for the past three years has chaired the Clinton Global Initiatives, Energy and Climate Change Working Group, which has a very close relationship with Google. Prior to that, David served as Assistant Secretary of State for Oceans, Environment and Science and the Clinton administration. And he held a joint appointment with the National Security Council and the Council on Environmental Quality in the White House where he advised President Clinton and Vice President Glower on international environmental issues. It's my great pleasure to welcome David Sandilo.

Thank you, Michael. It is great to be here. It's great to be at Google. It's great to be with friends. I am here with some really old friends. I can't tell you how great it is to be with Dan Riker. I've been a student of Dan Riker's for a long, long time, as have anybody else who's been working around renewable energy and clean energy. Has been a student of dance for many years. I intend to continue being a student for many years. And Michael Terrell, let me tell you, Google has done many smart things in its life, but hiring Michael Terrell, watch out, world. Google is really on the way now. So it is great to. And it's just great to be here with Larry Brilliant and John Lyman and Kirsten Olson and some other people I've had the privilege to work with. It's tremendous. So, you know, one of my favorite magazines in the world, it seems very appropriate for this place is the Funny Times. Does anybody here know the Funny Times? If you don't know the Funny Times, I recommend right after this, go and get a subscription to it. It's a monthly anthology of humor and they just gather great stu every month. And they had this thing on obvious headlines recently. And the idea was these are headlines that, like, you can't believe somebody really is getting paid money to do this. And like, one of them was man killed police, suspect homicide. Man killed police. Police raid gun shop, find weapons. Okay. Larger kangaroos jump farther, study fines. Somebody got paid a lot of money to figure that out. Or my favorite is prostra cancer, more common in men. Or Islamic center has Muslim ties. So, you know. So these are obvious headlines that are out there. It seems to me over the course of the past Five or ten years. Other obvious headlines that are out there include, oil prices reach record highs. I mean, we're talking in a week right now in which oil prices are, for the first time in history, looking like they might go over $100 a barrel. World temperatures reach record highs. We've had record temperatures in what, 11 out of the past 12 years have been among the world's hottest. And troops sent off to the Persian Gulf. And a couple of years ago, as I was kind of thinking about these issues and all the energy and environment issues I'd worked on for so many years and thinking about what binds these things together, it became clear that oil and our oil dependence was a driving factor behind all of these things. And oil dependence is something that people have been talking about for many, many years. But I wondered, why is it that we've been making so little progress on this issue? And that really is what drove me to do the work that led to this book. And so I thought what I'd do today is just offer a few of the basic insights that are in the book, which I had a great time writing, and then answer any questions. So the first, in many ways, the central observation, does this work? I'd love to walk away from the podium if I can. The central observation that I have from working on this is that the fundamental issue that we face is the lack of substitutes for oil in our cars and trucks. And think about it this way. If I am thirsty and I don't feel like this water that you just gave me, I could ask for a soda or orange juice or milk. If I'm hungry and I don't want a hamburger, I can have vegetables or pasta. If I want to relax, and I don't feel like reading a book or watching a mov. Watch television or talk with friends. If I want to go any place at any great distance in most places in this country and I don't want to use petroleum, I am basically out of luck. Maybe I'm not going too far and I can ride a bicycle. In a few places in the country, like here in the Bay Area, you actually have electric trains. But most places in the country, we need petroleum. Petroleum is 96% of the energy in our cars and trucks, both in the country and around the world. And it seems normal to that it should be like that. It seems normal because we grew up with that. Our parents grew up with that, our grandparents grew up with that. But it's actually fundamentally abnormal to have an entire global transportation system that relies upon one fuel. And I Think what we need to do is transition away from this one fuel to a choice of fuels that are cleaner than petroleum. And if we do that, that's the key to solving the problem. So a second insight that came from the research I was doing on this is to solve this problem, nothing would do more good, more quick than making cars that connect to the electric grid. Nothing would do more good, more quickly than making cars that connect to the electric grid. Plug ins are key. Now, over the course of the past five years, 10 years, we've made big progress in electrification of the car, of the auto fleet. We now have a million hybrids that are out on the road in the United States, and the fleet is growing quickly. And people here probably know that a hybrid engine is a mixture between an internal gasoline engine and an electric motor. It switches back and forth between the two. The electric motor is, is recharged by energy that's captured from the braking system and is captured from other parts of the engine. But it lacks one key feature, which is that you can't plug it into the grid. And as a result of that, it is limited in its ability to help get us off of oil. And here's the key point. As I said, we have 96% of the energy in our cars and trucks are oil. Only 3% of the energy in our electric system is oil. We essentially don't use oil to make electricity. So if we want to get cars and trucks off of oil, the best thing we can do is connect to the electric grid, which has an infrastructure that reaches into every home with plugs and every business with plugs. Now, here at Google, you know a lot about plug ins. Most people in the country don't know a lot about plug ins. I will tell you I've been greeted by a lot of skepticism talking about this topic until about two months ago when I am now able to say, I'm driving one everybody. And I've been out on the road driving