The following is a transcript of
"WomenMatter - Facts and Trade-Offs - Oil and Energy: What Choices Do We Really Have?"
From April 5th, 2006



ANNOUNCER: WomenMatter, Facts and Trade-offs is the place where we take one issue at a time and find the connection between our personal lives and the facts of the bigger system we all live in, and recognize that every idea for making it better has trade-offs.

This show, “Oil and Energy: What Choices Do We Really Have?” forces each of us to decide how we go about making tough decisions, both personal and political. We know that our planet will some day run out of oil and natural gas. The problem of finding other ways to produce energy has to be solved. Can we think about the future? Can we think bigger than ourselves at this moment? And can we face the future if we don’t?

The choices we make are too big to do all alone. But strangely, others can’t make the choices without our help. To solve the problem, WomenMatter asks as key questions: How much of this problem do I have to try to solve? What do I have to know in order to judge the trade-offs of all the possible solutions? Who can I trust to solve the problems? Can we Americans handle this together as our government – which is us – or do we have to handle this together globally?

Dr. Nancy Bauer, CEO and editor-in-chief of WomenMatter, teaches at the University of Pennsylvania and has written many books about how Americans have gone about becoming the biggest superpower in history in a peculiarly American way.

Professor Linda Jones is director of the Picker Engineering Program at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts – the only engineering program deliberately designed for women in a liberal arts college.

NANCY BAUER: Professor Jones, Americans have had such a lucky history. And we haven’t had to live with grim futures the way many others on this globe have had to. We don’t like gloom, and we hate doom. Political candidates are told that Americans vote for cheery optimists. But our country has built our modern way of life, our standard of living – which is the best in the world – on cars and airplanes and houses. And now we know that the world is going to run out of fossil fuels from which we make motors run and power everything we do electrically in our cars and on airplanes and in our houses, and where we work.

So on this show, “Oil and Energy: What Choices Do We Really Have?” we interview two of America’s foremost scholars. Paul Krugman from Princeton, who explains why we have no choice but to think globally, which we have never had to do before in our whole history.

And Marilyn Brown, an expert on energy from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, who explains those sources and she says we have no choice but to think technologically, which Americans mostly are not educated to do.

So Americans have never been educated to think globally and technologically. How do you at Smith College, and the Picker Program for Engineering, how do you turn 18-year-old women, just high school graduates, into global, technological realists? Do they take the same science and math courses the rest of us did?

LINDA JONES: Well I think what’s happening is the national conversation is beginning to shift, Nancy. I think what we’re beginning to hear is a rumbling in terms of a need for well-trained, broadly thinking individuals to keep us at the forefront of both creativity and innovation in this country.

So that sort of begins to put the onus on us as educators to prepare our young people to step into that role in a much more meaningful way. And certainly here at Smith, and within this engineering program at Smith, we’re on the cusp of that wave, if you will, of trying to put forward technical information to our students. But also getting them to become realists in the sense that they need to be more of a humanist in the context of engineering.

BAUER: When they’re 18, do they know that they’re going to have to be a humanist as well as a technologist?

JONES: You know, I think there’s an interesting sensitivity to this generation of young people. If they’ve not experienced it, whether they are here because they’ve been displaced from Katrina or whether they’ve been just exposed to a great deal on television or within their own local environments, there is a desire on the part of these young women to get involved and to make a difference. And what’s interesting to me, is in making that difference many of them see engineering as a pathway, which I don’t think was, at the point when I was entering university, even a notion in my head.

BAUER: So the people who want to help, like building houses and going to soup kitchens, are now saying, “I’m going to study engineering in order to help”?

JONES: Well I think that this is also very much a technical age. These are the kids with iPods in their pockets and they’ve grown up with computers and electronics. And they’re fairly tool savvy, and I think they realize the usefulness of those tools. And they want an education to further inform them. But at the same time, there’s this desire to use tools to make a difference, and I think that’s exciting.

BAUER: So do they come to Smith the same way they go to other engineering schools, where they just do engineering, because they want a job? I mean do they picture the job ahead?

JONES: Well at Smith we very much have this notion that engineering is nested within the context of the humanities and the arts, that as a discipline, engineering is using technology, using the basic sciences to benefit humankind. And that is very much the philosophy of the program and very much how we structure our courses, and not all universities have that as a crux of, sort of their mission, if you will.

