Will climate change finally wake us from our energy lethargy? Three times in the past 36 years, our nation has suffered from oil shocks and done little to implement lasting policies that could avoid them in the future. We took some small steps in the 1970s and 1990s, but ultimately we failed to close the deal.

Today, we are more dependent than ever on imported oil - two-thirds of our total consumption in 2008 came from other nations compared to one-third in 1973. And today we face the recognized threat of climate change, which will affect the entire world dramatically in the coming decades - unless we and other nations reduce the production of greenhouse gases, primarily carbon dioxide.

For our oil dependence, we took half-measures. Will we do better on climate change? The House version of the climate bill, which passed by a narrow margin, offers some hope, but it misses the mark on several accounts. To satisfy various interests - some legitimate, others selfish - drafters of the legislation compromised away a number of crucial provisions. The big question now: Will the Senate make it better or worse?

The House gives away too many of the emission allowances that are central to cap-and-trade; places too much emphasis on renewables, which are not as ready for the big time as their advocates claim; gives too little emphasis to natural gas and nuclear power, both of which could play a large role in replacing coal; does not fund the necessary long-term research, development and demonstration program that President Barack Obama proposed; and places far too little emphasis on energy efficiency, which is easy to implement and saves money in the long run.

The Senate can do better. It should start by including in the legislation the president's Clean Energy Technology Fund, an investment of $15 billion per year over 10 years to develop affordable, low-emission energy technologies that could be used by the developing world as well as by rich countries. The provision wasn't included in the House bill, and I am one of 34 Nobel Laureates who recently wrote to the president, urging him to try to get Congress to include the fund in a final climate bill.

A stable funding mechanism for basic and applied research, development and demonstration is critical to developing the technologies we will need to greatly cut emissions in a cost-effective manner. The Senate should set aside at least 5 percent of all emission allowances for the Clean Energy Technology Fund, and for purposes of stability of funding, provide support for the full lifetime cost of a competitively selected project at the time the award is made.

Current technologies are a good start, but they are not up to doing the entire job. For example, we have no effective way to store energy from intermittent sources to smooth out the variations of wind and solar output that hugely complicate their use on a large scale.

Another challenge is the use of hydrogen fuel cells to store energy from intermittent sources and use it for transportation. The present cells use so much platinum as a catalyst that the entire yearly world supply of platinum is not enough to supply the fuel cells needed for U.S. auto production, much less the world's.

Our very expensive corn ethanol program is at best a marginal reducer of emissions, and if the effects of land-use changes are included, is positively harmful. There are more advanced biofuels that might actually do some good, but they, too, need more research and a lot more development and demonstration.

Nuclear power, a safe source available 24/7, is being slowed by concern about the lack of a permanent repository for spent nuclear fuel. There is no intermediate-term problem because spent fuel can be stored safely at reactor sites for many years. In the interim, we can do the research and development that might allow us to reduce the volume of waste in a way that is proliferation-resistant.

Energy efficiency is an easy, low-cost way to reduce emissions. There are many ways to improve efficiency in power generation, transportation and buildings that would benefit from the president's fund. Some things don't even need research and development, like an energy audit before the sale of any building that would tell the buyer how to save with simple upgrades that pay for themselves through reduced utility bills. Unfortunately, the House failed to include a provision for the audits, bowing to the National Association of Realtors, which seems to want buyers to know as little as possible.

Tackling climate change is not mission impossible. Deploying today's technologies and supporting the research and development for tomorrow's will put us on the right path toward achieving energy security and mitigating climate change.

Burton Richter is a Nobel Laureate (Physics, 1976), member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a past president of both the American Physical Society and the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics. He is the Paul Pigott professor emeritus at Stanford University and the former director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, one of the Department of Energy's science laboratories.

