In 1979, the Russians invaded Afghanistan and fears were running high that they were going

after the Saudi Arabian oil fields. President Jimmy Carter responded with the "Carter

Doctrine," which designated those oil fields as vital U.S. interests and stated that we would

use "any means necessary" to defend them — apparently including nuclear weapons.

Risking nuclear war for oil, when we were wasting it like crazy, seemed absurd and

dangerous to me. So I created the Energy Conservation Peace Pledge, a petition that said let's

conserve energy instead of risking nuclear war. Pretty obvious stuff, but it was in direct

opposition to conventional wisdom and U.S. foreign policy at the time.

My conservation pledge did not change history but it was an epiphany for me. I realized

that if I wanted to be an effective peacemaker, I had better address the energy issue. So I

left my position as director of the Western New York Peace Center and went back to school to

study energy policy. That decision led to a 26-year career as energy officer at the University

at Buffalo, where I planned and implemented energy conservation measures while teaching about

the need for sustainable energy policies.

My early understanding of the energy issue was influenced by Amory Lovins' groundbreaking

essay, "Energy Strategy: the Road Not Taken?" that appeared in the October 1976 issue of

Foreign Affairs. In that article, Lovins established his credentials as an energy visionary by

discussing the "hard" and "soft" energy paths.

The hard energy path is the path we are on — with near-total reliance on

non-renewable fossil fuels and large central power stations mostly fueled by coal or uranium.

Lovins characterized the hard path as polluting, risky, vulnerable, costly and capital

intensive. He was also prescient, observing more than 30 years ago that a long-term commitment

to coal-burning would cause substantial and potentially irreversible changes in global

climate. Moreover, he sounded the alarm about the dangerous connection between nuclear power

and nuclear weapons.

Lovins' soft energy path was easier on the environment, society and pocketbook. Instead of

the hard path's commitment to ever-increasing conventional energy supplies, the soft path

called for first reducing demand through energy conservation and efficiency and then using

soft energy technologies like solar, wind and biomass to meet those reduced energy needs in

ways that were renewable, diverse, decentralized, easy to understand and appropriate to the

tasks at hand.

Observing that more than half the energy we produce is wasted, Lovins turned energy

thinking on its head by advocating meeting energy needs with "negawatts" or energy savings

— an approach he termed "least cost" because it generally costs much less to save energy

than it does to make it.

Looking back, we see that the 1970s were watershed years in the energy world. In 1973 and

1974 we experienced an energy crisis when Arab oil-producing nations imposed an oil embargo on

the United States and its allies in response to U.S. support for Israel during and after the

Arab-Israeli War of 1973. Many will remember long gas station lines that called into question

our love affair with large, gas-guzzling cars.

That first energy crisis was followed in 1979 by a second energy crisis when the

U.S.-supported Shah of Iran (Mohammad Reza Pahlavi) was overthrown and replaced by the

Ayatollah Khomeini. In addition to seizing American hostages, Iran's new government turned off

the oil spigot, reducing global oil supplies and causing gasoline prices to soar again.

These events and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan focused the Carter administration on

U.S. foreign oil dependence. At the time only 37 percent of U.S. oil was imported —

compared to 57 percent now. While Carter was an advocate of energy conservation, he also was

willing to use U.S. military might to keep foreign oil flowing into our gas tanks. Before

Carter left office he created the Rapid Deployment Force, a new military command designed to

quickly deploy to global hot-spots like the Persian Gulf whenever U.S. interests were

threatened.

Our first oil war occurred in 1991, when U.S. and allied forces carried out Operation

Desert Storm to repel Iraqi military forces that had invaded Kuwait in 1990, seizing its oil

fields. While President George H.W. Bush took pains to wrap this war in the American flag,

calling it a defense of "freedom and democracy," the war was clearly all about oil. After all,

Kuwait was not a democracy but it did contain the world's fourth-largest oil reserves.

While this war was relatively short, each day of fighting cost taxpayers $1 billion, or

three times the annual federal budget for energy conservation. And 148 American soldiers died

liberating Kuwaiti oil. Iraqi deaths were considerably higher — 50,000 or more. Civilian

deaths were termed "collateral damage" with many killed during weeks of U.S. aerial bombing of

Baghdad.

