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CENTER FOR AMERICAN PROGRESS AMERICA OVER A BARREL: REDUCING OUR OIL DEPENDENCE INTRODUCTION: WINNIE STACHELBERG, SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT, CENTER FOR AMERICAN PROGRESS MODERATOR: DANIEL WEISS, DIRECTOR OF CLIMATE STRATEGY, CENTER FOR AMERICAN PROGRESS SPEAKERS: SEN. JEFF MERKLEY (D-OR) JAMES BARRETT, CHIEF ECONOMIST, CLEAN ENERGY DEVELOPMENT CENTER SHERRI GOODMAN, SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT, CENTER FOR NAVAL ANALYSIS JEROME RINGO, SENIOR EXECUTIVE FOR GLOBAL STRATEGIES, GREEN PORT MONDAY, JUNE 14, 2010 9:30 A.M. WASHINGTON, D.C. Transcript by Federal News Service Washington, D.C. WINNIE STACHELBERG: Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the Center for American Progress. My name is Winnie Stachelberg and I’m a senior vice president here. And I’m thrilled to welcome you to our event today, “America Over a Barrel: Reducing Our Oil Dependence.” I would like to thank today’s guest speaker and our featured panelists for being here today to discuss reducing oil dependence, which would enhance national security, help the economy and reduce the likelihood of future oil disasters. The Center for American Progress is thrilled to have with us Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon, a longtime champion of American energy independence. Elected to the United States Senate in 2008 and with a background as a five-term member of the Oregon Legislative Assembly and speaker of the Oregon House of Representatives. Sen. Merkley has long campaigned for energy independence for his homes state of Oregon and as well for the nation. In fact, as he put it so well, himself: “It’s a choice between a strong, secure, energy-independent America and a weaker, oil-addicted America.” Sen. Merkley recognizes the national security, economic, public health and environmental consequences of our dependence on oil. The transition to a clean-energy economy and many clean-energy jobs must be spurred now by taking steps to reduce our dependence on oil, particularly on foreign oil, and there’s no better spokesperson for this necessary campaign than Sen. Merkley. The center has focused on clean-energy policies since its inception, particularly clean- energy and global warming pollution reductions. Such measures are essential to economic growth and national security issues, as well as environmental quality. Recent successes here from the center include the House passage of Home Star – energy efficiency retrofit legislation – as well the Obama administration adapting CAP proposals for a response to the BP oil disaster. These ideas include the establishment of an independent commission to investigate it and the creation of an escrow account to ensure that BP promptly pays claims. Sadly, the BP oil disaster is directly related to today’s event. The unfolding disaster is a tragic reminder of the human, economic, public health and environmental costs of oil dependence. While it certainly helps to have an administration which has demonstrated strong leadership on these issues through rapid response and interagency coordination, this is not enough, nor is trying to clean up an oil spill or plug the leak enough. Rather, we must transition toward a clean-energy economy to get our country off of our dirty, dangerous addiction to oil. The United States has only 2 percent of the world’s oil reserves yet we use one-quarter of the oil produced annually. One in five barrels of U.S. oil comes from countries that the State Department considers dangerous or unstable. And America sends over $1 billion a day overseas to secure this dangerous, dirty fossil fuel. Furthermore, growing worldwide demand led by China will put additional upward pressure on oil prices. For all these reasons, America needs to get off oil and get onto the clean-energy bandwagon. The United States needs comprehensive clean-energy climate reform that would decrease our dependence on this expensive and unstable commodity. Sen. Merkley is here to tell us not only that we can get off of oil but how. By outlining the concrete steps needed to get us there, the senator is providing a marker and a pathway toward our clean-energy economy. He will then be followed by today’s panel of energy experts who will discuss the connection between oil dependence and our security and economy and how this year’s disastrous spill will impact America for decades to come. Please join me in welcoming Sen. Jeff Merkley here today. Thank you very much. (Applause.) SEN. JEFF MERKLEY (D-OR): Thank you very much, Winnie, for the introduction and for the support of the Center for American Progress, which is doing so much to advance the conversation about energy policy in our nation. I’m pleased to be here to speak about energy and, more specifically, about energy independence. Let’s start by recognizing that human civilization has gone through a dramatic transition in its use of energy in a very short period of time. It’s only been in the last few thousand years that human society has leveraged the power of both wind and beasts of burden to augment human power. And then we fast forward to the 1800s and the use of coal and the 1900s and the use of oil and then to the current day where we have a host of additional technologies for nuclear and solar and the potential for wave and so forth to bring into the puzzle. Certainly hydropower as well. So the practical effects of this have been a powerful change on the way that we structure our society, on the way that we live. We see it at the personal level in the size of our homes and the comfort of our homes. How many people slept with air conditioning last night? (Pause.) Oh, come on. More than that! Well, I haven't yet turned mine on but I will be with a couple more nights like the one we had like last night. And we see the power of this leveraged energy in terms of the projects we undertake, the physical infrastructure we build, our multilane highways and, of course, the amazing, beautiful and huge buildings that we build. But this recent command of energy in all these forms has significant side effects. And just specifically, economy challenges, national security challenges and, certainly, pollution problems from toxins in our air and water to the impact on climate and the acidity of our oceans. So our challenge, our collective challenge – and I know that most of you are involved in this challenge in some way or another – is to manage our use of energy – our production and our use – in a much smarter way. And that involves changing habits, reducing waste – and when you mentioned the Home Star program we’re debating now – the Home Star program and the Building Star program; how can we change our use of energy in buildings so that we consume a lot less and have the effective benefit of reduced-energy cost, month after month after month? The investment that keeps on giving. How can we choose our strategies for producing energy so that the effects are less damaging? And indeed, that is the big frame. But when we talk about energy, because it encompasses virtually everything we do as a human civilization, it’s often such a large topic it’s hard to get your hands around and it’s useful to break it into pieces. And when I was thinking about this, I was thinking about the Oregon Bottle Bill. Now, the Oregon Bottle Bill was passed more than three decades ago. And as a young Boy Scout, I was out picking up trash along the river. And often, that trash was bottles and often it was broken bottles. And Oregonians as a whole were unsatisfied that they had all this litter and this broken glass. The bottle bill was an energy bill but it also was a piece of the puzzle that folks could get their hands around and it had this additional component of being a litter problem. Well, we need to – in this vast conversation, we need to look for pieces in which we can connect on multiple points. And our addiction to overseas oil is just one of those points. So this morning, I’m going to narrow our lens to that piece. As Winnie noted, we spend a billion dollars a day on imported oil. That’s about $3 for every American. I have a family of four. Try to picture yourself writing a check every single day, be it to Hugo Chavez or Ahmadinejad or other leaders around the world taking our dollars, exporting those dollars out of our nation. Certainly, that has an economic impact because when those dollars leave our nation, they do not stay here and reverberate and pass through our grocery stores and our retail outlets, creating jobs here in America. And much of that oil does not come from Mexico and Canada. It comes from the Persian Gulf or from Venezuela. Approximately 70 percent currently comes from overseas – of our imported oil. And projections to 2030 are that 70 to 75 percent will continue to come from overseas. So this money going overseas not only affects jobs, it affects our national security. In part because dollars end up in the hands of terrorist groups. In part because in order to sustain our access to oil in the Middle East and Venezuela, we have to have a greater projection of forces. Some estimates have put the cost – the indirect cost or the additional, hidden, national security tax for axis to Middle East oil – at the equivalent of $5 per gallon of gas that we consume. That’s an enormous hidden tax.