Roger L. Simon: Rockin' Woolsey... The former DCI rocks out with a former Doobie Brother and tells it like it is on energy independence

I was at the Four Seasons Bev Hills last night to see James Woolsey receive the Jerusalem Prize of the American Jewish Congress. These events are usually pretty stodgy but this one was surprisingly entertaining, not least because the former Director of Central Intelligence turns out to have a secret side. [Don't they all?-ed. Not this kind.] Woolsey, who hails from Oklahoma, is a closet country rocker. Well, he came out of the closet last night to perform with Jeff "Skunk" Baxter of the Doobie Brothers. A quick-and-dirty video of the duet will be up on Pajamas later.

Woolsey's keynote speech at the event was quite interesting. His hobby horse du jour appears to be energy independence and he is quite convincing on the subject. Without it, he indicates, we will continue to be the primary subsidizers of the Islamofascist terrorism which is bent on destroying us. The former DCI is not, however, a great advocate of hydrogen because of the immense costs in building a new infrastructure. He favors the use of grasses, a cheaper and more immediate method. Once we make a public commitment to energy independence, he thinks the Saudis, Mullahs, etc., will panic and begin to mend their ways. I think that's more than worth a shot. Where are our politicians?

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Sounds like a great idea to me. Didn't Reagan do the same thing with Gorbachev to bring down the iron curtain over missile defense?

When someone tells me they want to promote peace and appeasement with the militatant Muslims, I say, then promote our country's energy independence at all costs.

Sounds like a great idea to me. Didn't Reagan do the same thing with Gorbachev to bring down the iron curtain over missile defense?

When someone tells me they want to promote peace and appeasement with the militatant Muslims, I say, then promote our country's energy independence at all costs.

everytime I put gas in my car, and add fuel to my heating system, I think of those awful mullahs and sheikhs. Personally, I don't care if they get all worried at our becoming independent of their oil. I just want to know that my money is not going to support their primitive jihad against me and mine.

As to energy independence, this is where I really would like to see actual leadership from the Anglosphere of US, Canada and Australia. It could be a lot of things: development of the oil sands (proceeding as I write), of the oil shale in the MidWest, grass, anything that works is fine by me! You know, a 'fruit salad' kind of thing! (thank you, Jim Baker)

Remember, to avoid these very same Arabs, the Portuguese learned how to get around Africa and go straight to India and China without passing the "Go" of the extortionists of the Middle East.
The main problem was to overcome their fear that the farther south one travelled, the hotter it would get until people would just burn up in hellfire. Once they realized this was a wrong idea, it was a piece of cake!

Note that this doesn't eliminate oil as a fuel, though, but "we estimate that biofuels produced on the degraded lands of Earth could [meet] 13% of global needs and simultaneously produce electricity that met 19% of global needs" is nothing to sneeze at.

For the rebuttal to these myths go here for a 49 page pdf.
http://www.rmi.org/sitepages/pid65.php

Myth #1. A whole hydrogen industry would need to be developed from scratch.

Myth #2. Hydrogen is too dangerous, explosive, or "volatile" for common use as a fuel.

Myth #3. Making hydrogen uses more energy than it yields, so it's prohibitively inefficient.

Myth #4. Delivering hydrogen to users would consume most of the energy it contains.

Myth #5. Hydrogen can't be distributed in existing pipelines, requiring costly new ones.

Myth #6. We don't have practical ways to run cars on gaseous hydrogen, so cars must continue to use liquid fuels.

Myth #8. Compressing hydrogen for automotive storage tanks takes too much energy.

Myth #10. We'd need to lace the country with ubiquitous hydrogen production, distribution, and delivery infrastructure before we could sell the first hydrogen car, but that's impractical and far too costly - probably hundreds of billions of dollars.

Myth #11. Manufacturing enough hydrogen to run a car fleet is a gargantuan and hugely expensive task.

Myth #12. Since renewables are currently too costly, hydrogen would have to be made from fossil fuels or nuclear energy.

a. A hydrogen economy would require the construction of many new coal and nuclear power stations (or perhaps nuclear fusion stations).

b. A hydrogen economy would retard the adoption of renewable energy by competing for R&D budget, being misspent, and taking away future markets.

c. Switching from gasoline to hydrogen will worsen climate change unless we do a large amount of successful carbon sequestration.

Myth #13. Incumbent industries (e.g., oil and car companies) actually oppose hydrogen as a competitive threat, so their hydrogen development efforts are mere window-dressing.