converted Prius. They took the spare tire out, they put in a lithium ion battery. It's actually pretty light because lithium is the third lightest element and the lightest metal. And a plug. And I go home every night and I plug it into my garage with a regular extension cord. It gets about 30 or 35 miles on a charge. It only uses gasoline if I go up a steep hill or if I accelerate hard right out of the stoplight. And I was driving it out for like a month or two, actually for a week or two. And I called the company that owns this car and I said, I'm so excited, I'm getting 120 miles a gallon. And the guy said, what? That's ridiculous. We get much better than 120 miles a gallon. How come you're only getting 120? Come on, let's let you drive it around. We drove around and we went out. They had this incredibly sensitive gauge. We drove around for seven miles. We used less than a tenth of a gallon of gasoline. And of course we're doing this. The gauge showed 343 miles per gallon. And you know, by the way, this car is not made to go with flex fuel like E85 ethanol, but you could do that. And if you did that, you would be, you know, getting like 1500 miles per gallon of petroleum product with your car. This technology is here. It's, you know, it's happening now. So the second really important point is if we want to do the most good most quickly in terms of getting off of oil, the way to do it is by connecting cars to the electric grid. The comment, the question I get most frequently about this topic, I talk about it is, but is it good for global warming? And it's an absolutely central question because of course, if you plug a car into the electric grid, the energy has to come from somewhere. And in lots of the United States, that somewhere will be a coal fired power plant. And we know that coal fired power plants are the biggest single cause of global warming. So the question is, is it good for global warming to do this? And the happy answer is, yes, it is a very good thing to do. And the reason is because electric motors are so much more efficient than internal combustion engines. Electric motor, if you think about it, that internal combustion engine that you've been driving around your whole life, if you drive it more than a couple of miles, it gets too hot to touch. And we have a radiator system that is designed entirely to cool the thing down. All of that energy is wasted. All that heat is wasted energy. An electric motor is much higher efficiency rate than internal combustion engine. If you, if you plug a car directly into a coal plant, you are doing better from a global warming standpoint than if you run a car a regular internal combustion Internet oil. And the good news is that our grid is only about 50% coal. So if you plug a car into a regular outlet, you're doing much better from a global warming standpoint than if you run a car on oil. And the real answer here is, is to plug cars into windmills, either kind of literally or figuratively through the grid. I was down in Texas last week and their utility manager was telling me that they've got lots of wind resources, but the wind mainly blows at night, which isn't great from a utility manager standpoint because we need a lot less electricity at night. With wind power and plug ins, you can use wind, recharge the batteries in your car at night, drive during the day. You're literally sailing along on the wind. It's a great solution. So that's plug ins. A couple of other thoughts from this book. Biofuels are an important part of this answer. When I started writing this book about two years ago, almost everybody I talked to was in favor of ethanol. It was amazing. The pendulum has swung and now as I travel around, I get many more skeptical questions and critical questions about ethanol than I do positive questions about I am a cautious optimist on ethanol. I think ethanol has an important role to play in our transportation system. Corn based ethanol, which we currently use, is a transitional fuel at best. I think we're going to move to other types of feedstocks, but ethanol can help us get off of oil. I've looked at the literature on the environmental impacts of corn based ethanol. From a global warming standpoint, I think it's about 20% better than gasoline, which is okay, you know, it's not going to save the world. But by the way, a lot of hybrids out there that people are enthusiastic about get about 20% improvement over internal combustion engine, regular internal combustion engines. So even carbase ethanol is positive. But the real transition here is towards cellulosic sources like switchgrass. And that is a technology that is coming. It's not fully here, but it's coming. I mean, it's not fully here in an economic rates that people can afford. So I think there's potential for ethanol. It's really a way of promoting rural development in a lot of places as well. So there's plenty of potential there. One of the things I do in this book, which I had a lot of fun with, was go around and talk to different people in different parts of the country. And I write the stories of about 10 people in the country working on this and a couple of them are from right here in the Bay Area. One of them is Vinod Khosla, who people here I think know well. Finod's been an IT investor and is now one of the major clean energy investors. And he says you can get off of gasoline completely in 25 years with cellulosic ethanol. And I read the lyrics on this and I had a conversation with him. And I said, look, you know, I've read this and this is a wildly optimistic projection. And his response was he came back and he said, look, there's so much money and there's so much brain power going into this industry right now and cellulose and ethanol, that there are going to be breakthroughs and we're going to be able to totally transform our fuel supply. He could be right. He's been right about some other things. Another person I write about in the book, by the way, is from the Bay Area is Mark Eberhard, who started the Tesla Motors. And those of you who don't know about Tesla, it's a all electric sports car. It's not even a hybrid that goes zero to 60 in, I think under four seconds. It's just, you know, amazing acceleration. And I mean, the basic problem with the Tesla as a way of getting America off of oil is that it costs $98,000. And so I asked Martin, how are you going to save America with a $98,000 sports car? And his answer was interesting. He said, he said, look, he said, think of flat screen and plasma TVs. He said, this is the way you introduce premium products. He said, when flat