Looking to be more energy efficient

In Feb. 2002, the Bush administration's energy bill will go before Congress. The centerpiece of the bill is drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. \n"The United States has 3 percent of the world's oil reserves. Seventy-seven percent are in the Middle East. We're not going to be able to drill our way out of this problem," Reid Detchon said. Detchon is the director of special projects for the Turner Foundation, an Atlanta-based environmental grant foundation. He served as the principal deputy assistant secretary for conservation and renewable energy at the U.S. Department of Energy for the 1989 to 1993 Bush administration.\n"There's no question that we went to war in the Persian Gulf to protect our access to oil," Detchon said. "A compelling statistic is that we spend $50 million a year working on these new (alternative) fuels. We spend $50 billion a year protecting the Persian Gulf. If we ever want to have a day when American soldiers are not being sent over to fight and die in the Middle East, we have to produce alternative fuel resources."\nThe current Bush administration's energy bill proposes drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as one alternative to foreign oil.\n"If Congress set fuel efficiency standards at 40 miles per gallon, we would save two million barrels of oil a day by 2012 and four million barrels a day by 2020," said Marty Hayden, legislative director of Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund. "To put that into perspective, drilling the Arctic Refuge will yield a mean estimate of 290,000 barrels of oil a day."\nThe Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is a 1.5-million-acre coastal plain in northern Alaska.\n"Mr. Sununu of New Hampshire said that the 'footprint' on the refuge would only be 2000 acres," Hayden said. "What that doesn't include are the roads, the gravel pits and most of the pipe line. The only part of the pipeline included in the 'footprint' are the 12-inch square braces that hold the pipeline up off of the ground."\nThe Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, sometimes called America's Serengeti, is the home of the Porcupine River caribou herd, a 130,000-member herd. Hayden said the proposed 'footprint' would be in the biological heart of the Arctic Refuge, also the calving zone for the herd. The Gwich'in people, a Native American nation, have been dependent on the herd to sustain their culture for over 10,000 years.\n"It's clear that the future lies in clean energy technology, renewable forms of energy, high fuel efficiency vehicles and ultimately fuel cell vehicles that don't create any conventional air pollution at all," said Eban Goodstein, associate professor of economics at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Ore. "In order to continue to pursue this fossil fuel intensive technology that we use, it takes massive government subsidies, basically dipping into the tax payers pockets…for a [potential] $38 billion hand out for nuclear, gas and coal industries. It just doesn't make economic sense."\nGoodstein said Japan now leads the world in production of high-efficiency vehicles. But Detroit is still a few years from getting one on the road, and this is a potential threat to U.S. auto makers.\n"We had this in the 1970s when Japan came in and produced the fuel-efficient vehicles that citizens were asking for. They took a huge share of the market from Detroit," Detchon said. "Now they have the Toyota Prius, the Honda Civic, and they have hybrid development. These are the cars that you have to get on a five or six month waiting list to get. I don't know how much more indication Detroit needs to see that people want these cars."\nAnother alternative is ethanol, a bio-fuel produced from corn.\n"The exciting thing is to not just use the corn, but the rest of the plant, even the stalk, so the waste in the process can be turned into ethanol, and if you do that a state like Indiana could be the Saudi Arabia of bio-fuel," Detchon said.\nIn some universities around the country, students are assessing the energy use on campus and finding which emissions contribute to global warming.\n"At Lewis and Clark, we found out that our emissions have risen over the last decade by about 7 percent," Goodstein said. "We'd like to get down to the level that was called for in the Kyoto global warming treaty."\nGoodstein is currently working with other colleges and universities to organize a conference to discuss how to conduct greenhouse gas inventories to assess an institution's global warming 'footprint,' and other ways to reduce emissions, save energy and money and make a campus more sustainable. \n(INPIRG) has taken up the issue of clean air advocacy.\n"The best action that citizens in Indiana can take is to contact their representatives, Sen. (Evan) Bayh and Sen. (Richard) Lugar," INPIRG clean energy advocate Amanda Roll-Pickering said. "Tell them that you would like to see a better, more sensible energy policy with higher fuel standards, higher renewable targets and to look for investing in cleaner, renewable energy policies rather than continuing to drill for oil in wilderness areas like the Arctic Wildlife Refuge."\nRoll-Pickering added that INPIRG will be conducting a campaign for a more responsible energy bill.