the institutional memory of that has dimmed, and I believe we are far too modest in our plans for nuclear and could really use some innovative ideas to drive us toward a sustainable energy source. The third category and the one that I am most identified with and favor the most is renewable energy, primarily solar and wind energy. These energy sources are low intensity, intermittent, and widely distributed. If we wanted to use these sources, if we wanted to get, let's say, one-third of our primary power from renewables, one-third from green nukes, and one-third from coal sequestration, we really need to invent and deploy entirely new systems for transmitting and storing this energy. Indeed, the transmission and the storage of the renewable energy may become the cost pacer in the implementation of renewable energy beyond the point where renewables can penetrate as a niche market. I think that is another area that could benefit from a DARPA-like program. This emphasis on technology, which in no way should be construed as an alternative to prompt action, I also think is a way that we might entrain a bipartisan support for this. I had the pleasure yesterday of appearing before a different committee, the House Committee on Science, and Congressman Rohrabacher was there and made some remarks to the effect that he doesn't accept the theory of global warming, which I know, and that was fine. But I also know Congressman Rohrabacher to be a proponent of space solar power, solar power satellites where one collects solar energy in Earth orbit and beams it to the Earth. He has given many talks in conferences on this that I have attended. On this score, we are technologically simpatico. I think it would be very important to have an R&D program in space solar power. After all, the world is spending $13 billion to build an experimental thermonuclear reactor that isn't even going to generate any power. There is essentially zero funding for space solar power right now, although we did have a program in the 1970's. It is another discussion, but the one problem is that, if that technology or other related technologies like global super-conducting transmission lines, auto gyros that might be suspended in the upper troposphere which have the potential of providing all the electricity on Earth are not being supported because there is no champion within the Government agencies, particularly the Department of Energy. How are we ever going to start working on those ideas? I think that I would imagine a sequence of events in which we might start with a relatively modest exploratory research technology program that would examine the feasibility of these ideas and start looking into experiments to test them. That might be eventually correlated with an ARPA-E program and, if it looks like it is very promising, it might transfer eventually to the Department of Energy. I don't think I have very much time left but I have one more point that I think is vitally important. Many Americans believe that the job of the Department of Energy is to develop alternative energy sources that would be sustainable and allow us to live harmoniously with nature and yet retain our high-tech civilization. That is not the job, as you well know. DOE has two jobs, one is called stockpile stewardship, which means to make sure that the nuclear weapons we have will actually work if we ever had to use them, and the other is toxic waste cleanup. I put it to the committee that the Department of Energy, itself, should be reorganized. This is not such a far-out idea. As you may well know, NASA has recently been reorganized and tasked with the mission of going back to the moon and going to Mars, perhaps without adequate funding but certainly heads rolled and there were internal reorganizations. I don't bring this up because I necessarily agree with that direction. In fact, I am quite unhappy about the loss of monitoring programs from space that have applicability to climate change. But I bring it up because it is not impossible for a Government agency to be reorganized and to be retasked, and I cannot think of a more important task for this century, a more important organizing principle than developing sustainable energy sources in harmony with natural ecosystems. Thank you. [The prepared statement of Mr. Hoffert follows:] Testimony of Dr. Martin I. Hoffert "An Energy Revolution for the Before the United States House of Representatives "Climate Change Technology Research: Do we need a 'Manhattan Project' for the Environment?" September 21, 2006 Martin Hoffert An Energy Revolution for the Greenhouse Century When there is no vision, the people perish. -Proverbs 29:18 You see things: and you say, "Why?" But I dream things that never were; and I say, "Why not?" We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the -John F. Kennedy, Rice University, 1962 THE REALITY OF GLOBAL WARMING FROM THE BUILDUP OF FOSSIL FUEL CARBON dioxide in the atmosphere is no longer in doubt. Arctic sea ice, tundra, and alpine glaciers are melting, tropical diseases like West Nile virus and malaria are penetrating higher latitudes, and sea surface temperatures have risen to the point where Katrina-like hurricanes are not only more probable, but actually occur. Also taking place are the extinction of plants and animals adapted to cooler regimes but unable to migrate poleward fast enough to keep pace with a warming climate. Polar bears, already far north, may have nowhere to go. Ominously, the melting of Greenland and Antarctic icecaps is accelerating, threatening worldwide major sea level rise and coastal inundation (Hansen, 2006; Gore, 2006; Kolbert, 2006; Flannery, 2006). These are well-documented facts, not alarmist predictions by desperate environmentalists in search of funding (Crichton, 2003) or some colossal hoax on the American people (Inhofe, 2003). Atmospheric warming from water vapor, CO2 and other greenhouse gases is a basic principle of atmospheric science. It is responsible for maintaining earth as a habitable zone for life, and for making Venus, with its pure CO2 atmosphere 100 times thicker than earth's, hot as metaphorical Hell. Cooling can result from suspended aerosol particles also produced by burning fossil fuels, but aerosols remain in the atmosphere a much shorter time than CO2 and their cooling effect, so far, has mainly served to mask the full impact of warming from CO2 emissions. (Some propose "geoengineering" climate by intentionally injecting aerosols to cool regions most threatened by global warming, such as the Arctic; see for example Teller, Wood, and Hyde, 2002). Heat temporarily stored in oceans can also delay or mask committed greenhouse warming, as can variations in the output of the sun and volcanic eruptions. But volcanoes, the sun, and the oceans cause surface temperature to rise and fall in a narrow range. In retrospect, it was inevitable that the explosive growth (on a geological time scale) of human CO2 emissions, driven by population growth, industrialization and, most of all, by fossil fuel energy use, made it inevitable that human-induced warming would overwhelm climate change from all the other factors at some point. And we are at that point. That fossil fuel atmospheric carbon dioxide would warm the planet was predicted over a century ago (Arrhenius, 1896). Roughly half the CO2 input by humans remains in the atmosphere. The rest mostly dissolves in the ocean, creating excess acidity that marine organisms may not be able to tolerate, which is another problem. By the third quarter of the twentieth century, CO2 buildup in the atmosphere was evident, although greenhouse warming did not emerge from background "noise" until the late 1980s. Hans Suess and Roger Revelle recognized early on that transferring hundreds of billions of tons of carbon in fossil fuels (coal, oil, and natural gas) formed over hundreds of millions of years and locked up in earth's crust to the atmosphere as CO2 in a few hundred years was "grand |