Myth #14. A large-scale hydrogen economy would harm the Earth's climate, water balance, or atmospheric chemistry.

a. Using hydrogen would release or consume too much water.
b. Using hydrogen would consume too much oxygen.
c. Using hydrogen would dry out the Earth by leaking hydrogen to outer space.
d. Using hydrogen would harm the ozone layer or the climate by leaking too much water-forming and chemically reactive molecular hydrogen into the upper atmosphere.

Myth #15. There are more attractive ways to provide sustainable mobility than adopting hydrogen.

b. We should convert existing cars to carry both gasoline and hydrogen, burning both in their existing internal-combustion engines, to create an early hydrogen market and reduce oil dependence and urban air pollution.

c. We should improve batteries and increase the required electricity storage capacity (battery-electric driving range) of hybrid cars.

d. If we have superefficient vehicles, we should just run them on gasoline engines or engine-hybrids and not worry about hydrogen or fuel cells.

Myth #16. Because the U.S. car fleet takes roughly 14 years to turn over, little can be done to change car technology in the short term.

Myth #17. A viable hydrogen transition would take 30-50 years or more to complete, and hardly anything worthwhile could be done sooner than 20 years.

Myth #18. The hydrogen transition requires a big (say, $100-300 billion) Federal crash program, on the lines of the Apollo Program or the Manhattan Project.

Myth #19. A crash program to switch to hydrogen is the only realistic way to get off oil.

Myth #20. The Bush Administration's hydrogen program is just a smokescreen to stall adoption of the hybrid-electric and other efficient car designs available now, and wraps fossil and nuclear energy in a green disguise.

For the rebuttal to these myths go here for a 49 page pdf.
http://www.rmi.org/sitepages/pid65.php

another thing about that Portuguese end run around the Arabs: when Spain had thrown out its Jewish population, some of them went to Portugal. Among THOSE Spanish Jews were experts in mapmaking. Mapmaking was the top intellectual product of its time, and the key to sailing around the world. Thus, like the US in the 1930s winning all those great (Jewish) physicists, the Portuguese won in the exploration stakes.

Once again(won't make any difference) Hydrogen is a power STORAGE not a power generating element.It takes more oil or natural gas to make hydrogen than the power it STORES. You got a hidden hydrogen well stashed somewhere? Meanwhile, back to more practical solutions, where's my solar powered unicorn?

The problem with government programs for anything is that they tend to be driven more by interest-group politics than by actual results. At this very moment, for example, there is a 50 cent per gallon on imported sugarcane-based ethanol, even though the sugarcane-to-ethanol process has a far better energy balance than the corn-to-ethanol process. A major government energy independence program is likely to lock in on certain approaches that are either (a)beneficial to well-organized interest groups, or (b)associated with technologies that, for whatever reason, are currently viewed as "sexy."

I absolutely agree that we need to accelerate movement toward energy independence, but am concerned about doing more harm than good. On the other hand, the main problem with a leave-it-to-the-market approach is that people thinking about putting several billion $ in alternative energy projects are worried about oil returning to the $30/bbl level and staying there for years, thereby destroying the economics of their projects. Perhaps some for of oil import tariff, starting small and increasing with time, would help. This seems much more logical than a tax, which would apply to domestic producers as well as offshore sources.

Thats a red herring. The difference is far more than offset by the hydrogen's 2-3 fold higher efficiency in running a fuel-cell car than gasoline's in running an engine-driven car. Using Japanese round numbers from Toyota, 88% of oil at the wellhead ends up as gasoline in your tank, and then 16% of that gasoline energy reaches the wheels of your typical modern car, so the well-to-wheels efficiency is 14%. A gasoline-fueled hybrid-electric car like the 2002 Toyota Prius nearly doubles the gasoline-to-wheels efficiency from 16% to 30% and the overall well-to-wheels efficiency from 14% to 26%.
But locally reforming natural gas can deliver 70% of the gas's wellhead energy into the car's compressed-hydrogen tank. That "meager" conversion efficiency is then more than offset by an advanced fuel-cell drivesystem's superior 60% efficiency in converting that hydrogen energy into traction, for an overall well-to-wheels efficiency of 42%. That's TREE TIMES higher than the normal gasoline-engine car's, or 1.5 times higher than the gasoline-hybrid-electric car's.

Any conversion from one form of energy to another consumes more useful energy than it yields.
If it could do the opposite, creating energy out of nothing, you could create a perpetual-motion
machine violating the laws of physics. Conversion losses are unavoidable; the issue is whether
they're worth incurring.

