Citizens Energy Summit Launches Effort to Plan for National Energy Needs
Hoping to spark a grassroots effort to develop a national energy plan, the Citizens Energy Plan, held its first public event designed to mobilize the public to action.
Held in Willmar on February 24, the event featured several speakers who are knowledgeable about energy issues and related policies that will be included in the comprehensive plan slated for completion in 2010.
Joe Shuster, author of Beyond Fossil Fools: The Roadmap to Energy Independence by 2040, gave the audience of eighty a wake-up call to what he calls a “brewing energy storm.”
“If congress understood the seriousness of our energy situation,” Shuster said, “they would have already developed an energy plan. And if they do not do something soon,” he added, “our children will inherit chaos.”
To help make his point, Shuster claimed that if the United States had to live on its own reserves of oil, it would run out in three years, and that the world’s known supply of oil will be depleted in thirty-seven years.
Shuster recalled that the Department of Energy was established in 1977, but that the country still does not have a national energy policy.
Massoud Amin, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Minnesota, framed the need for a national energy plan by saying energy is at the core of the country’s three main security issues: Environmental, national, and economic.
Amin’s research on the nation’s power grid as a high-value target for terrorism made his message very timely.
An expert on energy infrastructures, transportation and communication, Amin reported that only fifty-five percent of the energy used in the United States is used at its final destination. The rest is consumed in transportation. He said that electricity is the most efficient energy to transport.
Other speakers for the daylong event included Lee Byberg and Donna Boonstra, two of the founders of the Citizens Energy Plan organization. Both spoke of their commitment to inform and excite everyday citizens to participate in a national conversation about the unfolding energy crisis.