8:00 p.m. EST January 21, 2009, Dawn of the New Energy Order

September 21, 2008

Here's a little speech we worked up for the next President to deliver at 8 p.m. eastern standard time on his first day in office. Say something good and we'll tuck it into the final draft which publishes before the election. We're told this speech could go viral, and with a few tweaks, be delivered by the next President. So, if you want to touch history, if you want a piece of the first democratically crafted presidential speech ever, jump in. (Like the democratically crafted movie "Snakes," only without the flop part). This speech could well be the marker for the dawn of the New Energy Order.

Click here to read the speech.

"Good evening, America. It is unusual for the President to launch a major initiative on Day One, but these are unusual times. Our energy situation, in fact our nation's future, is precarious. We are dangerously dependent on oil. By importing two thirds of the stuff, we are fomenting the greatest transfer of wealth in history, and thus are mortgaging our children's future. Our electrical grid is brittle and outdated. Our energy use impacts the planet we depend on for sustenance. This crisis did not happen in a day (we've been talking about it since President Eisenhower) but it has become clear to all in recent years that we are in crisis.

Imagine for a moment a world where you plug your car into your garage to recharge from the renewable energy setup that you own. Your car charges from quiet, low profile wind generators on your roof that tap the steady night breeze. You don't pay an electricity bill, and sometimes you even sell excess energy you've produced back to the grid. At your office parking garage twenty miles away, you plug into a similar setup. You quickly "top off" your battery, with the help of a smart car-grid interface that tells you electricity is cheap this morning. As demand peaks in the hot summer afternoon, your car acts on a sell signal, releasing energy stored in its battery back to the grid, so that you actually make money on your fuel costs today. You are one of millions of citizens who buffer the grid, helping us to defer building new power plants and electrical transmission lines. For this service, the American government had already cut you a check to help you buy the wind and solar at your house, and your new plug-in car, all produced by a revitalized American manufacturing economy. The technologies I've just described are real and are coming to market in the next year or so.

Even as we've developed a collective urge to do something, our energy choices are somehow still hostage to the partisan. To the crisis, let us bring an abundance mentality that recognizes that the problem is big enough and dire enough to make a place at the table for all of the solutions we've been talking about over the last two years. Let's do something.

Both parties. Every American. Every reasonable solution.

We can drill for oil and create more nuclear power and transition to renewable energy as the basis for powering our country and rethink our electrical grid and rebuild our transportation infrastructure. In fact, we must. This crisis demands all hands on deck, it demands that we put aside our differences and come together to take active control of our future, instead of gridlocking and bickering in a passive partisan standoff that begets year upon year of inaction.

Fortunately our problem comes bundled with a good number of solutions. Market-worthy technology is available to create the new energy order; business and the American citizen are ready to act. The collective will to do something has developed like energy stored in a giant, national coil. It is time to unleash this will and do what needs doing. Within a decade, we can drive vehicles that are powered by buildings, where a smart grid has married the car and building together in mind-boggling ways that are greater than the sum of parts. We can make energy where we use it: at our offices and factories and homes. We can unburden our electrical grid even as we diversify and decentralize the production of power, even as we replace oil with electricity, even as we power vehicles cleanly and even as we do all of this for less cost. We can relegate oil to the heap of common commodities like coffee and paper and lumber, instead of letting it continue to be the super-commodity that it is, overshadowing and driving our relations with the likes of Russia, Venezuela, China, India, Iran and Iraq.

The cost of the new energy order is in the transition, and I am asking you to consider making this sacrifice; to bear the cost of the transition. For our nation, for our children and the generations that follow, for the community of nations we must bear this cost. In the world beyond the transition, we will live and work in a cleaner way, in a more productive and engaging way, for less cost, with greater energy reliability and national security. To get to this world, we must pay the entry fee.

Congress and I have been working over the last month on a comprehensive energy bill that we will pass in early February. The bill allows for immediate drilling offshore. In exchange, we will roll back oil subsidies. Oil is critical to us today, but it is not the fuel of the future, it is a stepping stone to the future. Beginning today, we will invest in our future. The bill provides for $200 billion in funded initiatives, some of which will begin immediately, including incentives for people and businesses to start building a plug-in/building grid on behalf of the nation.