There are a number of studies which indicate that grasses would make biofuel a net positive energy source. Even more than most of the popular grasses, hemp, the non-hallucinogenic cousin of Marijuana, may have even better numbers. Hydrogen doesn't seem to be "the answer" but it certainly may fit well in niche markets, as would wind, water, nuclear and solar power. Biodiesel shows some promise and it can run in diesel engines which also run petrol based diesel.

I think the best solution we can find for energy 'independence' will be an amalgam of many different energy solutions. We need to get away from the idea that 'energy' comes from the 'energy company' and is the same for everyone, in every situation. At the end of the day, I think we can find solutions though none of them will completely replace oil, or be the magic bullet for the future of energy.

Bush has spoken up in favor of the use of biofuels and hydrogen as well. It is not however, just about the politicians, the markets need to get involved as well.

One positive thing I can say about John Kerry--in his inauguration speech he said that energy policy is a national security issue.

Yes, Terrye, Bush has "spoken up,"but he has not really used his bully pulpit for this. One of his great psychological insufficiencies has been an inability or an unwillingness to bring the non-military average citizen into the struggle. Truly an unsophisticated approach on his part.

No, but hydrogen, first on the periodic table, is the least complex and most abundant element in the universe.

You know before we had oil from the ground we had oil from whaling why did we change? All this changing from LP to CD to DVD to MP3 to wireless satellite and who knows waht's next. Why can we just stay with one?

Why the bloody h*** would we look to *them*? I'd say, rather, where are our inventors? Give me one Edison, Ford, or Farnsworth before you unleash some government-funded boondoggle. Even so-called "incentives" usually distort the market and invite the bottom-feeders; does anyone (besides a politician) *seriously* think switchgrass is going to get us out of this mess?

Take it from a wise (if, alas, fictional) inventor speaking to a government official: "You need us. We do not need you. Get out of our way."

Energy independence needs to be a ten year goal. It needs to be multi-facted approach, including solar, wind, nuclear, hydrogen, ethanol, coal, domestic oil and domestic natural gas.

Instead of just giving tax breaks directly to companies to supply product, tax incentives can be given to consumers to make alternative forms of energy cost competitive in the earlier years.

Yesterday, CNN (which I usually have little use for) aired a program that featured Brazil's ethanol program that is based upon sugar cane. It shows what can be done.

However, everyone must understand that the Islamofascists of Iran, the Saudis and rest of the oil cartel will flood the world with oil to try to maintain the dependency. We need to understand why it makes sense to be energy independent and have the will to do so.

If we are successful, our militant Islamic friends would be back driving their camels.

Personally, I would love to see hydrogen become the fuel of choice. I don't know as much about it as Lem, but I am learning more everyday.

Just never forget that we are in this mess primarily because of Jane Fonda and her leftist buddies. She did everything possible to severely damage our nuclear industry. We use more oil to fuel our businesses and homes than our automobiles. Fonda's destructive behavior occurred well over twenty years ago. It is very fair to describe this traitor as an unwitting accomplice to the Islamic nihilist cause.

Roger, sorry for an OT comment (don't know where to put 'em) but are you planning to write about the Clintons spying on Diana? And the subsequent delay in Hillary's announcement she's running? Interesting, no?

Some of you may remember a Reuter letter explaining a policy refusing to call the 9/11 hijackers "terrorist" soon after 9/11 - ".... the policy of our Editorial group to avoid using emotional terms such as "terrorist" in their news stories. Our policy is to avoid the use of emotional terms and not make value judgments concerning the facts we attempt to report accurately and fairly."

Imagine my surprise ;) when I read the unattributed, emotional use of the term "dictator" in a Reuters UK story.

"Thousands of Chileans, some praying and many in tears, flocked to a chapel in Santiago on Monday to pay their respects to Augusto Pinochet, the former dictator who polarized the country and who died on Sunday."

http://tinyurl.com/ybm3qp

But here is the kicker. Reuters admits (albeit indirectly) making a value judgment in the story.

"Pinochet's legacy is still hotly disputed. Some Chileans say the general saved their country from communism while others regard him as a murderer who escaped justice and should have been tried for human rights abuses."

Fair enough, but to Reuters, it seems that a state murderer is a dictator, but stateless murderers? ...well, let's not get emotional.

One man's murderer is another's decapitator, I'm guessing.

"Roger, sorry for an OT comment (don't know where to put 'em) but are you planning to write about the Clintons spying on Diana?"