Executive Summary

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is a promising technology that might allow for significant reductions in CO2 emissions. But at present CCS is very expensive and its performance is highly uncertain at the scale of commercial power plants. Such challenges to deployment, though, are not new to students of technological change. Several successful technologies, including energy technologies, have faced similar challenges as CCS faces now. In this paper we draw lessons for the CCS industry from the history of other energy technologies that, as with CCS today, were risky and expensive early in their commercial development. Specifically, we analyze the development of the US nuclear-power industry, the US SO2-scrubber industry, and the global LNG industry.

We focus on three major questions in the development of these analogous industries. First, we consider the creation of the initial market to prove the technology: how and by whom was the initial niche market for these industries created? Second, we look at how risk-reduction strategies for path-breaking projects allowed the technology to evolve into a form so that it could capture a wider market and diffuse broadly into service. Third, we explore the "learning curves" that describe the cost reduction as these technologies started to capture significant market share.

Our findings suggest that directly applying to CCS the conventional wisdom that is prevalent regarding the deployment and diffusion of technologies can be very misleading. The conventional wisdom may be summarized as: "Technologies are best deployed if left in the hands of private players"; "Don't pick technology winners" or "Technology forcing is wrong"; and "Technology costs reduce as its cumulative installed capacity increases". We find that none of these readily applies when thinking about deployment of CCS.

Democrats voting in Ohio and Texas may well decide the shape of the U.S. presidential election. Regardless of who they choose to run against Sen. John McCain, the all but certain Republican candidate, it is likely that energy issues will figure more prominently in the election than at any time in the last generation. High prices are sapping economic growth, the No. 1 concern across most of the country. Gasoline is now approaching $4 a gallon; natural gas and electricity are also more costly than a few years ago. Global warming has become a bipartisan worry, and solving that problem will require radical new energy technologies as well. All this is good news in the rest of the world, which is hoping that a new regime in Washington will put the United States on a more sustainable energy path.

It may be a vain hope. It is extremely unlikely that Washington will ever supply a coherent energy policy, regardless of who takes the White House in November. That's because serious policies to change energy patterns require a broad effort across many disconnected government agencies and political groups. Higher energy efficiency for buildings and appliances, a major energy use area, requires new federal and state standards. Higher efficiency for vehicles requires federal mandates that always meet stiff opposition in Detroit. A more aggressive program to replace oil with biofuels requires policy decisions that affect farmers and crop patterns-yet another part of Washington's policymaking apparatus, with its own political geometry. New power plants that generate electricity without high emissions of warming gases require reliable subsidies from both federal and state governments, because such plants are much more costly than conventional power sources. Approvals for these new plants require favorable decisions by state regulators, most of whom are not yet focused on the task. Expanded use of nuclear power requires support from still another constellation of administrators and political interests. And so on.

Whenever the public seizes on energy issues, the cabal of Washington energy experts imagines that these problems can be solved with a new comprehensive energy strategy, backed by a grand new political coalition. Security hawks would welcome reduced dependence on volatile oil suppliers, especially in the Persian Gulf. Greens would favor a lighter tread on the planet, and labor would seize on the possibility for "green-collar" jobs in the new energy industries. Farmers would win because they could serve the energy markets. The energy experts dream of a coalition so powerful that it could rewire government and align policy incentives.

This coalition, alas, never lasts long enough to accomplish much. For an energy policy to be effective, it must send credible signals to encourage investment in new equipment not just for the few months needed to craft legislation but for at least two decades-enough time for industry to build and install a new generation of cars, appliances and power plants, and make back the investment. The coalition, though, is politically too diverse to survive the kumbaya moment.

Just two weeks ago the feds canceled "FutureGen," a government-industry project to develop technologies for burning coal without emitting copious greenhouse gases, demonstrating that the government is incapable of making a credible promise to help industry develop these badly needed technologies over the long haul. (The project had severe design flaws, but what matters most is that the federal government was able to pretend to support the venture for as long as it did and then abruptly back off.) Similarly, legislation late last year to increase the fuel economy of U.S. automobiles will have such a small effect on the vehicle fleet that it will barely change the country's dependence on imported oil and will have almost no impact on carbon emissions. Democrats and Republicans alike claim they want to end the country's dependence on foreign oil, but neither party actually does much about it.