So the women that choose to come to Smith understand that very much. Or even more interestingly, they come to Smith to take advantage of Smith as it’s historically known for its vision and mission in terms of humanities. So they come here to take advantage of that and because we have engineering through first-year courses, through hearing about it – these students take perhaps a first-year course, that interestingly enough is called “Engineering For Everyone,” which is taken by all students who want to become engineers. And roughly filled additionally with about 50 percent of non-majors who really just want to find out what engineering is about because they understand that understanding how to pose questions, understanding how to solve problems, is really critical for all of us in our futures.

BAUER: OK. Now I’m going to nail this question, I’ve been wanting to know for a long time.

JONES: [laughter].

BAUER: The turning point in learning – and by the way, for full disclosure, I am a Smith graduate in the humanities, and I have in my portfolio, or my scrapbook, the letter from Smith from years ago that says, “You can come to Smith but promise us you’ll never take science or math.” So you know, today I probably couldn’t get in.

But this question now is, how do you pose a problem to solve? One of the things we see is that the government says, “It’s an oil problem,” or “It’s a trade problem,” or “It’s a fossil problem,” or “It’s a solar problem,” or “It’s a money problem,” or “It’s a military problem.” How do you teach someone to ask the first engineering question about oil and energy, for instance?

JONES: Well the first engineering question would be the first question anyone – and that’s really the gist of engineering – is learning: how to begin to structure problems to get at a critical solution. And so in a sense engineering is applicable to everyone to help us frame the way we might shape the question in a way to get at as many of the issues as possible.

Well much of what we do throughout the curriculum has to do with issues in design and problem-solving. So for example, I’m teaching a first-year course, and I’m getting the students to think about problems. We’re doing just straightforward math and energy balances, but I’m getting the students to think about these problems-- you know what comes in, what comes out-- in a broader context to get them used to thinking in a much more expansive way.

So for example, go to the equestrian center and tell me what goes in and what comes out [laughter]. And of course after their shock at my question they start to partition the question, exactly what is consumed, what is respired, for example. And they partition the question in ways that they can handle information. And then ultimately, by partitioning, being able to couple the important pieces – importance has very much to do with the degree to which they have some technical training – but couple those pieces so that they can get at that broader, more expansive question. Or answer the broader, more expansive question.

BAUER: I love the fact that you can write home, or I guess call home on their cell phones, and explain that their first assignment at Smith College is to study horse manure.

JONES: [laughter] I’m a little concerned as to the final papers and poster presentations. But it is also a great deal of fun, you know, the students are getting out and finding out about the world around, which is ultimately what we want them to do.

BAUER: You’re lucky if the presentation is just a PowerPoint and not a three-dimensional one, I should think. [laughter]

JONES: [laughter] Well, maybe.

BAUER: You never know. But the idea is forcing them to use an engineering model, which maybe we should also be doing in the humanities. And women of WomenMatter should be thinking this way when somebody says to us, what are we going to do about oil and the price of oil at $67-a-barrel this morning and whatever. That is, to talk about all of the inputs – how many are there? – and then all of the outputs – how many are there? And then we have to make the decision about which are the most important.

So it means that the people who are trying to explain it to us – are interfered with by, for instance, politicians who don’t want us to think about it because we might not vote for them. The idea that we have to say, “They left out something, they omitted something I knew was important.” Or, “They pushed something that I think is less important.” So that the neophyte, the beginner, even an 18-year-old at Smith, or us women voters who haven’t had to think about these things before, we could begin to say, “I know something, they can’t tell me how to think about this.” We could actually be in at the beginning of this. That’s really interesting.

JONES: You know I think every educator in the world wants to start those students on a pathway toward critical thinking. And if by this little small example of going to an equestrian center and sorting out what goes in, what comes out, what is generated in that process, what’s consumed in that process, what’s accumulated in the process, if I can just get the students to pause, that’s part of the critical thinking element.

I think this is something we need in terms of education, we need to start to force – and I don’t know if “force” is the right word – but we do need to educate individuals to pause, collect data, reflect, logically connect the information that you have. And rather than being swayed in an emotive way, to come to a conclusion that’s based on the logic of the situation presented to you. If can get students trained in that manner, that is really education in the context of engineering problem-solving, but it is applicable to all of us in our everyday lives.

BAUER: But we all went to high school and we took physics, chemistry and biology. And nobody ever, ever gave anyone of us a problem that hadn’t already been solved.

