Pushing Together for Energy Security
(Page 2 of 3)
April/May 2003
By Denis Hayes and Lisa A. Hayes
First, let's mandate a radical redesign of that core user of oil, the automobile. Americans drove 60 percent more total miles in their automobiles last year than the Germans, French, British, Japanese, Canadians, Mexicans and Swedes combined.
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The size of the average new vehicle in the U.S. fleet makes the gulf between Americans and everyone else even greater. That is why Americans, with less than 5 percent of the world's population, consume 43 percent of the world's gasoline.
In World War II, we stopped producing cars in order to convert Detroit's assembly lines to jeeps and tanks. That's what "serious" means during a time of war. For this war, let's keep Detroit's assembly lines rolling. But—remembering the Victory Gardens families were asked to plant during World War II—let's build Victory Cars: All new cars, all new sport utility vehicles and all other personal vehicles would have to get at least 50 miles per gallon by 2007. By 2008, all new cars would use either hybrid engines or fuel cells.
Here's another critical transportation step: high-speed rail. Congress's recent airline bailout was equal to Arntrak's budget for 30 years! This is crazy. We already build airports with tax-exempt bonds, we develop virtually all new aircraft using Department of Defense research and development resources, and we subsidize air traffic control.
Last year, the federal government spent $33 billion on highways and $12 billion on aviation, but only a half billion on Amtrak. That's 70 times as much money on highways as on railroads. And at the state, county and local levels, which contribute 75 percent of all highway money, the ratios are even worse.
The time is long overdue to develop dedicated high speed rail corridors between all major cities 500 miles apart or less. A 200-mph train could travel from downtown New York to downtown Washington in less than an hour and a half. Airports now require longer than that just to clear security. Superb, popular, high-speed rail systems have been operating for the last two decades in Japan, Germany, France and Italy.
Third, there's the sun. We can reduce the cost of solar cells dramatically with huge, structured federal purchases. There's a precedent: The Department of Defense did it for computer chips. In 1961, Texas Instruments began producing integrated circuits for small, specialized applications. They cost $100 and replaced a couple of dollars' worth of conventional electronics. Although there was no meaningful market for them outside the very narrowest of niches, and other companies sneered at them, the Department of Defense started burying these small, lightweight, low-power devices in bulk.
In a few years, the price plummented—from $100 in 1961 to $2.33 in 1968. As the price dropped, the market got interested. Soon private purchases were dwarfing government purchases. We now have chips that cram vastly more processing power in little laptops than was available—total—to NASA at the time of the first moon shot.