The only policies that survive in this political vacuum are those that target narrower political interests with more staying power. Thus America has a highly credible policy to promote corn-based ethanol, because that policy really has nothing to do with energy; it is a chameleon that takes on whatever colors are needed to survive. It is a farm program that masquerades as energy policy; at times, it has been a farm program that masquerades as rural development. As an energy policy it is a very costly and ineffective way to cut dependence on oil. As a global warming policy it is even less cost effective, since large-scale ethanol doesn't help much in cutting CO₂ and other warming gases. Similarly, the United States has a stiff subsidy for renewable electricity-mainly wind and solar plants-because environmentalists are well organized in their support for it. The coal industry periodically gets money for its favored technologies, as in FutureGen, but even that powerful lobby has a hard time getting the government to stay the course.

Europe is in danger of contracting the same affliction. To be sure, most European countries long ago started taxing energy as a convenient way to raise revenues, which fortuitously also makes energy more costly and creates a strong incentive for efficiency. That approach did not originate as an energy policy, but it has emerged as a keystone of Europe's more successful efforts to tame energy consumption. And Europe is in the midst of shifting policymaking from the individual countries to Brussels, which may create a more coherent approach. But despite these advantages, Europe is notable for its inability to be strategic. For example, Brussels is touting a new pipeline called Nabucco that would help Europe cut its dependence on Russia for its natural gas. So far, Brussels is good at talking about the Nabucco dream but can't agree on a route, financing, or even on where to get the gas that would replace Russia's.

The rising powers in Asia are also finding that they, like America, have a hard time developing and applying strategic energy policies. China develops energy policy through its economic planning system, with mixed results. The country doesn't even have an energy ministry, and efforts to create one are being stymied by the bureaucracy and companies that fear they will lose influence. India has four energy ministries and no real central strategy. Like America, India is very good at declaring visions for strategic energy policy but dreadful at putting them into practice. The Japanese public is just as fickle, but the government bureaucracy is entrenched and far-sighted enough to keep its focus long after public interest has waned.

All this means that the underlying forces that are causing high demand for energy (and high prices) and emitting greenhouse gases will be hard to alter. The effort to solve global warming might change this pessimistic iron rule of energy policy, because the environmental community that is the core of the coalition in support of global warming policy is becoming much stronger and has shown staying power. For the moment, however, that is a hypothesis to be proved.

Coal is dirty. But coal is driving the U.S., Chinese and Indian economies. And therefore, coal is not going away. Renewable energy sources like solar and wind generate only 1 percent of the world's electricity. Do the math: Making coal burn cleaner might be the most pressing environmental problem that no one talks about.

Despite recent estimates that pollution from China's booming coal industry reaches U.S. shores in as little as five days, the green-tech investment boom that has funded the rise of biofuels has bypassed coal. Even the head of the World Coal Institute recently proclaimed the last 10 years "a lost decade" for clean coal, saying it's time to play catch-up.

Stanford's Jeremy Carl, a research fellow in the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development, couldn't agree more. He spoke on the phone with Wired News to discuss China, the holy grail of clean coal and how many coal plants he'd trade for Kyoto's accomplishments.

Stanford research fellow Jeremy Carl says, "Coal is as dirty as it gets," but warns against throwing the possibly cleaned-up baby out with the dirty bathwater.

Wired News: Why'd you get into clean coal?

Jeremy Carl: I looked at the numbers. It's a question of where the big sources of emissions are and where we can attack them.

WN: Can you give us an idea of the scale of coal power? Can you put coal in context as an energy source?

Carl: Only oil makes a bigger contribution to global energy. In terms of energy in the industrial world, it's about 40 percent of electricity production.