JONES: Well that’s it. You’ve got to expose students to open-ended questions. And you’ve got to cause those students to step into those open-ended questions, and to seek and search for information for themselves, and not just simply take whatever’s presented and come up with conclusions just based on that presentation. But to continue to ask questions till their satisfaction’s been met.

BAUER: So that’s very exciting, because now we’re going to turn to our economics and energy experts in these interviews for a fact-based look at oil and energy, and their view of what we should be doing personally and politically, both to think about and to do something about it.

* * *

BAUER: Women of WomenMatter, with great pride and pleasure, I introduce to you Professor Paul Krugman, professor of economics and international affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University. Professor Krugman, we’re talking about oil and energy and whether or not we have any real choices. What choices do us Americans and individual Americans really have?

Women have a way of looking at things, of looking at our particular lives and the communities in which we live, and sometimes we’re talking about the price of our car and our house, and heating the house. Sometimes we’re talking about security, because somebody could bomb something, or a hurricane could come and then something will happen to our standard of living, which is the third thing we have to worry about, the quality of life. How much of oil and energy is something I should be concerned about for me and my generation, and do I basically have to think about the next two or three generations ahead? So where do you want the women of WomenMatter to begin to think about oil and energy?

PAUL KRUGMAN: Well I would like not just women, but I think everybody should be asking themselves, in their votes and to a certain extent in their personal choices, how do we get out of this world where we’re so dependent on oil? Oil is a great thing, it’s very convenient, it allows us to have all the conveniences of cars. But it’s dangerous. It’s dangerous mostly because we have to import it from places that are not exactly the most stable parts of the world. And of course it also, along with other fossil fuels, it’s helping to produce global warming. And there are a lot of indications that global warming is proceeding faster than we had hoped it would.

So we all need to think about how we’re going to get out of this. How are we going to get out of the petroleum economy, how are we going to get out of a fossil fuels economy. And that doesn’t mean that it has to end, that we have to be this 22nd century world where we don’t use the stuff at all tomorrow, but it does mean that we have to be thinking about where we go.

BAUER: And so it makes a difference in what we allow our legislators to do. And what WomenMatter wants people to do, all of us, is to know enough so that we can tell our congress people how they ought to vote on these very specific kinds of things that come up. So that they talk about oil shocks, and then what happens with the shortages that can happen when we have an oil shock. And does that cause people to spend more or invest more in technology? I mean, how does the economy fit into all of this?

KRUGMAN: Let me say first off that one of the problems that we have on this is that people want to think that there’s a technological fix, that that’s the only answer. That we’re going to invest more in creating oil substitutes from switch grass or something, which is what President Bush seemed to be saying in the State of the Union. Now, by all means if you can do it, fine. But a lot of what you want to do is more mundane than that. Conservation. The best way we have of producing oil to replace imports right now in the United States is actually to use less oil so we don’t need to import so much. And you can do that by getting people to buy cars with better mileage.

I know that hybrids are expensive, but they actually do, as far as we can tell, they actually do make a quite large difference. Or just smaller cars. At the very least, don’t buy a Hummer. That’s an unpatriotic act, actually, to buy a car like that, particularly if you don’t have a very, very good reason to use it. And we need to support policymakers – politicians – who are reasonable about these things, who are actually thinking about the issue.

BAUER: So the idea that all the sexy advertising that says girls will like you better if you drive a faster car, don’t try this at home, but the idea that cars are sold, especially to men it seems, for power.

KRUGMAN: That’s right, and also families. The giant SUV, I mean, you know a friend of mine says he drives this small car to drop off his kids at school with all the SUVs, giants ones, around him. He feels like a small mammal during the Jurassic. I mean, let’s put it this way: The United States, we did a very good job of reducing oil dependency and conserving energy during the 1980s, believe it or not, in response to the oil shocks in the ‘70s, the country actually had a pretty good response.

And then after that we made this big turn towards much bigger cars, towards much less fuel economy, and I don’t think that made us any happier as a nation on the whole. You know, each individual might have said, “Gee, I’ll feel better.” Maybe if I say each man said, “I’ll feel more macho if I’m driving this bigger vehicle,” but also the soccer moms said, “Well I’ll feel safer in this bigger thing, especially since everyone else is getting one.” But the end result is that we’re less secure as a nation. We’re more vulnerable to whatever may happen in the Persian Gulf, and we’re not any more happier.

