 "Photo: Dawn Jones-Garcia")
Electric cars top David Sandalow's list of solutions for America's dependency on oil.
The Brookings Institution senior fellow spoke Monday at UT to an audience of about 100 people about the country's oil addiction, global warming and the impact of energy policies.
During the Clinton administration, Sandalow served as an assistant secretary of state and served jointly as senior director for the National Security Council, among other posts. Sandalow authored "Freedom From Oil: How the Next President Can End the United States' Oil Addiction."
Roger Duncan, deputy general manager of Austin Energy; Michael Webber, engineering assistant professor; and Eugene Gholz, public affairs assistant professor, joined Sandalow in a panel discussion about U.S. energy policy that was sponsored by the Center for International Energy and Environmental Policy.
Sandalow summarized the question his book tried to answer - how to end America's oil addiction - during his talk.
"We have essentially no substitutes in our global transportation options," Sandalow said. "If you want to do something about that, nothing would do more good more quickly than making cars that connect to the electric grid."
He said electric cars still generate less carbon emissions than combustion engines even though electricity is produced by coal because they are much more
efficient.
Acknowledging widespread criticism of corn-based ethanol such as the water consumption needed to grow corn and the energy costs in developing it, Sandalow said it encourages development of vehicles that can run on petroleum or ethanol and an infrastructure that could one day be used with other types of ethanol created from plants such as switch grass and sugar cane.
Sandalow recounted eating dinner with former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean on separate occasions. He said they both agreed oil dependence is a national security issue and that the country needs a project with the kind of government involvement exhibited in the Manhattan Project, which began the atomic age. Fuel efficiency is a large part of the solution, he said.
Webber said the oil dependence problem is not a new political dialogue.
"Every president since Nixon has set as a target that we're going to get off oil, import oil or Middle East oil, and every year we import more oil despite all of those pledges, because we don't really back it up," Webber said.
He said that oil is hard to replace because it does things that no other fuel can do, such as not freeze at 30,000 feet.
Webber said he believes Americans should focus more on cultural shifts such as telecommuting and driving less than electric transportation.
Gholz then asked Duncan what kind of problems the country needs to overcome to get everyone to drive an electric car.
"I think you're going to see three or four commercial models of plug-in hybrids on the streets within the next two to three years," Duncan said. "So the technical problems are not that great to overcome. I think the whole question of how fast we transition to electric grid is based on the question of peak oil."
Duncan then said that if the country has a supply problem with oil, the transition could happen much faster.
Sandalow said the oil dependency and climate problem is a bipartisan issue that the next president "can hit out of the ball park."
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