Is this true? I find it very hard to believe that our government would waste time watching a silly young lady fooling around with her various lovers. Why should we give a damn? What in hell does it have to do with national security? I am definitely not a fan of Bill Clinton. Nonetheless, I think he is probably being slandered in this particular instance.

An ocean-spanning pas-de-deux wherein two brilliantly vibrant stars of Eros must, must, reach out and find one another, high in the scented mists of Olympus, or y'know, some kinda sh*t like dat.

nah, and anyway, I struggled for hours over mine, even calling in a ghostwriter at one point.

Biofuels and ethanol are a joke when you consider the fertilizer/irrigation/processing needed. A nice pork barrel gift to Iowa corn farmers, that's all.

Building nuclear power plants should be the priority. It's safe - more coal miners have died than nuclear plant workers - clean, and contributes nothing to global warming which I'll leave to others to debate as valid.

More important is to leave gas prices ascend to the stratosphere without some lame intervention by politicians. Market forces will put people into smaller cars. It did in the 70's. The Democrats will never get that as they weasel for windfall profit taxes and lame subsidies to the wrong alternative fuels.

Canadian oil sands have a huge reserve in a non-hostile neighboring country, more expensive to extract and process, but, its in the neighborhood. We can also develope better coal conversion technologies. We have big coal reserves.

With the Arabs and Russia playing politics with oil and natural gas, we need to act now. Unfortunately the elected slugs in DC aren't in a rush.

onecent has it right. The market is already responding to the high price of oil by investing in alternate technologies and research.

Energy is at the very heart of our economy. The idea of having some government program to get "energy independence" is frightening - it would make nationalized health care look great by comparison.

If energy independence is a matter of national security, then the government can:

2) remove artificial barriers such as the absurdly burdensome costs (especially envirowhacko and NIMBY) on new energy investments - especially nuclear

3) guarantee a price floor on oil (I don't like this idea but it seems the least interventionist government policy)

4) Keep the military strong (bigger than it is now), the powder dry, and be willing to defend our energy supplies or take them away from terrorists or other enemies

Everyone arguing about hydrogen or bio-fuels or whatever should let the market decide, because the distributed intelligence of thousands of innovators and hundreds of millions of customers is vastly smarter than any group of politicians, experts, or even bloggers.

In order to encourage the development of alternative (and conventional) energy facilities, it may be desirable to change the tax code, which arguably discriminates against firms which make heavy investments in fixed assets, by requiring these to be depreciated over time for tax purposes--whereas many other kinds of expenditures (such as marketing campaigns) can be immediately expensed.

".... nobody has objected to the basic thesis that we can get the country completely off oil over the next few decades and revitalize the economy ALL LED BY BUSSINES FOR PROFIT.

I've read that the success of Brazil with their ethanol program rests on the cheapness of converting sugar cane. In the northern latitudes it is not cost effective to grow sugar cane. The climate is not wet or hot enough.

We are relying on corn and other grasses to produce enough ethanol here in the US which according to experts at Iowa State University is going to cost more than converting oil to gasoline in the long run. Plus the land in Iowa and other farming states needs the plant waste plowed under and allowed to return nutrients to the soil on an ongoing basis. Without that process and prudent stewardship of the farm land, the rich black loam of Iowa and other midwestern ag states will soon become black dust rather than it's currently popular description of "black gold". Despite those negatives, the production of ethanol in Iowa proceeds at breakneck speed.

Have we really learned all we need to know on this subject? I don't think all the costs have been accounted and acknowledged by the ethanol entrepreneurs.

I'm going to be a bit of a naysayer here and contend that energy independence may not be quite the panacea everyone thinks it is. No matter what we do, that pool of oil under the sand dunes of the Middle East will continue to be extraordinarily valuable.

Think about it. With all the incredible technological achievements of our species - men on the moon, nuclear power (certainly part of the solution), the internet - it is still difficult to make hydrogen fuel or ethanol cost effective. Oil is simply an incredibly concentrated and easily accessible source of energy. We can lower its value but not eliminate its value.

Of course, striving for "energy independence" is still greatly worthwhile. We would certainly reduce the wealth of problematic countries such as Iran, and maybe even free ourselves from the threat of blackmail from the oil producers. John Moore's plan is likely the best - leave it to the market along with some targeted government actions.

But I don't think we can tell ourselves, "Let's achieve energy independence and then we can pretend these guys don't exist." Somebody somewhere will still want to buy that oil and provide money to those with malevolent intentions. And remember the "investment" required to perpetrate 9/11 didn't really take all that much money.