screen TVs, TVs first came out, they cost $6,000. Only a tiny fraction of the public could afford them. But they were cool. They were instantly cool, in part because they were that expensive. The price came down with volume, as they do with many technologies. And we're going to do the same thing with sports cars and with electric cars. He said, the basic problem with electric cars right now is they tend to be boxy things that only people who are into pain and suffering like to drive. He said. And he said, that's ridiculous. You get instant torque with electric cars. You know, let's use them. They've got a thing on the Tesla website. I haven't experienced this myself, but they claim that their favorite thing to do is to put passenger into the car, potential customer. And then they say, you know, turn on the radio. And the instant they say turn on the radio, they accelerate. And the G forces are so great that you can't reach the radio shows the power of the car. I write about coal in this book. I am not saying I do not support the development of liquid coal as a replacement for oil. For those who know this issue, liquid coal is potentially politically controversial. It's been touted by some as a way of using domestic US Resources for oil or for our transportation vehicles. We've got a lot of Coal out in the United States. The core problem is that it's about twice as bad from a global warming standpoint to use coal as it is to use oil. If you put. It's kind of like going cutting pasta out of your diet and replacing it with chocolate cake or something like that, it's not going to get you where you want to go. There are ways theoretically of doing better, but I think it requires sequestration technologies that are only being developed right now at the scale that we need them. So that's a little bit about the technologies. A word about the politics. What I do in this book, I had a lot of fun doing it. Some of us worked in government together who were here. This book starts with a memo to the President. It opens, the President says, I'm going to give a speech on oil dependence in a month. And it says to his or her Cabinet and senior aides, what should I say? And the rest of the book is a debate between different members of the Cabinet and the White House staff about what should be said. And just like in the real world, there are a lot of disagreements about, you know, exactly what should be said. And at the end it culminates with a big speech by the President. But I guess I would make this observation on the politics of this issue, which is about a year ago, I had lunch with Newt Gingrich and about 30 other people. And he's a brilliant guy. I agree or disagree with his politics. He's got a lot of thoughts and a lot of questions. And since I was writing this book, I asked him what should I, you know, what do you think we should do about the problem of oil dependence? And within a few weeks I had dinner with Howard Dean, also a brilliant guy and chair of the Democratic National Committee and also about 20 or 30 other people. And I asked him the same question. And both Newt Gingrich and Howard Dean said basically the same thing in the answer to my question. It amazed me. It kind of blew my mind. I mean, both Newt Gingrich and Howard Dean said oil dependence is a national security problem that we have to address as a matter of priority. Both of them said ethanol's a big part of the answer. Both of them said, we need a Manhattan Project type research effort in order to get off of this. And both of them said, the fuel efficiency of our fleet must improve. If these two guys basically agree, maybe this is a problem that we could actually solve. The polling data on this is really compelling. It's about 90% of the public thinks that oil dependence is a serious problem. You start looking at the positions of the major political figures on this and there is a lot more agreement than disagreement all the way across the political spectrum. So I think this is an agenda that we can really make progress on. I've been out talking on radio shows for the past couple of weeks. I've been doing Fox radio, progressive radio, small business radio everywhere I go. So people are asking basically sympathetic questions. They want to get to a good place on this. So I really think there's a lot of opportunity here. And I guess that's a closing thought about one place I visited. I went to Reynolds, Indiana, which is a town between Indianapolis and Gary, 547 people. And they have decided that they are going to live on renewable resources alone. That this town is committed to moving towards an entirely renewable resource based system. And they're making great progress. It's not easy for a little town to do this on its own, but they're in the middle of the corn belt and they built an ethanol plant. They got Verisun to build an ethanol plant nearby. They got GM to give them some, donate some flex fuel cars and they bought some more. They got a gas station to dispense B85 and they've got a transportation system that is almost entirely running on ethanol at this point. They're moving to the electricity system right now to do this. And they want to get completely off the grid. They've got a lot of livestock and they've built. They're going to use waste from the livestock to generate electricity. And the town president there told me that the main challenge here, he said, is that if you want to get something done, if it's never been done before, people won't believe it and people just don't believe it if it's ever been done. And I think that is, you know, a core part of the challenge. But I was going there and as I was driving back, I rented for the first time a GPS box. And I was like, first time I had done this and the box was telling me, you know, turn right in 100 yards, turn left in 600ft, and that type of thing. And I was thinking, you know, when I was a kid, we never, not only didn't we have boxes that told you to turn left at 100ft, I never even dreamed of the concept of a box that would tell me to turn left in 100ft as I drove along. And I was wondering, so when my kids are, you know, my age, when my teenage kids are my age, what is it? That they're going to be looking back on and saying exactly the same thing about what technology will be unimaginable. And I think with all the energy, with all the dynamism that's going into this whole clean energy area, that it's going to be something in this area and that with the creativity, the inspiration and the intentions that are going to this right now that we will be free of oil. So thanks very much.

