National Academies Summit on America's Energy Future

[kristopher]

http://www.nap.edu/catalog/12450.html

If you want to know the advice the Obama administration and the Congress will be getting when the new government convenes, you might want to download this free 156 page (12.8mb) summary of the Academy's March summit. For spice Chu was one of the speakers.

Foreward:

A confluence of events is producing a growing sense of urgency about
the role of energy in long-term U.S. economic vitality, national security,
and climate change. Energy prices have been rising and are extremely
volatile. The demand for energy has been increasing, especially in develop-
ing countries. Energy supplies, and especially supplies of oil, lack long-term
security in the face of political instability and resource limits. Concerns about
carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, which currently sup-
ply most of the world’s energy, are growing. Investments in the infrastructure
and technologies needed to develop alternate energy sources are inadequate.
And societal concerns surround the large-scale deployment of some alternate
energy sources such as nuclear power. All of these factors are affected to a great
degree by government policies both here and abroad.

To stimulate and inform a constructive national debate on these and other
energy-related issues, the National Academy of Sciences and the National Acad-
emy of Engineering initiated in 2007 a major study, “America’s Energy Future:
Technology Opportunities, Risks, and Tradeoffs.” The America’s Energy Future
(AEF) project was organized to respond to requests from the U.S. Congress,
in particular from Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chair Jeff
Bingaman and Ranking Member Pete Domenici as well as House Science and
Technology Committee Chair Bart Gordon and Ranking Member Ralph Hall.

Phase I of the project is structured to provide authoritative estimates of the
current contributions and future potential of existing and new energy supply
and demand technologies, their associated impacts, and projected costs. It will
also serve as the foundation for a Phase II portfolio of subsequent studies at the
Academies and elsewhere focused on more strategic, tactical, and policy issues,
such as energy research and development priorities, strategic energy technology
development, and policy analysis.

Phase I of the AEF project will produce a series of five reports designed
to inform key energy policy decisions as a new U.S. President assumes office
and a new Congress convenes in 2009. The AEF effort to date has benefited
from a large number of recent projects conducted by various organizations that
have explored technology options for shaping future energy use. Some of these
study results conflict and reflect disagreements about technology potential,
particularly for technologies such as biomass energy, energy efficiency, renew-
able electric power generating technologies, nuclear power, and advanced coal
technologies. A key objective of the AEF series of reports is to resolve conflict-
ing analyses of technology options to help facilitate a productive national policy
debate about the nation’s energy future.

The AEF project is being generously supported by the W.M. Keck Founda-
tion, Fred Kavli and the Kavli Foundation, Intel Corporation, Dow Chemical
Company Foundation, General Motors Corporation, GE Energy, BP America,
the U.S. Department of Energy, and by our own academies.

A key milestone in the AEF project was the National Academies Summit
on America’s Energy Future, which was convened on March 13-14, 2008, in the
National Academy of Sciences Auditorium in Washington, D.C. The summit
provided an opportunity for discussion of recent major studies by key principals
of those studies as input to the AEF study committee and panel deliberations.
This summary report, the preparation of which was overseen by a subgroup of
the Committee on America’s Energy Future (see Appendix A), chronicles the
rich and varied presentation that occurred at the summit. Information on the
speakers at the summit is given in Appendix B, and the agenda for the summit
is included as Appendix C....

[kristopher]

1. Kicking this once myself

Just because it needs to be read by anyone interested in our energy future.

It isn't the kind of writing you need to wade through, BTW.