Press Release

Table of Contents

Preface

Chapter 1: Summary and Recommendations

Chapter 2: Energy System Security Criteria

Chapter 3: The Bush Administration and the IEER Energy Plans

Chapter 4: Vulnerability Comparison: The Bush and IEER Energy Plans

Chapter 5: Policy Recommendations

References

Our work on the technical feasibility aspects for the United States was almost complete early this fall, when the September 11 attack took place. In view of the many infrastructure vulnerabilities, many associated with energy, that have been revealed to be much more serious than generally realized, IEER decided to publish a preliminary report on our project as soon as possible. An examination of IEER's past research, other past assessments of energy vulnerabilities, and the Bush energy plan,¹ which was not reviewed or changed in light of September 11, led us to this decision. The evaluation of energy system vulnerabilities in this report shows that existing vulnerabilities are serious and that the Bush plan would make them far more so.

We decided to publish this preliminary report because the United States is at a crossroads, and is set to make major decisions on energy policy at least as momentous, possibly far more so, than were made in the 1970s during the two energy crises of that period (1973-74 and 1979-80). Vulnerability assessments prepared as a result of those crises, notably the second one, have been all but ignored in official policy as energy receded from the center of the scene with the decline of oil prices that began in the early 1980s and the collapse of oil prices in 1986.

The 1991 Gulf War brought oil back to the center of the picture, but only very briefly. Energy policy continued to fade as a subject of coherent, central debate in the U.S. body politic, until the advent of the Bush-Cheney administration in January 2001.

It will never be possible to eliminate all vulnerabilities and risks to terrorist attack, war, severe accidents, and mistakes. But it is possible to achieve objectives that will greatly reduce the attractiveness of major elements of the energy system as targets of attack and also to reduce the consequences of an attack should one occur. These two goals are mutually reinforcing in that reducing the consequences of an attack also reduces the risk of one. Terrorists such as those who perpetrated the mass murders of September 11, seek to create fear, damage, and havoc on a large scale. Such vulnerabilities can be eliminated in many cases and greatly reduced in others. Unfortunately, the course advocated by the Bush administration would greatly increase those vulnerabilities. We present this preliminary report as a contribution to the national and international debate on energy and security that is now taking place.

This report is also limited in scope in that we have compared the Bush and IEER energy plans under the assumption of a similar overall economic evolution of major social systems. For instance, we assume no change from business-as-usual on transportation, whether by car or aircraft. We assume continued growth at historical levels in both these areas, for three decades for cars and four decades for air travel. We do not assume that there will be major changes in the approach to agriculture even though the increase of urban agriculture, using the land associated with single family homes, would greatly reduce some food system vulnerabilities. We do not assume that multiple modes of transport: walking, bicycles, public transport, and cars in a mixed mode on a wide scale in cities, even though this would provide resilience in the face of a severe attack on any one mode. These and other changes should be debated far more intensively and seriously than they have been in light of September 11. Changes in these directions will have great collateral benefits for the urban environment, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and making the energy system more flexible, in addition to potential security improvements. But they are beyond the scope of this report.

We also do not include detailed considerations of some parts of the infrastructure such as refineries, liquid natural gas terminals, and pipelines. The vulnerabilities of such parts of the infrastructure have been discussed in prior works, notably that commissioned by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, published in 1980, and the book by Amory Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins, Brittle Power, published in 1982.² The IEER plan would result in a reduction in vulnerabilities in these areas, due to a reduction on dependence on both oil as a whole and on imported oil in particular, but some vulnerabilities in relation to natural gas will remain at about the same level as the Bush plan. We have not attempted to devise additional scenarios in this preliminary report. The reduction of fossil fuel related infrastructure vulnerabilities is to a substantial extent related to the greater use of hydrogen derived from local renewable energy sources, which will be a component of IEER's final report.

IEER's staff research on the energy report is being done by Sriram Gopal, Staff Scientist, and by Annie Makhijani, Project Scientist. I thank them both for their fine work, without which this report could not have been prepared in a short time. I have particularly used the research done by Sriram Gopal, who has been collecting and doing write-ups on the technologies associated most with the US case study. He also prepared the graphs and charts published in this report. Special thanks also go to Lois Chalmers, IEER's librarian, who helped secure the documents and prepared the bibliography. Of course, as the author, I am responsible for the contents of this report, including any errors and omissions that may remain in it.

This report has undergone internal review as well as brief external review, which is considerably short of the normal review for such projects. That is, while we have carefully checked our overall approach and calculations, we have not subjected them to intensive external review. We will perform that review as part of the completion of IEER's work on energy and publication of our case studies. The unusual publication of this preliminary report has been occasioned by the gravity and urgency of the present situation in the United States.

This report is a part of IEER's global outreach project, which is funded by grants from the W. Alton Jones Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and by general support grants for IEER's work on nuclear issues from the Ford Foundation, the HKH Foundation, the Turner Foundation, the Rockefeller Financial Services, the New Land Foundation, and Colombe Foundation. We thank them for their generous support of our work.

Arjun Makhijani
Takoma Park, Maryland
November 2001

Next: Chapter 1: Summary and Recommendations

1. Bush Energy Plan 2001
2. Brittle Power can be downloaded in full from the web site of the Rocky Mountain Institute, www.rmi.org.