WN: How dirty is coal?

Carl: Coal is as dirty as it gets. Coal has every element in the periodic table. And depending where in the world you get it from, "coal" can mean 100 different substances. If you sent the sort of coal you might use in a typical Indian plant to a supermodern boiler in Japan, it would shut the place down.

WN: But there's got to be good things about coal.

Carl: It's cheap. And coal doesn't have the kind of extreme risk that nuclear power has. You're not going to build a dirty bomb out of coal. And unlike other fossil fuels, it is really widely distributed, so there is less of a coal OPEC.

WN: And that distribution would seem to make resource wars less likely to break out over coal?

Carl: Yes.

WN: Is there an energy source that could replace coal?

Carl: Natural gas is the only viable replacement, and it's not clear that the natural-gas supply could scale up to replace coal.

WN: So, how can we can make coal cleaner?

Carl: The most-well-known is flue-gas desulfurization, which takes sulfur dioxide out of smoke stacks, and came out of concerns about acid rain. There are other pollution-control devices for nitrogen oxide and mercury filters.

WN: What about up-and-coming technologies like carbon capture and sequestration? Can you tell us about that?

Carl: You're taking carbon from a smokestack and pressure-injecting it into a geological formation of some sort. We actually already do this process at an industrial level. We know how this works.

WN: Seems like we're spending a lot of time on the backend scrubbing pollutants out. Should we be designing in a cleaner process on the front end?

Carl: A lot of people point to integrated gasification-combined-cycle (IGCC) plants, which gasify coal before burning it, as the holy grail because they get you a cleaner process. It gives you a more concentrated stream of carbon that you can sequester underground more cheaply. The capital cost is very high, though, and we don't have a lot of experience in designing them.

WN: We hear a lot about China's coal industry. Can you compare it with the U.S. industry, which ranks second in the world?

Carl: We mine about (1.1 billion tons) of coal per year. China was at about 1.4 billion tons seven years ago. Now they are at 2.4 billion tons. So, they essentially took the second-biggest coal industry in the whole world and replicated it in seven years. And if you look at the Chinese plans, they plan to ramp it up even more in the future.

WN: Given the obvious environmental impacts of these plants, why don't we have better answers for these problems than the Kyoto Protocol (which the United States didn't sign, and which exempted China and India from emissions restrictions)?

Carl: I'll give you a speculative, personal answer. It has to do with the politics of the type of people who were negotiating Kyoto. And the pressure put on by environmental groups that were uncomfortable with coal. There was just so much pressure on the symbolic importance of getting a deal done.

WN: What would you have rather seen?

Carl: I think there has been some really good criticism that says, "Was the U.N. really a good forum for this? Or would it have been better to have taken the 10 countries who consume 60 percent of global energy and do something with real teeth in it?" I think that would have been a much better approach.

I would have happily traded every emissions gain from Kyoto for eight clean coal plants sequestering carbon in different countries. Because then we could have a real discussion that says, "This works. Now let's see who has to bear the cost."

WN: Why would that be such a big deal?

Carl: Because right now we're having a conversation with China and India where we're trying to get China and India to build clean coal plants by saying, "Here's this thing that's never been tried before at a mass scale. You should build one." And that's not going to work.

Every day, the United States burns through 20.7 million barrels of oil. China, the world's second largest consumer, uses about 6.9 million barrels a day. Although the United States is the third leading oil producer in the world (behind Saudi Arabia and Russia), its appetite is so enormous that it overwhelms the country's production capacity. Its known reserves, about 21 billion barrels, would supply only enough to keep the country running at full speed for about three years.

So when STANFORD gathered five faculty members to talk about the implications of U.S. dependency on foreign oil, we expected grave declarations of alarm. But their concern did not square with the growing chorus of citizens and elected officials about why reducing this dependency is so important.

On the next five pages, faculty from political science, economics, law and engineering explain why the debate about energy security is missing the point, and what they think needs to be done.