David, talk to us a little bit about car companies.

One second for all the folks at YouTube.

For all the folks at YouTube, thank you for all that you do. David, talk to us a little bit about car companies. The fastest way to get a decrease in average amount of gasoline per mile is to get a lot of plug in hybrids and electric cars out there. The biggest impediment is the car companies and their argument is that there's not enough demand and that they don't know how to rapidly retool. How can we help persuade them what data they need, what's going on inside of their boardrooms and what are their economic motivators that we need to know about?

It's a great question, Larry, and it's exactly the right one. I grew up in Michigan, in southeast Michigan and the towns around where I grew up have been devastated by what's happened in the car industry in the past quarter century. And it's really the lack of vision and leadership on the part of some of the companies that that have led to this situation. The good news here is that some of the car companies at least have started to really see the opportunity here. And General Motors is, I say, in the lead at this point on plug in hybrids and they've announced the Volt and the View and I think they are looking at whether or not there's going to be a market for this and whether the battery technology works. Right. I think the most, the best thing that could be done at this point is to get conversions out on the road and demonstrate the market for these things. I mean, this car that I've been driving around, it seems to me is a walking testament or a driving testament. It's a testament on wheels for the market power of cars that plug into the grid. And so I think we need to demonstrate that with conversions. And when they're these conversions are going to be available on a market basis within the year, I think. And if they really start to take off, I think that the car companies won't help but take notice. Toyota is obviously a key player here in working with Toyota is key. Toyota have a key set of relationships in terms of battery supply. And I think a company like Google can spend some time with the Toyota executives and really make sure that they're moving in the right direction.

Just because it's for YouTube. I don't know if everybody knows what Neil Young is doing. He has a Mark 31958 Lincoln Continental convertible, which is the largest and heaviest.

American car ever made.

It's approximately the size of three boats. And he has converted it to be a plug in hybrid. And he's driving all over the United States picking up hitchhikers and as they get into his car and he has a captive audience, he's interviewing about what they think about climate change. I can't wait to see the movie.

Great.

If anybody has any questions also Herb on the Mountain, you can pop up. You'd like to ask any questions.