Given the human and dollar costs of the Gulf War, the take-home lesson should have been

"let's do everything we can to avoid another oil war." But that lesson was not learned. Our

cars remained inefficient and we drove them greater distances, causing U.S. foreign oil

imports to grow during the 1990s. Moreover, at the end of the Gulf War the seeds were sown for

the next oil war by establishing a permanent U.S. military base in Saudi Arabia. This base was

deeply resented by Saudi fundamentalists like Osama bin Laden, and may have precipitated the

al-Qaida terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, which served as a catalyst to our second oil war

in 2003.

The ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus is credited with saying, "In war, truth is the first

casualty." Nothing could illustrate that maxim better than all the lies that were told by the

George W. Bush administration to mobilize our nation for "regime change" and war in Iraq.

We now know that Saddam Hussein and Iraq had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks and that

Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction threatening the United States. While the Bush White

House was masterful in conjuring up phony rationales for invading Iraq, it never admitted the

real one — oil. The role of Saudi Arabia in 9/11 was also obscured. Saudi money, much of

it recycled U.S. petro-dollars, was funding fundamentalist Islamic schools throughout the

region committed to jihad against the United States.

Given the Bush administration's strong oil industry ties, it was not surprising that it

immediately focused on foreign oil through Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force,

which met in secret with top oil company executives. Its May 2001 report highlighted the

dangers of U.S. foreign oil dependency, predicting that by 2020 as much as two-thirds of U.S.

oil would be imported. Cheney's task force is believed to have reviewed maps of Iraqi oil

fields, noting which U.S. oil companies wanted access to them. When the 9/11 terrorist attacks

occurred, the administration was ready to use this tragic event as an excuse to go after the

Iraqi oil reserves — the second- or third-largest in the world.

When the cause of war is obvious, it's remarkable that knowledgeable political leaders

remain silent and sustain the masquerade. It took Alan Greenspan, former Federal Reserve

chairman, to say in his 2007 memoir, "I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to

acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil." This statement's truth

was borne out by the Bush administration's ongoing attempts to pressure the new Iraqi

government to sign no-bid contracts with Western oil companies like Exxon, Mobil, Shell, Total

and BP, which previously did not have access to Iraqi oil.

Our second oil war, which has yet to end, makes the first one look like a piker: 4,000

Americans have been killed and more than 30,000 wounded. Iraqi deaths are estimated between

100,000 and 1 million. So far the war has directly cost American taxpayers more than $700

billion and the U.S. economy an estimated $3 trillion — $10,000 for every American.

These staggering sums may be more than would be needed to completely redesign our

transportation sector to run efficiently on domestic biofuels or wind powered hydrogen,

completely eliminating U.S. foreign oil dependence.

In the absence of better energy policies, we can expect more oil wars in the future,

perhaps at an accelerating rate. After all, our dependence on oil imports is still growing and

most of the world's remaining conventional oil is located in Middle East Islamic nations often

not well disposed to the United States.

Plus it appears that the world has or will soon experience "peak oil," a point in time when

global oil production peaks and then declines as the oil reserves that are easiest to discover

and tap are depleted, and when finding more oil becomes difficult and costly.

Peak oil, which is inevitable because global oil supplies are finite, will usher in an era

of much higher gasoline prices and economic dislocation. Even worse, peak oil could propel us

toward "non-solutions" like reckless drilling for oil in fragile, irreplaceable natural

environments or tapping Canadian oil sands — which would be catastrophic given the

energy requirements and carbon footprint associated with exploiting that resource.

The frightening prospect of peak oil should motivate us to quickly become "energy

independent" by developing public transit, bicycle-friendly communities, smart-growth plans to

minimize sprawl and highly efficient alternatively fueled vehicles. Lack of action is setting

us up to become full participants in an intense international scramble for dwindling oil

supplies — a recipe for economic collapse, international conflict and more oil wars.