Click on Audio clip of green features - KTVB TV and
Audio clip of green features - KDFW Fox 4

Converting to hydrogen does nothing to alleviate fossil fuel consumption. We may buy less oil for a little while, but we'll still send most of energy dollars to the middle east.

Bush should announce that he's opposed to nuclear power. Hates it. Thinks it's a commie plot. We'll be 90% nuclear powered in 10 years.

Well, I agree that energy independence should be the number 1 goal of the U.S. A very thoughtful friend of mine, however, assures me that it will surely lead to war! His reasoning is that, without income from oil or natural gas, the Middle East despots will quickly collapse (very likely true), widespread civil war will commence in the region, and that, due t overpopulation, that war will spread to Europe in short order. I don't necessarily buy this reasoning, but our current course doesn't seem much brighter.

Interesting to see Amory Lovins being extensively quoted here. He's a bit like Paul Erlich: he's been wrong so many times that most of us had forgotten he still existed.

Lest anyone remains mentally fixed on 'energy independence' as a means of cutting Islamic jihad financing off at the knees, let me poke a hole in that fantasy as immediately as may be done.

All that oil under the ME is a saleable commodity, in heavy and increasing demand worldwide. While it may be true that the environmental jihadists in the US may succeed in so over-regulating the evil 'big businesses' here that our economy goes into decline, be sure that other entities (think India and China and Indonesia in 20 years) may not be such suckers for political correctitude as the US Democratic Party is.

In other words, the demand for ME oil ain't gonna go away no matter if the US imports none at all. Therefore the finances for Islamic jihad financing will remain bright and cheery, and should the US invest vast capital in politically correct 'energy independence' schemes, that will just mean less capital here to defend against whatever those jihadists obtain to launch in this direction.

Insufficiently...it's true there's a lot of oil (and natural gas) demand from places other than the US, but whatever technologies we develop and build out here will also probably be applicable in those places, and will benefit from the learning curve and scale factors.

It can also go the other way. Countries without a comprehensive grid infrastructure may help drive demand for solar technologies, for example, and then *we* can benefit from the learning curve.

- No matter what we here in the US do petroleum will remain a very valuable and profitable resource. US achievement of "energy independence" will not change that. Money, in enormous amounts, will continue to flow into the oil producing nations (ME and otherwise) for many decades to come.

- if we really wish to achieve "energy independence" we need to let the market sort out what works and what doesn't (to the extent that that is possible within the modern welfare state context and, Dear Fellow 'Muricans, we live in a modern welfare state)

- there's just flat out no way to avoid or ignore the tax system that encourages and discourages. We need, within something approximating reason, to make sensible tax decisions to encourage what we want and need and discourage obstacles to that.

- success will look like nothing more than consumer energy choice. When you drive your automobile, in whatever form, into a Refilling Station and select which aisle and pump/black box you pull up next to based on whether you want diesel and what mix of bio (in three or four grades), or gasoline and what mix of bio (in three or four grades), or hydrogen, or the Rapid Recharge box, you'll know we're closing in. In the meantime your town or county or co-op may have chosen to build a pebble bed reactor to feed local needs and it will be common for indivicual domiciles to get some significant portion of their electrical needs from their rooftop wind generator and solar cell.

Right now we're pissing up ropes complaining that ethanol, hydrogen, coal conversion, wind, solar, and all the other bits and pieces can't solve the problem. None of those things will deliver us to the Land of Energy Independence.

All of them are necessary to accomplish that. If and when we get there, however, we'll learn that in addition to whatever good we've done ourselves we have NOT solved the problem of whackjob jihadis with boatloads of cash AND we've made petro based energy relatively cheap - or at least kept the price increases from going bonkers - for the rest of the world.

Other people will buy oil... it's a commodity. Even if we develop whiz-bang alternative energy technologies, burning oil will probably remain cheaper for a long time. If nothing else, existing cars will remain on the road for 10-20 years, at least. If we convert away from gas, those cars will be sold elsewhere.

Hydrogen is not an energy source. The myth-buster claims that it's more efficient to convert natural gas to hydrogen then burn the hydrogen. I suspect that if we just burn the natural gas, it would be more efficient. I'm highly skeptical that adding a transformation makes the process more efficient.

December 11, 2006: Rockin' Woolsey... The former DCI rocks out with a former Doobie Brother and tells it like it is on energy independence

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