BAUER: So that we have shifted from the thing that we remember, the fear that lasted after we had those long lines in 1973, so then that wore off, and all of a sudden we can get gas and we can get it at a regular price. And now of course the prices have gone up and people don’t seem to be staying home. That is, we’re not worrying enough. Do you think we need to worry about China and India in order to get worried?

KRUGMAN: Well yeah. I mean, by and large people don’t stay at home when the price of oil goes up because people have to get their lives done – they need to get the kids to school, they need to get to work. So it’s actually you need to make longer term choices. The best way we have to conserve on gasoline is to buy more fuel-efficient cars. Now that takes a while because there’s always an existing fleet out there, but that’s the reason you have to think ahead, not wait until you’ve suddenly got a war in the Middle East, and then say, “Ooh, we really should conserve some gasoline.” We should be doing it well in advance.

We got complacent. I mean we’ve forgotten about the lines, and we had a period there when things were relatively calm, when the oil was abundant, but it’s not abundant anymore. And now there is in fact a limited supply of oil out there. There’s a lot of argument about how many years it’ll be till we reach the point of peak production, but the world’s oil supply is gradually running out. And there are new players out there competing for the oil with us.

It doesn’t mean you have to get all xenophobic about it. The Chinese in some sense have got a right to go out there and to bid for the oil supply just like anybody else, but it means that we can’t count on having this abundant supply of cheap oil coming from the rest of the world to feed our gasoline addiction, to paraphrase President Bush.

BAUER: So let’s talk a minute about what we need to understand about China and India on the one hand, and about Europe and their manufacturing and what they’re doing about the distribution of oil there. I mean everybody on the globe has to think longer term, and everybody on the globe has to think about their choices, and everybody has to decide how much of this they’re going to leave to the government and how much they’re going to do it themselves, right?

KRUGMAN: Yeah.

BAUER: But I think that we need, maybe every household now needs a resident historian and anthropologist saying, when they talk about these other parts of the world, we’re on the globe with them. What do you want people to know about what’s happening with China and India? And is this really good for the world, because if they don’t get the supply that they need, they’re going to have social unrest.

KRUGMAN: Well yeah. Look, China and India are still very poor countries, but they’re on their way up. And that’s a good thing. I mean we’re talking about, between the two of them, around two billion people who now have hope for the future in a way that they never did before. And you’ve just got to step back and say, “That’s a good thing.” We don’t want to condemn countries to permanent economic backwardness. And by the way, we couldn’t do it if we tried. Yhey’re on their way up.

One of the things that people do when they’re on their way up is they buy cars. They start to consumer gasoline. They have trucks. Fleets of trucks carrying stuff around the country uses diesel and gasoline. They start to have air travel, it uses jet fuel. You know, down the road, inevitably these places are going to consume a lot of oil. And what’s happening right now is that although they still, China is still a small fraction of the world’s consumption of oil – I think it’s about eight percent right now – they’ve been accounting for 35, 40 percent of the growth in the demand for oil, which means that they’re a big player. And the addition of these new customers makes the oil scarce.

And what all that does is, it means that we’re in a world where basically there’s no slack. Basically there’s about enough production capacity to meet the current consumption of oil, but there isn’t any reserve.

BAUER: Ah, it is a tight market.

KRUGMAN: That’s right. And what that means is that when anything goes wrong- you know recently there was a serious spike in the price of oil because of insurgent attacks in Nigeria.

BAUER: So all of a sudden then we have to learn something about where Nigeria is on the map.

KRUGMAN: Yeah, I didn’t know. I mean I knew where Nigeria was but I didn’t know there were insurgents in Nigeria. But it turns out that now we’re in a world where that matters. Where, and of course we’re, you know, we’re, a lot of – I’m not going to talk foreign policy here but –

BAUER: No, go ahead.

KRUGMAN: –all the saber rattling around Iran, and that would be a lot less nerve-wracking if it wasn’t for that fact that Iran produces a lot of oil, and is in the middle of a region that we’re totally dependent upon.

BAUER: So the idea is, I mean one of the things that was a concern and it came up in the story about Nigeria, was that the Nigerians said, “Well, we’re getting more votes from China than we’re getting from you.” And Mr. Rumsfeld was saying that we have a military concern about who the Nigerians are. And what’s more, I understand, our Pentagon is quite concerned about whether China is going to be friendly. That is, all of a sudden then, you have this idea that the Chinese are going around the world securing oil supplies for themselves.