Hi.

I was wondering what advice you would give to developing countries that have like some have a rapidly increasing demand for oil or energy resources. Maybe if you could talk about what they could do sort of before citizens are consuming energy at the level that like individual citizens are in this country. And if they can sort of there's a solution before citizens are consuming as much as we need.

It's a very central question. And right now tens of millions of Chinese citizens are in the position to have vehicles for the first time. It's happening in India and other countries. And so building the right type of infrastructure is incredibly important. I think there are a couple of principles here. First, don't repeat the same mistakes that industrial companies, industrial countries made. And there are so many of them. Build cleaner car fleets is one. And from day one, countries can start building car fleets that attach to the grid and that aren't entirely reliant on petroleum. There's also a basic principle here, and I didn't have a chance to talk about it about mass transit. And you know, building more roads does not solve traffic problems. It's not well understood. But there's a lot of experience with widening. Am I good here? There's a lot of experience with widening roads in order to solve traffic problems. And then as soon as the road is widened, more traffic just comes onto the road. And in so many developing countries right now, where congestion problems are are terrible. That basic principle and not just building more roads for more cars is I think central to the solution and making sure the mass transit facilities are developed and not just road widening. There's one, Somebody said that building more roads in order to solve traffic problems is like widening your belt in order to lose weight. It just doesn't work. And so it's. But that principle needs to be applied. I also, I write in the book just related to this about oil diplomacy. And oil diplomacy forever in this country has meant securing more oil. I mean, that's the meaning of the phrase. And it seems to me we need to broaden the concept of oil diploma of what oil diplomacy means. Maybe a problem, sir?

Yes.

I can just stand here. That's good. We should broaden oil diplomacy to also include conservation alternatives. I mean, we have an incredible set of aligned motivations with China right now. I mean, common objectives with China in terms of preserving and conserving oil. And so oil diplomacy needs to be a broader concept that includes working together on conservation technologies. David, am I on?

I guess I'm there. David, thank you so much. Great presentation. Great book. Really pleased you can be here. Love your thoughts about whether we're going to see an increase in the CAFE fuel economy standards this year? Number two, when are we going to see a price on carbon via US Climate legislation? Both of those obviously key to getting our arms around the oil problem.

I write in the book about fuel efficiency standards, and I say that we need to change them in certain ways. And one of the things we need to do is just get rid of the label. And I talk about fuel reduction in energy efficiency standards, which stands free. We need freedom standards, and these freedom standards should be increasing the fuel efficiency of our fleet at 4% a year, which seems to me basic. It's something that's been talked about, but. And it's part of the debate on Capitol Hill right now. But it needs to be. It just needs to be in law. If engineers know what objectives they're shooting for, they can hit those objectives. And we need to say clearly that the fuel efficiency of our fleet is going to increase at 4% every year. And we need to make other basic changes, but we need to be increasing the fuel efficiency of our fleet. I don't know, Dan, whether it's going to pass this year. You know, it's. I think there was more basis for optimism months ago maybe, than there is right now. We'll see. I think this is. It's a challenging set of issues, you know, from a political standpoint, and there's some big players on both sides. I will say that if you look at where this was three years ago, it's just amazing how much more support there is now for the fuel efficiency standards. And if it doesn't happen this year, I think it's going to happen very soon. I think the momentum behind it is pretty strong. And even stronger, I think, is the momentum behind some type of cap and trade legislation or some type of price on carbon. This is going to happen and I'm offering even money bets. Anybody who wants to bet even money that we're going to have cap and trade legislation or some type of price of carbon in the United States in the next four years, I'm taking the bet. It's going to happen and you know, potentially even sooner than that. And my prediction guess is it's going to be a cap and trade program. There's an increasing amount of talk about a carbon tax and I've actually been amazed at how many times I've been asked in the past month kind of cap and trade versus carbon tax, which is going to be there's. But still I think that the political culture in this country is much more favorable towards a cap and trade program. We've had much more success politically in implementing cap and trade programs. We just have this record of success. So I think we'll have a cap and trade program. And I think by the way, when that happens, it is going to be, without exaggeration, the most important legislation on Capitol Hill since Medicare. I mean, there's going to be tens of billions of dollars of value. It's going to be a huge debate and hugely significant for the future of the United States and the world.

