Ex-CIA head emphasizes clean energy

America needs to develop secure, relatively inexpensive and clean ways of powering transportation as alternatives to oil, former CIA Director James Woolsey said yesterday in a lecture on the intersection of global warming and national security.

Woolsey told a crowd of about 120 people in McCosh 10 that two facets of America's energy supply pose threats to national security: dependence on foreign oil and the energy grid.

"The electricity grid is highly vulnerable," Woolsey said. "Transmission lines are highly congested and very dangerous if they fall, and they are also part of a system which was designed without a single thought about vulnerability to terrorism."

Power generation plants for the nation's electrical grid also contribute to the greenhouse gas emissions causing global warming, Woolsey added. He seemed confident, however, that the energy grid could be improved.

"Fixing the energy grid is a hard problem, but it's not, I think, a vastly expensive problem," he said.

U.S. dependence on foreign oil is even more dangerous to national security than the energy grid, Woolsey said.

"Unlike electricity, disruption to the oil supply can take place entirely outside of the U.S.," Woolsey said, citing the failed 2004 al Qaeda attack on Saudi Arabia's largest oil-processing facility at Abqaiq.

U.S. imports of foreign oil pose a particularly unsettling threat to national security since hundreds of billions of dollars are paid to unstable countries in the Middle East, Woolsey said.

Even when the money is not paid to countries with which the United States is at war, the money usually goes to "dictators and proselytizing fanatics," Woolsey said, so it still poses indirect threats to national security.

In addition to the security concerns of America's oil resources, American dependence on oil contributes to global warming with disastrous effects, Woolsey said.

Because of its dual threat to national security and the environment, the United States must develop a variety of alternatives for powering transportation, 97 percent of which is oil-dependent, he added.

"Just as an investment works better if you have a portfolio of stocks, combating the energy problem works best with a portfolio of options," Woolsey said. "A single-point solution can not be expected to be maximally effective."

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These options should include vehicles powered by electricity and renewable fuels, such as ethanol, which do not depend on extracting hydrocarbons from the earth, Woolsey said.

"Electricity is one of the most important components in our portfolio," Woolsey said.

Woolsey noted that only a fraction of the electric grid's capacity is used during the night. If 85 percent of cars in the United States were electric, they could all be recharged each night without requiring any new power plants, he said.

Besides being entirely independent of foreign resources, electricity — though its generation does contribute to greenhouse gas emissions — is a much cleaner form of fuel for cars than oil, Woolsey added.

The main barrier to widespread adoption of renewable fuels is their incompatibility with current U.S. fuel infrastructure.

"We need to make it possible to process and use renewable fuels in the same facilities that we currently use for oil," Woolsey said.

"How we deal with transportation needs to be secure, it needs to be affordable and it needs to be clean," Woolsey said. "Is this possible? I think so."

The talk was cosponsored by American Foreign Policy magazine, the Wilson School, the Geosciences Department and the Program in Science, Technology and Environmental Policy.