KRUGMAN: Sure. Well and that’s –

BAUER: Why not?

KRUGMAN: I mean again, what do you expect? I mean we do that. And they’re- China is big. The important thing about China is there’s a lot of Chinese. And although they’re still individually a lot poorer than we are, selectively their economy is about as big compared to ours as that of the Soviet Union was during the days when we had the height of the Cold War. So this is another player.

Now we don’t necessarily have to be in conflict with them. But in fact, to the extent that we’re sort of competing for a limited world supply of oil, that is a source of conflict. So again, this dependence on oil spills over across many parts of the way we live in the world, and is a source of tension.

BAUER: So then take a look at what the president has just done when he went to India, and all of sudden he introduces conservation and oil and nuclear whatever as part of an energy situation. Obviously with military concerns, which then bumps over into what we’re going to do about Iran. Because what we’re going to apply to India, are we going to say the same thing to the Iranians?

KRUGMAN: Yeah, well and I have to say, it’s not a surprise I suppose for your listeners, I’m not a fan of George Bush.

BAUER: I’m sorry, WomenMatter is nonpartisan but we want people to become knowledgeable enough to become partisan.

KRUGMAN: But what I was going to say is that at least there’s been some evolution. If you go back to what the Cheney energy plan five years ago said, it was basically saying, drill and burn. Between importing oil and finding it here and in Alaska and whatever, that we can continue down this course of really very rapid growth in the amount of gasoline we consume; big vehicles. Conservation, I think Cheney said, is nothing but a sign of personal virtue.

And now at least we’re hearing from the president himself that we’re going to need to think about alternative energy sources. He’s talking a little bit about conservation, although mostly when he’s outside of the United States. That’s a move in the right direction. You know, because ultimately, if you ask, How are we going to deal with this dependence on oil? Are we going to deal with it through new technology, are we going to deal with it through nuclear power? Are we going to deal with it through conservation? The answer is, all of these. This is a big problem, and we’re probably going to need to do at least a little bit of every answer you can think of.

BAUER: So give me some understanding of the corporations that are in the oil business. The commodities market – we know that there are those who dig up the oil, the explorers, and then there are the refineries, and I gather that there’s a shortage of those.

KRUGMAN: Yeah.

BAUER: And then in addition to that there are the distributors, and that’s the guys that were at the energy meetings in the White House. That is, who controls all of this? In the short term who do we get mad at? And when we encourage the legislators, do we want to control those guys who are in the marketplace, or do we just let them go? Because I understand Europe’s having the same question about whether they should have national oil companies and energy companies, or have a big European company.

KRUGMAN: Well in general I think it’s always a good idea to be suspicious, watch out for misbehavior. In terms of the actual markets, there’s no real sign that anything particularly went wrong here. It doesn’t look like there’s been significant price gouging or other stuff by any of the players in the energy industry. As you said, the basic thing you want to think of is that there’s crude oil coming out of the ground. A lot of that is under the control of actually national governments like Saudi Arabia or Iran, rather than private companies.

There’s refining the stuff into gasoline and home heating oil and so on, other products. That is, for the most part, the big oil companies. Although they do extract quite a lot of oil, for the most part they’re in the refining business. We have a shortage of refining capacity. There’s a long story about that, I don’t think it’s really anybody’s fault, it just sort of happened. And that makes us vulnerable to things like the hurricanes of last fall, which ripped right through the heart of a lot of American refining capacity.

BAUER: And they have the same effect as if a bad guy had blown them up.

KRUGMAN: That’s right.

BAUER: Whether it’s Mother Nature or it’s man-made, it doesn’t seem to make any difference; I mean the effect is the same.

KRUGMAN: That’s right. And then there’s the distributors, basically the gas stations. And that’s again, some of those are owned by the refining companies, some of them are independent. Now, if you ask me, “What’s the source of our problem? What was the source of the very high prices we had for a while in the fall?” The answer was, well, a combination of limited supplies of oil worldwide and growing demand from China, plus hurricanes cutting through the U.S. refining areas near the Gulf of Mexico. And really no fault of anybody.