STANFORD: How would you frame the issue of dependency on foreign oil? What should we be concerned about?

David Victor: The problem is not dependence per se. In fact, dependence on a world market produces enormous benefits, such as lower prices. Nor is the problem that energy's essential role in the economy means that dependence must be avoided. The real problem is that energy - oil, especially - doesn't operate according to normal market principles. Something like 75 percent of the reserves of oil and gas are controlled by companies that are either wholly owned or in effect controlled by governments, and there's enormous variation in how those companies perform. Some of them are just a disaster, like [Mexico's state-owned oil company] Pemex, and others can work at world standards, like Saudi Aramco or Brazils Petrobrás. Some of these governments, such as Venezuela, use oil revenues for political purposes that undermine U.S. influence. High prices do not automatically generate new supply or conservation, partly because suppliers can drop prices to undercut commercial investment in alternatives. Second, we have what has become known as "the resource curse." There'sa lot of evidence that the presence of huge windfalls in poorly governed places makes governance even worse. Revenue that accrues to oil-exporting governments is particularly prone to being misspent, often in ways that work against U.S. interests.

Scott Sagan: I agree that calling the problem "energy dependence" and therefore seeking energy independence is the wrong way to think about this problem. Talking about energy independence feeds the xenophobic impulse that occurs all too easily in American politics. And it suggests to other countries that they should seek independence rather than a more cooperative approach. I see very negative consequences politically in the signal that attitude sends. Think about the current nuclear crisis with Iran. Iran claims that it needs independent uranium enrichment capabilities to have "energy sovereignty." Such uranium enrichment production could be used, however, for civilian nuclear power or for making a bomb, creating enormous nuclear weapons proliferation problems. We're feeding into that kind of thinking when we use the same language about independence when referring to oil. And it produces uncooperative effects elsewhere. The Chinese, for example, cut a deal with Sudan as a means of creating energy security for themselves. It inhibits efforts of the international community to encourage that government to behave responsibly.

John Weyant: There is a distinction between dependence, meaning how much of the oil the United States consumes is imported, and vulnerability, meaning how at risk our economy and our social order are to oil-supply disruptions. That vulnerability is defined by how much of the total supply of oil in the world market comes from unreliable sources. So you have to look at oil supply on a global scale, not just in the United States. It's the instability of the supply that affects price.

Victor: I like John's term "vulnerability," and it leads us to various kinds of actions to reduce our vulnerability to the market rather than trying to make us completely independent. One of them has been around since the '70s - building and coordinating strategic stockpiles so that they are supplied into a single world market. Traditionally that could be done by the major Western countries because they were the major oil consumers. One of the big challenges for policy makers today is how to get India and China to think about the operation of this world market in the same market-based way that we think about it, and to get them to build up those stockpiles and coordinate them with our own. There's some evidence that that kind of coordination can reduce our vulnerability.

Weyant: There's this fallacy among the public that if we don't import so much oil, other oil-exporting countries are going to be hurt and we will be unaffected if oil supplies are cut off. But these countries are sometimes major trading partners of allies, and asking those allies to take a hit on our behalf just leads to other economic problems. If the economies in China and Europe and Japan, who are all major trading partners, go down, it affects how much they can buy from us. It's another reason we can't be xenophobic and just look inward on an issue like this. You get these international trade flows outside the energy sector that could be pretty devastating.

STANFORD: Last summer we saw crude oil prices hit $70 a barrel and gas prices went well above $3 per gallon nationwide. That momentarily changed consumer behavior, and reduced demand. Are high prices a good thing?

Michael May: The key factor in normalizing market conditions is assuring the market that high prices are here to stay. Major oil companies like Exxon and bp have been putting their money to other uses than exploration. They have been buying back shares and increasing returns to stockholders because that's the way Wall Street drives them. That might change if prices stayed high. It probably won't be $70 a barrel, but even $50 a barrel as a base price is almost twice the historic average. The extent to which investors become convinced that that's going to be the future average will have some bearing as to how much money they spend on exploration. Toyota and General Motors and others can make hybrids or much more efficient cars, but it takes billons of dollars of investment, and if the price of gasoline goes down, they have less incentive. When gas is cheap, driving an SUV is not such a big deal.

