Today, Senator Kerry will chair a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing at 2 pm - "ENERGY SECURITY: HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES AND MODERN CHALLENGES". When Senator Kerry ran for President in 2004, he spoke at every rally about how developing the technology and products to transition to alternative fuels would be good for the economy because it would create good new jobs, would lead to clean air and water, would lead to improved health, and was necessary to our national security to eliminate our dependence on oil partly from the unstable Middle East.
Jimmy Carter will testify in the first panel. Everyone here likely remembers that when he was President, he faced the OPEC generated oil shortages and higher prices by leading the country to conserve. Automobiles became more fuel efficient, we bought programmable thermostats, and wore sweaters in the winter. In addition the government did things to encourage research on alternative energy.
The Republicans mocked conservation as contrary to what they thought America's divine right to use the world's resources in as prolifigate a fashion as we desired and ignored the need to develop alternatives. Jimmy Carter was right and the decades since he was President have been wasted as far as addressing this problem goes. Now, with President Obama and Energy Secretary Chu, that will end.
Chairman Kerry and the SFRC will have the job of getting any global warming treaty through Congress. This hearing will likely help create support. In addition to Jimmy Carter being able to speak of things that did work in the 1970s, the second panel seems to be designed to win the support that global warming legislation needs but does not yet have.
The second panel consists of Fred Smith, the CEO of Fed ex and General Charles F. Wald.
Although Smith is extremely conservative, he is a long time close friend of Senator Kerry. In 2007, when Senator Kerry and others negotiated the first increase in CAFE standards in two decades, the testimony of Smith at a Small Business Committee hearing was extremely important. From an article at that time, Smith made the case that it would be in business' interests to move in that direction, but that they couldn't get there without the government - and he noted it was rare for him to argue for government regulation:
Memphis-based FedEx Corp., which operates 77,000 vehicles and spends $3 billion a year on fuel, has 93 hybrid-electric vehicles in its fleet, and is supporting efforts to refine the technology. The hybrids, however, cost $35,000 more than a conventional delivery vehicle, said FedEx Chairman and CEO Frederick W. Smith. Widespread deployment is "impossible," he said, with that kind of cost disparity.
Smith, who co-chairs the Energy Security Leadership Council, supports higher fuel economy standards, as long as they're tailored to specific types of vehicles.
"I rarely come to Washington to argue for government regulation," Smith told Kerry's committee.
But the free market "has not -- and will not -- adequately motivate the investments necessary to protect the nation in the event of an oil crisis," he said. "As such, mandating improvements in the fuel economy of our cars and trucks is one critical and unavoidable step that Americans must take if we are to halt our national descent into unmitigated oil dependence."
http://albany.bizjournals.com/...
General Wald was one of the 3 and 4 star officers who wrote a report that analyzed the national security impact of global warming. Senator Biden chaired a hearing with the officers at Senator Kerry's request. Here is a fantastic summary of that hearing from the Kerry blog written at the time of that hearing - http://www.johnkerry.com/...
The blog, which includes the link to that still relevant hearing and to the report itself, summarized Wald's testimony as:
General Charles F. Wald, USAF (Ret), who was formerly a deputy commander in Africa and the Middle East, sees Africa as the biggest problem. The fear is of giant migrations as water and food become scarce. Darfur partially started due to climate change, where people migrated as land became unusable. The alternation of floods and droughts in Somalia led to problems there, which causes extremism to grow. Wald said, "Climate change is a threat multiplier everywhere."
This hearing will be on CSPAN3 at 2pm today and will also be livestreamed by Cspan - http://cspan.org/ at the link for video below Jimmy Carter's picture. Given the cast of characters, this should be an important and interesting hearing.
Edited to add that the hearing is now available in the CSPAN library at - http://www.c-spanarchives.org/...