I was wondering what your thoughts were as far as whether or not you feel there are any lessons to be learned with the situation in Brazil and their conversion to ethanol, cane based ethanol.

There are, absolutely. For those who aren't familiar with this, about a little bit less than half of the gasoline in Brazil has been replaced with ethanol. And it dates back to the 1970s when the Brazilians saw high oil prices and low sugar prices and decided this is crazy and they could make fuel out of their sugar. And they put in place a program to do it. And it was wildly successful for about 10 years. Then commodity price prices flipped and the program had a lot of trouble, but the Brazilians stuck with it. And one of the lessons that I learned from looking at Brazil is that consistency counts. That the Brazilians stuck with their ethanol program through some ups and downs. And today it's become a really important factor in their economy. And so I think we've had the opposite in many ways. In some of our energy programs they kind of of wildly vacillate from year to year and so consistency really counts. Another lesson to be learned is that there are jobs to be created in these industries. I mean, we have seen the Brazilians, hundreds of thousands of jobs in the ethanol industry. Another lesson, which is, I think one that is just becoming clear, is you have to be that you have to be careful on the environmental side, that there can be some downsides on the environmental side. And there is increasing concern in ethanol right now about sugarcane plantations displacing cattle in the south towards the north, where it is then leading to clearing of the Amazon. And so we need to be careful and attentive to those types of issues. And I think a lot of work needs to be done on sustainability standards for biofuels and making sure that not all biofuels are created equal and to make sure that the biofuels that are used in the fleet are produced sustainably. By the way, on this whole issue, there's amazing ironies, and we've been ranting against imported oil in this country for 30 years. We have no tariffs whatsoever on the import of oil. We do have tariffs against import of the leading alternative to oil, which is ethanol, which comes from Brazil and from the Caribbean mainly. There's some very, very rich ironies there. Question from Irvine. Can anyone hear me okay? Yes. Okay. You mentioned that 3% of the electricity on the grid comes from oil. I'm wondering how much of that energy in the grid comes not from sunlight, Nuclear, for example. So, I mean, in the most narrow sense about, if you mean not solar power, then 99% of the energy in the grid, or more than 99%, comes not from solar power. I mean, you know, a scientist could give you a different answer, if that's what you mean. I mean, you could also, of course, say that any type of fossil fuel ultimately came from sunlight, but is that what that's what you're asking? Yeah, I mean, solar power is less than 1% of the energy in the grid. It's about 50% coal, 20% nuclear, 20% natural gas, about 8% renewable resources, including hydro, which is the bulk of that, and about 2 or 3% oil. Those percentages vary a little bit by 1% or 2 every year, but that's ballpark.

So I was wondering, with the 2008 elections coming up, if there are any candidates on either side or on both sides who particularly stand out in terms of their willingness to maybe move on these issues.

There are, I don't want to get into naming kind of individuals and kind of who's kind of specifically who's better than others. I would definitely commend you going to their websites and today we're meeting on a day in which Senator Clinton has just put out a new energy plan which talks about a lot of these issues. You know, go look at what she has said. She's been talking about the Salt Center, Obama has been talking about it a lot, Edwards, Richardson, and on the Republican side, John McCain has been talking about the global warming issue. A lot of. I think this is an issue that is bipartisan and that any of these candidates can take on, in my opinion, and I think they will on different sides of the aisle. I mean, I'm a Democrat and I worked in the Clinton White House. But I'm really honored that Richard Lugar, who's a Republican from Indiana and chair of the ranking, ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, did the forward for my book. And I think this is an issue that has been winning support everywhere.

I have a question with regards to innovation and government playing more of an active role in that innovation. Do you see scenarios recently I've heard statistics, for example, for every dollar that a barrel of oil goes up, it translates to approximately $100 million for the Pentagon in energy and the amount of petroleum they use. And an organization such as darpa, which of course had a key role in the Internet. Would they have that kind of role in the future or now in starting to establish taking the lead on innovation with regards to energy?