Victor: The reason some of these companies are buying back the shares is not just because of Wall Street but because they don't have a lot of truly attractive opportunities for investing in new production. Most of the oil reserves are either legally off limits for the Western oil companies or international oil companies generally, or they're de facto off limits because they're in places where it's so hard to do business. Although the public is seized by the high price of energy, the major energy companies are seized by concerns that prices are going to decline sharply. If there is a recession, which would dampen demand for energy, or the capacity to produce oil around the world improves, then prices will decline. It has happened in the past. That fear really retards a lot of investment because these investments have a very long capital lifetime, and you need to protect them against low prices over an incredibly long time horizon.

Michael McFaul: It's very important to understand that oil companies owned and operated by governments are not necessarily profit-maximization entities. Take Gazprom, the gas company of Russia. It is closely aligned with state interests, so profit isn't its only motivation. It will use its money for strategic purposes as defined by Vladimir Putin, not as defined by the shareholders of Gazprom. For instance, early in 2006, Gazprom cut off gas supplies to Ukraine, mostly for geopolitical reasons. Why is Hezbollah so well armed? Because of Iran, which uses oil revenue for strategic purposes; it is not used for investing in a company or investing in the market per se. This is part of the problem of the "resource curse" David referred to. If oil is discovered in a country before democratic institutions are in place, the probability of that country becoming democratic is very low. In countries where the state does not rely on the taxation of its citizens for its revenues, it doesn't have to listen to what its citizens want to do with that money. So instead of building roads or schools or doing things that taxpayers would demand of them, they use their money in ways that threaten the security of other countries, and, ultimately, their own.

Victor: It's important that we not overstate the extent to which users of energy are going to respond automatically to high prices, and the personal vehicle is a great example. Fuel accounts for about 20 percent of the total cost of operating a vehicle. Traditionally it's only been 10 or 15 percent, but we are much wealthier today than we were three decades ago when we had the [first OPEC oil embargo]. I think that helps explain a lot of the sluggishness in response in the marketplace. People are buying smaller, more fuel-efficient cars, but that trend will only go so far because there are other factors that determine what kinds of vehicles people purchase. In the United States and most advanced industrialized countries, most oil is used for transportation, where oil products have no rival. It is hard to switch. In most of the rest of the world, oil gets used for a variety of other purposes, including generating electricity. Those markets are probably going to be more responsive to the high price of oil because they're going to have opportunities to switch to other fuels. The United States used a lot of oil to generate electricity in the early 1970s and when that first oil shock came along, essentially all of that disappeared from our market. That's part of the reason why the U.S. energy system responded fairly quickly to the first oil shock, and why changes in behavior are harder to discern in the current crisis. There is no easy substitute for gasoline.

May: If we generally agree that high oil prices, on the whole, are a good thing because they cause investment in more production and more efficient uses of oil, then it would follow that the rapid growth in consumption in China is also a good thing and we should welcome it, right?

Victor: I disagree with that. In effect what we have right now is a "tax" that's been applied to the oil market due to the various dysfunctions of the way it operates and to unexpectedly high demand in the United States and China. The revenue from that tax is accruing to the producers, and if we think about how to get out of the mess here, then what we want to do is in effect apply a tax to the oil products. If we raise the price of these products to reflect the real total cost of our vulnerability to the world oil market, those companies have an incentive to go off and look for alternatives.

May: So you're saying the same thing: that high oil prices, whether from this tax or otherwise, are a good thing.

Weyant: It depends significantly on who is collecting the tax.