The new energy order will be driven by the newly appointed Secretary of Energy Amory Lovins and Mary Peters, who has agreed to stay on as Secretary of Transportation. They are creating task forces in areas where we need immediate impact. Among these are the Wind Group, which will the pave the way for business to develop the Wind Belt in the mid-West and wind power in our coastal areas. This group will be headed by Jerry Patterson, who is currently the Texas Land Comissioner. Another is the Mileage Fee Group. Jim Whitty is charged with helping automakers and states implement a national GPS-based mileage fee that incentivizes clean, fuel efficient vehicles, disincentivizes driving in rush hour, and creates revenue to rebuild our transportation infrastructure. Google founder Sergey Brin has agreed to lead an effort to implement the Smart Grid, including a focus on building-sited renewables like vertical axis wind turbines, and getting us good legislation to make net metering easy and otherwise encourage renewables and plug-in hybrids and electric vehicles.

We will aggressively pursue and exploit the promise of urban wind power and enhanced geothermal energy. We will build nuclear power plants to augment renewables. We will use the buying power of the United States government to prime the pump for renewable and sustainable technologies and energy conservation efforts, using the Department of Defense and others. Government buildings will become models of energy efficiency and production, achieving gold certification under LEED, the green building rating system, phased in for new buildings over the next five years.

Oil, coal, natural gas and nuclear energy have their place at the table. But to be clear, the focus of this effort will be to power America with renewable energy. There is enough sun and wind, enough motion in the water, and enough heat within the earth to power America several times over. We have the technology to tap these clean resources. We must address the problems arraying against us, and we must do it now, while we have the capital to do so; before the problems overwhelm us. We will borrow heavily from T. Boone Picken's plan to create power in the mid-West wind belt. We will draw power from the bounty of the the Pacific, Atlantic and Gulf Coast winds. We will harvest the sun in the Southwest much as described by the Solar Grand Plan developed by the Scientific American.

America is at its best in crisis. Crisis concentrates our will, engaging a resilient fabric of decentralized power that is unique among nations.  We are three hundred million autonomous individuals that are ready to rise to the challenge as a one nation, to reap the benefits of our collective effort in our time, and for the generations that follow. I ask each of you to join me in meeting this, the greatest challenge of our generation.

Tomorrow we will rise to the dawn of the new energy order. Good night and God Bless America. "

Photo: Georg Hoermann on flickr

Comments

[Mysterymeat]

This is fantastic stuff. Good alignment with T. Boone and others' wish that the candidates get their full energy plans articulated before entering office, preferably prior to the debates.

[EB]

How about a little aside for public transportation? Increased use of trains for intercity travel could go a long way toward decreasing our use of energy.

[Chris]

EB, public transportation certainly belongs in the mix, we'll find a way to work it in. Maybe something about increasing the use of inter-city trains, and developing high speed intra-city trains like those in use in France and Great Britain.

Let us know if you have examples of good programs or technical systems.

[Clifford J. Wirth, Ph.D.]

This is the Peak Oil reality. According to most independent scientific studies, global oil production will now decline from 74 million barrels per day to 60 million barrels per day by 2015. During the same time demand will increase 14%.

This is equivalent to a 33% drop in 7 years. No one can reverse this trend, nor can we conserve our way out of this catastrophe. Because the demand for oil is so high, it will always exceed production levels; thus oil depletion will continue steadily until all recoverable oil is extracted.

Alternatives will not even begin to fill the gap. And most alternatives yield electric power, but we need liquid fuels for tractors/combines, 18 wheel trucks, trains, ships, and mining equipment.

We are facing the collapse of the highways that depend on diesel trucks for maintenance of bridges, cleaning culverts to avoid road washouts, snow plowing, roadbed and surface repair. When the highways fail, so will the power grid, as highways carry the parts, transformers, steel for pylons, and high tension cables, all from far away. With the highways out, there will be no food coming in from "outside," and without the power grid virtually nothing works, including home heating, pumping of gasoline and diesel, airports, communications, and automated systems.

This is documented in a free 48 page report that can be downloaded, website posted, distributed, and emailed: http://www.peakoilassociates.com/POAnalysis.html

I used to live in NH-USA, but moved to a sustainable place. Anyone interested in relocating to a nice, pretty, sustainable area with a good climate and good soil? Email: clifford dot wirth at yahoo dot com or give me a phone call which operates here as my old USA-NH number 603-668-4207. http://survivingpeakoil.blogspot.com/

[Luminara]

If you want a plan for public transport, I suggest you take a look at this plan by Alan Drake, which can be found at http://www.theoildrum.com/node/4301