Set America Free Coalition member and former director of the CIA Jim Woolsey in today’s WSJ:
An oil and security task force of the Council on Foreign Relations recently opined that “[t]he voices that espouse ‘energy independence’ are doing the nation a disservice by focusing on a goal that is unachievable over the foreseeable future . . .” Others have also said, essentially, that other nations will control our transportation fuel — get used to it. Yet House Democrats have announced a push for “energy independence in 10 years,” and last month General Motors joined Toyota and perhaps other auto makers in a race to produce plug-in hybrid vehicles, hugely reducing the demand for oil. Who’s right — those who drive toward independence or those who shrug?
Bet on major progress toward independence, spurred by market forces and a portfolio of rapidly developing oil-replacing technologies.
[...]The change is being driven by innovations in the batteries that now power modern electronics. If hybrid gasoline-electric cars are provided with advanced batteries (GM’s announcement said its choice would be lithium-ion) having improved energy and power density — variants of the ones in our computers and cell phones — dozens of vehicle prototypes are now demonstrating that these “plug-in hybrids” can more than double hybrids’ overall (gasoline) mileage. With a plug-in, charging your car overnight from an ordinary 110-volt socket in your garage lets you drive 20 miles or more on the electricity stored in the topped-up battery before the car lapses into its normal hybrid mode. If you forget to charge or exceed 20 miles, no problem, you then just have a regular hybrid with the insurance of liquid fuel in the tank. And during those 20 all-electric miles you will be driving at a cost of between a penny and three cents a mile instead of the current 10-cent-a-mile cost of gasoline.
[...]A 50 mpg hybrid, once it becomes a plug-in, will likely get solidly over 100 mpg of gasoline (call it “mpgg”); if it is also a flexible fuel vehicle using 85% ethanol, E-85, its mpgg rises to around 500.
The market will likely operate to expand sharply the use of these technologies that are already in pilot plants and prototypes and heavily reduce oil use in the foreseeable future. And given the array of Wahhabis, terrorists and Ahmadinejad-like fanatics who sit atop the Persian Gulf’s two-thirds of the world’s conventional oil, such reduction will not be a disservice to the nation.