McFaul: Yes, the fundamental question is how the money is being spent. If I had high confidence that the money was going to reinvestment, then I could agree that high prices are good, but that's not what is happening. The Soviet Union's most dangerous adventures in the Third World correlated with the high oil prices in the 1970s. You can see the direct effect. And when the prices came down, the Soviet Union collapsed. The same is true with Iran today. They are being very aggressive in the region - in Iraq, in Lebanon, in Afghanistan - trying to become the Middle East hegemon. This would not be happening if they didn't have all these clients - Hezbollah, Hamas, their friends in Iraq - that they can support with millions of dollars. Going back a few decades, where did Osama bin Laden come from? Where did support for the Taliban come from? It came from this tax that David is talking about. If we're talking about security issues and oil, this is much more serious than supply disruption to the United States.

Victor: I agree with Mike 100 percent. If you look at where the revenues are going from Iran, Venezuela and so on, there's a long list of folks who are doing things that are contrary to our interests with the money that ultimately is coming out of the pockets of American consumers. Dealing with that is job one.

STANFORD: So how would you counsel American policy makers? What needs to happen to reduce our vulnerability over the long term?

Sagan: The vulnerabilities we have today should provide an incentive to make some critical investments and to change our thinking, but we're not really doing that. I was quite surprised at how much I agreed with one aspect of the second Bush inaugural address. [He said] let's start talking about our addiction to oil and all the problems associated with that, but I've been completely disappointed with the lack of follow-through. And part of the problem is this notion of energy independence. We need diversity in our research and development spending across the board, on a variety of technologies. We're going to produce energy security to a large degree by finding cooperative solutions that are efficient and secure for many countries working together. We need to see our national security as being very dependent on others and that's not entirely a bad thing.

Victor: There is one cluster of technology that's going to be exceptionally important - electric vehicles. The all-electric vehicle has been kind of a disaster. We tried to do that in California without much success at all. The new set of pluggable hybrid vehicles, which you plug in at night and charge up, are more promising. If such technologies make it feasible to reduce some of the transportation dependence on oil, then markets will be forced to become more "normal" and more responsive. Electric cars and other technologies can help to keep prices lower and ultimately help make the transition completely away from oil over a period of 30 or 50 years.

Weyant: We only think about energy as a nation when prices are high, and so there's a short attention span on the issue. That makes it really hard to sustain a policy that would be rational over the long term. If we're going to have a big R&D program, for example, you need to invest in technologies and sustain the investment over a long time horizon. If you couple this short attention span with our aversion to taxes, at least historically, you end up with policies that are almost designed from the outset to fail. The political tide is turning a little bit so a well-designed tax might be possible. Maybe you don't raise taxes now but you assure that the price of a [hybrid] car won't go below a certain level and that'll help create a little more confidence with the marketplace. If you just focus on research and development without getting the economic incentives right, you come up with all kinds of great gizmos that no one will actually make or use.

McFaul: We've been talking mostly about how to manipulate the market to change people's behavior and I think that's quite right. I can't tell you how many people I saw come out of a Palo Alto theater after seeing Al Gore's movie [An Inconvenient Truth] and jump into their gas-guzzling machines. I would like to tax those machines; use economic tools to change people's behavior in a way the movie didn't. This has to become a public policy issue. It's not right now. Think about the way the market for cigarettes worked in this country 50 years ago, and think of how it is structured now. We have not just taxes but regulation - they can't be advertised on television - and a national campaign trying to educate people about the health concerns. We need a similar effort on this issue.

Sagan: When you watch the Super Bowl you don't see advertisements for cigarettes, but you do for Hummers. There's no attempt at all to educate people about the relationship between these longer-term problems and what you do individually. And that takes decades.