Absolutely. And I write in the book about General Richard Zilmer, who was the commander of Western forces, of US Forces out in western Iraq until about a year ago. And he got out there and he looked around and he said, you know, I am losing good men and women in fuel cuts, convoys more than for any other purpose. And I am out in a desert where we have lots of wind and lots of sun. Why are we shipping fuel back and forth to the front line, you know, petroleum and literally costing men and women their lives in order to get US Petroleum products out to the front line. And so he put in category one priority one renewable, priority one request for renewable energy at the front lines. And the Pentagon was able to, to respond in part, they had some combat ready renewable energy resources, but not as much as they wanted. And so there's a crash program underway right now for combat ready solar power, combat ready, you know, highly transportable wind power type technologies. And that's just the tip of the iceberg, I think, in terms of the potential of the Pentagon to make a difference here. I think the DARPA model is a very interesting one. And there's proposals for something called ARPA E in Washington, which would kind of replicate that in the energy area. And that type of thing can make a huge difference for sure.

David, you advocate for a wide array of policies in your book to meet this challenge. If the next president does not take such a comprehensive approach and only chooses to go after one or two, what do you think they should be?

That's a tough one. I mean, I start in the book with the symbolic, and I think the next president should say that every car that he or she drives in, starting in six or 12 months is going to be a plug in flex fuel hybrid. But I would quickly go beyond the symbolic to the substantive and the, you know, and there's a key set of policies around federal procurement and, and it relates to the question on innovation too. The Federal government buys 60,000 cars a year outside of the military. And that is an incredible opportunity to transform the production of automobiles in this country. And the federal government could and should put out an open order for plug in flex fuel hybrid cars and say that they'll pay a premium and that they want half of the cars every year to be plug in a flex fuel hybrid. That would make a huge difference. So would consumer incentives like consumer tax credits. And then there's no question that the biggest, most potent tool would be a gasoline tax of some kind. And I write about this in the book and I also write about the political challenges associated with that. I end up in the book after discussing the pros and cons and the politics. I propose a 10 cent a gallon increase for five years each year, for five years. And I'd say rebate that money back to you to families to make sure it's not regressive. This is not. It doesn't have a regressive impact and it's kind of gimmicky. But I propose paying checks and mailing them out right before July 4th every year. So people kind of, you know, start to associate these checks arriving before the Independence Day holiday with this whole agenda. But I think it'd be policies in that area.

Are there any other questions from either Mountain View or Irvine?

Hello. Thanks for being here. You mentioned Detroit. I grew up in Detroit and both my grandparents, maternal and paternal, worked on the Ford assembly line. And that was a great way to come to the country, make some money. Obviously, time change, maybe in 100 years. My great, great grandkids, I worked at Google. But the question I have is how do you change the mind of the average Joe? And I think it's important that we realize part of the reason the Prius succeeded was coolness and, you know, sort of celebrity and all that. It feels like the people in this room, your book, it's a complicated topic that we can understand. It doesn't feel like there are specific metrics. I was at the Green Tech Awards for California John Doerr speak the other week. Your head kind of spins with metrics. And I'm wondering if there are any efforts anywhere to sort of simplify the message and have a clear presentation of what, what's going on with data that's, you know, not refutable.

You know, here's the good news. I think that Americans minds have been changed on this. I mean, Americans are sick and tired of being dependent on oil. You know, they're sick right now. If oil prices go up, you really have two choices, which is pay more or drive less. That's it. And people are sick and tired of that and they want a different type of approach. And the impact of oil on our national security has become really clear. The way 911 has played out and the Iraq war has played out. And increasingly global warming is a concern too. So I've been talking to folks all over the country and you know, I've done a lot of rural radio stations. I did one in central Illinois just earlier today at a Christian college. And it's everywhere I talk to people there's this real concern about this issue. So I think the problem is clear. And I think once we have vehicles on the road that help to address this problem, people are going to be snapping them up for sure. So I don't see that as a huge challenge.

I hope that's true.

Yeah, I think a lot of people.

Buying SUVs, I see a lot of people chugging tons of money into their car every day. So it's trending positively.

No question.

All the data supports that.

Well, people want big cars, there's no question about that. But people, we can have big cars that are a lot better for the environment, that are a lot better for our national security than the ones that we have right now. We don't have to build these cars that get 10 miles a gallon in order to have, in order to have room to put your fourth four kids in. And you know, we haven't talked that much today about mass transit, but we talked a little bit about it. But I'm also, I think in urban areas in particular, there's a huge enthusiasm and interest for mass transit in this country.

Any other questions? Thank you very much.

My pleasure. Thank you very much.