Now I think there was a pretty good case for having a temporary windfall, profits tax, on the oil companies, simply because they were making a lot of profits, and simply because the high prices were not the results of them having done anything particularly right, just because they were there- and we could’ve used the money. But no matter, that’s not the issue. So the real issue is not, well who are the villains in this piece? At least not on that. The question is what should we be doing about the future.

Now I would say that if there are villains, it’s the oil companies, particularly Exxon, that are actually trying to prevent us from thinking rationally about the future. And the good guys would be oil companies like BP that are trying to get us to think about it.

BAUER: With their very cute advertising campaign, which looks like a flower, that’s Spring.

KRUGMAN: Yeah.

BAUER: So therefore as we look at this whole picture, and we will be talking more about conservation in relationship to the economy as well, but the idea is that we have to think longer term. We have to step back, and when we do that, then as we step back and look at the worldwide picture, clearly peace is better for this than war.

KRUGMAN: [laughter] Well sure, yeah.

BAUER: And that becomes a really major issue as we, as WomenMatter, as voters talking to their legislators about is it better to try to deal with the supplies of oil and energy, at least for our lifetime, and rather to plan for a future when people like us, rather than when others don’t like us, -- and to think that we might have a peaceful world where we could sit down and discuss this globally instead of one country at a time.

KRUGMAN: Well I’m – let’s be clear. Sometimes there are people you can’t reason with. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, I don’t think there was anything you could’ve done—

BAUER: We had to stop him.

KRUGMAN: Yeah, so sometimes war is forced upon. I think it was in that case. But it’s certainly a consideration. Let me put it this way. There are some people out there who have a view that, well the answer to this is that we really need to militarily secure the supplies. And you actually will hear some people saying that quite frankly and it’s lurking in the background in some of the discussion about policy.

This is foolish. That is, in the modern world you’re not going to be able to do that. Or at least the cost would be prohibitive. It’s a much, much more- just on economic grounds, let alone questions of loss of life- it’s a much more effective strategy to try to reduce your dependence on oil.

BAUER: And collaborate among the nations, since everybody’s got the same problem.

KRUGMAN: That’s right. The Europeans, the Japanese, and increasingly the Chinese and the Indians all, we’re all consumer countries of this stuff. We all have a shared interest in not having global shortages; in not having sky-high prices. So we all have a shared interest in actually trying to, in general, reduce the world’s dependence upon this extremely sensitive resource.

BAUER: Thank you very much Paul Krugman for putting the details of our lives today into this longer term context, and getting us to step back and look both back and forward and realize how smart we’ve got to be so that we are not manipulated by the news, and we’re not manipulated by the legislature. What we need to do, indeed, as item for item comes up for legislation: and WomenMatter is designed to help as we track this three times a week- even when things are in committee, where you can make a difference before they can come to a vote. Where women can say, “I understand that bill and I know that it’s only a piece of the problem,” and can weigh in with their legislators. Thanks very much for your participation with WomenMatter.

KRUGMAN: Thanks for having me on.

* * *

BAUER: WomenMatter’s show, “Oil and Energy: What Choices Do We Really Have?” brings to you one of America’s leading people on the subject of energy efficiency and renewable energy programs. Dr. Marilyn Brown, from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, actually directs our nation’s program on those two things that we’re talking about all the time these days: what energy really works, and what are we going to do about energy that is not just burning up carbon fuels?

So I welcome Dr. Marilyn Brown to our show. And Dr. Brown, what does Oak Ridge National Laboratory do? You work for the government?

MARILYN BROWN: I do, I work for a Department of Energy owned national laboratory, which is run for DOE by a contractor. So we are incentivized to produce valuable science for the federal government. We’re not actually federal employees, we’re private sector employees, but our facilities and our management are under the jurisdiction of the Department of Energy. We have the largest Department of Energy-run energy research program in the United States.

BAUER: How long has this been going on?

BROWN: Let’s see, we’ve already had our 50th anniversary. That was a number of years ago. We’re a spin-off of the Manhattan project, and our roots are strongest in nuclear energy. But over the years we’ve transitioned increasingly to clean coal, and to renewables and efficiency, as well as continuing our research on nuclear fission and fusion.

BAUER: So among your colleagues at Oak Ridge, and you’re in Tennessee, right?

BROWN: We are, East Tennessee, outside of Knoxville.

BAUER: Aha, and so that, your colleagues there are sectioned off into different kinds of energy projects?