Victor: One of the acid tests for whether the nation is pursuing a coherent energy policy is our policy on ethanol. Ethanol is important because it is a partial substitute for oil-based gasoline. In this country, almost all of the ethanol that is delivered to the marketplace is made from corn, which is economically inefficient. But we do that because the corn grows in the heartland, such as Iowa - an important state electorally. There have been lots of proposals to, for example, erase the tariff on imported ethanol. Brazil produces ethanol from sugar cane and it's much cheaper and more efficient. But the farm lobby always intervenes and these proposals languish, with the result that the U.S. ethanol industry never faces the rigors of world competition. So long as energy is bouncing around lower on the list of priorities, it will be difficult to have a coherent policy.

Weyant: It would be far better if people were willing to bite the bullet and say this is a problem and it's not going to be painless to solve it, but if we play our cards right it's not going to reduce our standard of living much. Convincing the public is really one thing that might be worth some more effort. It's a cacophony to them.

STANFORD: What is your greatest hope and your worst fear with regard to demand for oil?

Victor: My greatest hope is that inside the Chinese government and inside the Indian government people know that this independence view of the world energy market is completely wrongheaded. Maybe that will create an opportunity for the United States and India and China along with other major oil consumers to collectively manage this issue, and the consequences of doing that will spill over onto other areas of cooperation. My greatest fear, in addition to the things we've already discussed, is that the United States will use the oil issue to beat up on the Chinese and the Indians, and that our relationship with those countries, which is already fragile, will make it harder to work together on other things that also matter.

May: My greatest hope is that the United States, China, India and other major countries work together towards a more hopeful future, including improving the global environment, providing a counterbalance to mischief in the Middle East, and promoting a transition to modernization and away from extremism. My greatest fear is that the little termites who are nibbling at what is currently a somewhat sensible Chinese policy will have their way, either because the country's economy slows down - which it will inevitably - or for some other reason, and we'll wind up fighting each other or destroying each other's capabilities.

McFaul: My greatest sense of optimism comes from this discussion, and about what my colleagues in this discussion said about China, because from the surface it looks like there's a much more pernicious policy of China going its own way. I've learned today that in fact there are very reasonable voices within the Chinese government, and I hope that there will be in my own government. My greatest fear is that there will continue to be politicians who control oil revenues who do things that do not serve international security, and I'm speaking not only of Iran. My nightmarish scenario is that 10 years from now Iran, Iraq and, God forbid, Saudi Arabia are controlled by hostile governments that want to use the revenues that we pay them for their oil to harm us. I give that a low probability, but in terms of things that worry me about our security, it's the instability of those oil-exporting regimes.

Sagan: The hope is that this current crisis will provide the right set of incentives to encourage investment in a diverse set of energy R&D programs across the board, and will encourage cooperation between countries in energy research and development. That would help educate and change the culture of the United States away from a gas-guzzling, governor-in-the-Hummer culture. The fear is that this will become yet one more excuse to move to a more xenophobic policy that discourages cooperative international policies.

Weyant: Remember David Stockman, the erstwhile head of the Office of Management and Budget? I ran into him in Washington and he literally said to me, "Don't worry about oil security and disruptions or any of that stuff. We've got battleships to take care of this problem." That shocked me to no end, and my response was "Do you really want to be in that position, where that's your only option?" Your whole response is "We're best in the battleship field and you shouldn't mess with us?" This type of attitude is what worries me the most.

Sagan: We were earlier talking about the resource curse, and this strikes me as an example of the hegemon's curse. To not take the necessary steps on economic policies or energy policies because you think you've got a military backup solution. If our military strength causes us to be passive or uncooperative on the economic or energy front, it will have a boomerang effect that will really hurt us.

PESD director David G. Victor testifies to the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources that the U.S.-India nuclear deal currently being debated by Congress could have a large impact on greenhouse gas emissions and be a major step towards engaging developing countries in the fight against climate change.

David Victor shows that by displacing coal-fired electricity generation, the U.S.-India nuclear deal could realize carbon dioxide emission reductions that rival the European Union's efforts under the Kyoto Protocol and far exceed previous efforts to engage developing countries in combating climate change.