Our addiction to fossil fuels also is causing global climate change because when coal, oil

and natural gas are burned they release vast quantities of carbon dioxide, the principal

greenhouse gas that traps heat in the atmosphere. As the atmospheric concentrations of

greenhouse gases rise, so does global average temperature. Our unusual recent local winter

notwithstanding, NASA warns that a new global average temperature record is likely to be set

soon.

There is a natural tendency to deny the inconvenient truth about fossil fuels, but it is

based on overwhelming scientific evidence. We ignore this problem at our own peril because as

climate change gets worse, our species will find itself living in a much less hospitable world

with rising sea levels and more intense storms, heat waves, droughts and floods.

Even now in parts of the world many people are just barely surviving. Imagine the

difficulties the world's poor will have as natural environments fail. Changing climates will

cause millions of "eco-refugees" to illegally cross national boundaries, seeking land, food

and water resources to survive. Water wars may rival oil wars as deserts expand and the

glaciers and winter snowpack that feed rivers decline.

The U.S. military understands the science and takes the threat of climate change seriously.

As early as 2004, the Pentagon released a study that found that climate change could lead to

anarchy in many parts of the world, making international conflict endemic. The report, which

was quickly suppressed by the Bush administration, described global warming as a greater

threat to national security than terrorism.

These findings were repeated in the recently released 2010 Pentagon Quadrennial Defense

Review, which described climate change as "an accelerant of instability" that "may spark

future conflicts." While we spent $5 trillion on national defense and war during the last

decade, we have yet to address climate change and our addiction to fossil fuels in any

meaningful way.

Climatologist Jim Hansen said in 2006 that he believed we had just 10 years to make

substantial progress reversing current carbon dioxide emissions trends or we would be unable

to avoid the worst consequences of climate change. Hansen argues that we must curtail coal

burning and implement a carbon tax. To date, neither strategy has been seriously considered.

Nor has Congress passed even a flawed climate protection bill.

Any discussion of energy and conflicts has one more element — nuclear power. Does it

contribute to peace or war?

Consider the nuclear fuel cycle: Uranium is mined, enriched and then "fissioned" in a

reactor to produce heat, steam and then electricity. Each step has risks. Nuclear plants also

produce radioactive waste that must be safely disposed of for tens of thousands of years or

reprocessed into more nuclear fuel.

The enrichment and reprocessing steps use technology that can produce highly enriched

uranium or plutonium — the stuff of radioactive "dirty bombs" or city-flattening atomic

bombs that we never want to see in the hands of terrorists or governments hostile to us

— like that of Iran. Thus, nuclear power technology — what President Dwight

Eisenhower hailed as "atoms for peace" in the 1950s — inextricably is tied to "atoms for

war."

Climate change reopened the nuclear power debate because nuclear power plants operate

without emitting carbon dioxide. While unimpressed by existing nuclear power plants, Hansen is

among those calling for accelerated R&D on "fourth generation" nuclear plants to provide

carbon-free, base-load electric-generating capacity. He believes these "fast neutron" plants

will be much more efficient than existing light water reactors and able to "burn" the

radioactive waste and plutonium created by older reactors — easing both the radioactive

waste and proliferation problems.

On the other side is Lovins, who still doubts we need large coal or nuclear power stations

and observed years ago that nuclear power plants make inviting targets for terrorists. Lovins

maintains that advanced reactor designs will not adequately safeguard against nuclear weapons

proliferation. In any event, he argues that a nuclear resurgence is unlikely because —

compared to the alternatives — nuclear power is just too expensive and will inevitably

die from "an incurable attack of market forces."

Of the thousand things we need to do to create a more peaceful future, surely one of them

— a principal strategy — is finding less dangerous ways to meet our energy needs.

Lovins was right in 1976 and he is right now in his continuing plea for the soft energy

path. We can have a cleaner, safer world and meet our energy needs less expensively by making

deep cuts in the amount of energy we consume and then using diverse, renewable, carbon-free

alternative energy sources like solar, wind, biomass and geothermal to meet those needs. It

need not be the "road not taken."

Walter Simpson has worked in the energy field since he was director of the Western New York

Peace Center from 1977 to 1980 and is co-founder of Western New York Climate Action. He

discusses this topic at noon today in the Burchfield Penney Art Center, as part of Peace on

Earth Week 2010.