BROWN: You know, our organization is more along the basic energy sciences that support the energy technology needs. So we have chemical sciences and engineering sciences, which is the division that I run. But then we have cross-cutting programs, which draw expertise from the different computational sciences and biological sciences. So we are organized sort of like a university would be, with different departments along disciplinary boundaries, but we have very strong programmatic organizations, which cut across those disciplines. And they are along the lines that I mentioned.

BAUER: That’s very comforting –

BROWN: [laughter].

BAUER: – for the nation to know that there are people with expertise who are working together, not just competing.

BROWN: Absolutely.

BAUER: From department to department. So now let’s move to, what do we, the taxpayers and voters, what do we grown-ups need to know about the way heat makes electricity? That is, we talk about energy, we talk about electricity, and then we talk about oil and gas and hydro, water, nuclear, wind and solar. Is it all about electricity?

BROWN: [laughter]. Well electricity is a complicated subject because it can be made from many different sources, different fuels and different conversion processes. It is complicated and the average citizen, perhaps can get easily confused. I know in one recent poll, which asked the question “Where do we get most of our electricity?” the most common answers were nuclear and hydro, which I think is because people have a good conception of what a nuclear plant looks like and what a hydro dam looks like, when in reality the vast majority – 55 percent or so – of our electricity comes from coal. And then the rest of the mix is equal parts of five or six other resources.

BAUER: So you have to burn the coal and it makes heat. And then what happens to the heat? What is it heating up?

BROWN: Well you can run steam generators with the heat. Of course heat is not the only way to produce electricity. There are electro-chemical reactions, there’s thermo-chemical, where one interesting new area of science is the creation of electricity from a small differential in heat, which might be, for instance, the kind of heating differential that you would experience in the brakes of a car or in the gaps between two materials.

BAUER: So it’s friction – from friction?

BROWN: From friction, a possibility, yep.

BAUER: Huh. So anything that can create the warming up of things, and then it makes something turn and then the things that turn send out the electricity, but it all ends up in that grid, right?

BROWN: Most of it ends up in the grid. An increasing amount of our electricity is used at the point of power production, which is called “distributed power.” So for instance, if you had a micro-turbine next to your building that was creating electricity from natural gas, again a spinning generator, but on site, you wouldn’t actually have to put that tower onto the grid. You put the tower right into the wires going into your building, and the advantage of that is that instead of being about 33 percent efficient, which is the average efficiency of a coal plant, because most of the heat is dissipated and waste heat, that heat can be captured at the micro-turbine and used to heat water or preheat air coming in to provide space heating in that building. Or to provide heat for air conditioning, which is a whole other concept – cooling from heat, which is a bit complicated.

BAUER: No, but this really helps, I think, to understand the connection between the science, the things that you’re studying scientifically, and the way in which it’s delivered. And we do remember the blackout of several summers ago. And I don’t think anything’s been done to repair the grid. But something happened in Ohio and then it caused a blackout over a wide area of this country.

BROWN: The largest cascading blackout in U.S., North American history, yep.

BAUER: And is that something that has to be repaired by private enterprise or is that something that gets repaired by our taxpayer dollars?

BROWN: No, the investment needs to be made by private industry, because the grid is owned by the private sector, it’s not a common-good owned and managed by the federal government. It is under the jurisdiction of the Federal Electricity Regulation Commission, FERC, and NERC, they’re two agencies.

BAUER: [laughter].

BROWN: I hope I got those right.

BAUER: Well that’s fine, but what we’re saying is that the government then sets the standards, but our system is basically private enterprise.

BROWN: Yes. With the Energy Policy Act of 2005 we have new standards of electricity reliability being enforced across the grid, nationwide. And it’s hoped that that will be an impetus for more investment. So given an electric grid owner is now forced to meet more stringent reliability standards, they should be motivated to invest more.

BAUER: So that gets us then to the government’s view of the voter or the taxpayer, which is just one in the same thing. We all have representatives in government, and they look at us sort of region by region, or state by state, and sometimes city, by community, because they count up their votes – whether they’re going to get reelected it’s all about the Electoral College, and whether you’re going to vote for them.

So the tendency, WomenMatter finds, is that government keeps talking about what we need to know based on what they think we’re afraid of, and whether we are going to have a job, or whether we’re not going to like the price of oil, or whether somebody’s going to blow the thing up and it’s going to be insecure. And wanting to vote for the party that will bring you the quality of life you already have. From the scientist’s point of view, that is as you look at the individuals, what kind of a voter-taxpayer-citizen do you want, and what do you want us to know?

