Source: Farm & Ranch
As a four-star general who served as NATO Supreme Allied Commander from 1997 to 2000, Gen. Wesley Clark has been in a unique position to see how vital energy independence is.
“Is there any doubt about what America's dependence on foreign oil has meant?” said Clark at the 2010 Renewable Energy Action Summit held in Bismarck, N.D.
He said Secretary of State Baker “was real clear” that the 1990 war with Kuwait was about protecting foreign oil supplies.
“In 2002 in the runup to the second war with Iraq, we were a lot hedgier. Couldn't get anybody to admit the war was about oil,” Clark said. “But the truth was, it was about oil. And today Iraq is sitting on the world's greatest, undiscovered and undeveloped reserves of hydrocarbons. It is there, protected by Saddam all these years and that was what these last few years have been all about.” As co-chair of Growth Energy, Clark is involved in all kinds of renewables:, including ethanol with Poet in South Dakota, wind, solar - while still working on boards that deal with oil.
He ran for U.S. president in 2004, then became a businessman. U.S. Sen. Byron Dorgan, who organizes the summit each year, said the U.S. needs to develop domestic energy strategies that are a mix of renewables - wind, biomass, biofuels, solar - along with drilling domestically.
“The new, big thing here is the Bakken shale (an oil formation in western North Dakota) for sure, but it's not the only new thing. I'm a big fan of doing it all,” Dorgan said at the summit.
He said he expects an energy bill with a renewable energy and carbon credit component to be out of the Senate by the end of summer.
“We need a renewable fuel standard, higher blends for ethanol, and new technology in renewables applied to it,” Dorgan added.
Clark said there is no way the U.S. will survive without developing ethanol, biodiesel and other domestic, renewable energies.
“We cannot move forward as a nation paying $300 billion a year out of our economy to other countries to support our energy consumption,” Clark said. “Can't do it - won't be able to make it. That is more than the health bill; that's your children's education.”
Clark said before the late 1960s, the U.S. actually used to export oil, not import oil.
He began in the energy business by studying nuclear engineering and Middle Eastern policy at West Point.
“I came back from Vietnam and I was teaching economics at West Point. Suddenly it occurred to all of us up there that we were no longer an oil exporting nation.”
