Book Report - Winning the Oil Endgame

A book report the day before moving, I must be crazy:)

The book was quite interesting and dealt with how America can use existing technologies to become energy independent and oil independent by 2025, while doing it profitably and creating jobs. The book was filled with tons of interesting facts, and seems more like a school textbook.

One of the main ideas to get rid of our addiction was to make lighter cars by using carbon fiber frames instead of the current frames used today. By doing this, vehicle weight can be reduced by up to half and the carbon fiber can be reinforced to actually increase safety. One example of the increased safety of a carbon fiber car was shown in an accident where a steel frame car sideswiped a carbon frame car at 30MPH. The steel car was totaled and the carbon frame car only had a few scratches on it.

A car can also be made to have much more efficient fuel economy through lightweight technologies and others for fairly cheaply too. Cars using state of the art technologies can achieve 90 MPG at a cost of only roughly $2000 extra.

To actually accomplish this goal faster than normal market forces would allow, the government could intervene with specific policies to help manufacturers adjust. The first policy they suggest is government guaranteed loans to manufacturers to retool their manufacturing plants to build these new types of efficient cars, since this process normally can cost billions of dollars. It would take about 5 years before plants could adjust to make about 50,000 cars to begin with a year. Another proposal is a low-income scrap and replace policy that allows low-income citizens to lease efficient cars through government loans. This would help accelerate the state of the art car adoption to nearly 375 million vehicles by 2050.

As far as suggesting it for reading, it's a pretty long book and probably not a good pick unless you are really into energy policy. However, one group I would really recommend the book to is to all of the US Senators that are on energy committees that would deal with these issues. We'd probably all benefit from them reading this book.