BROWN: Hmm. Well I think it’s important to know the degree to which our national energy infrastructure is being challenged. That is an issue, it does require attention. It requires even more policy debate than surrounding the Energy Policy Act. We are incentivizing, in that act, a number of investments which are great, including investments in more energy efficient homes. And you get tax incentives now for the purchase of high efficiency vehicles. But really much more needs to be done, in the policy arena.

You might have remembered that there was a lot of discussion about renewable portfolio standards in the EPAC debate. And while they were not successful in the end, they did get a lot of positive review by policy makers and we may see something nationwide in terms of a requirement for a minimum investment, a minimum amount of power produced by renewable resources across the country. That may come in the next few years.

But there was no discussion of energy efficiency portfolio standards. And I’d like to see the public more aware of the role that efficiency can play in meeting our future energy needs.

BAUER: Is that something that I could do myself?

BROWN: Oh, absolutely.

BAUER: Nobody’s asked me for a sacrifice lately, but what is it that I could do?

BROWN: Well using energy more wisely doesn’t always involve a sacrifice. It hopefully, typically involves being able to pay a little bit more up front to get a product that will consume less energy over its lifetime, and in the end will save you money. Just like a CD in the bank, only often at a greater interest rate than you can turn around a typical investment.

BAUER: So what can I do about my house? What can I do about my car? What are the things that we actually, as individuals, could do so that we can make the difference, with or without government incentives?

BROWN: Well, I think that in your house the first step to take is to improve any kind of incandescent lighting you have, switch it to fluorescent where possible. Maybe not over your cosmetics mirror, because of the color renditions that are still an issue with fluorescent lighting. But compact fluorescents ought to be screwed into most every fixture in your house, or bulbs in your closets.

The design of a home is extremely important. If you have the option of building a new home there’s a lot that you can build in. But once you’ve got a house, every time a piece of equipment turns over, go for either the best available on the market, or go onto the web and Google and take a little bit more time, but get something delivered that maybe isn’t at your Home Depot. I had to do that when I built my house ten years ago, I had an air conditioning energy rating requirement that exceeded anything that the local vendors could offer. So I just put in my request and insisted that they find it on the market.

BAUER: So that’s great, so insulation makes a difference, all of the materials that are used make a difference. And I can really save money off of putting those light bulbs in?

BROWN: [laughter] Yes you can.

BAUER: Uh-huh. Now tell me then about this science behind energy policy. As a national laboratory, and you’ve been there a long, long time, which means you’ve seen Republicans and Democrats come and go, what difference does the policy that a particular administration makes, what difference does that make to your work?

BROWN: Well that’s a very good question, Nancy. I’ve had the pleasure of serving under many administrations, and probably the biggest change that I’ve noticed on the research agenda here is differences in the selection of front-running technologies by administrations. That is, changes in the technologies seen as most viable and promising for the future.

So for instance in the Bush II first administration, we had the hydrogen economy strongly recommended and strongly funded. But as you noticed, from the State of the Union Address in February, George W. now has supplemented that by an emphasis on some other technologies, including one of my favorites, the plug-in hybrid electric vehicle. He mentioned the need for greater battery power so that the ATVs can run more on electricity and only trigger the gasoline engine when the battery can no longer perform. So you have the option of going your first twenty miles all electric, and then plug in at your office or plug in at home, recharge, and again all electric for the next trip. So I’m pretty excited about that as a more near-term solution to our oil crisis.

BAUER: So in your laboratory, since you have all of these projects going all the time, in some administrations some get more attention from time to time, but these don’t stop because the funding dries up, or that it’s not the fuel source du jour.

BROWN: No, initiatives don’t tend to come and go, sort of hot and cold entirely. There is continuity. And also what’s learned in the development of one technology can be developed for another. So for instance we’ve been working on the power electronics of just the standard hybrid engine. And now to turn to this plug-in feature, it’s just an incremental transition. And we’ll build on all the capabilities that we’ve had over the years. So yeah, it is a typically quite an accumulation process of learning and application to a broader and broader set of technologies.

BAUER: What WomenMatter wants to do is to make sure that we women understand how to think bigger, think long term, and to let our legislators know that we are not self-centered people who don’t understand science. That we look forward to collaborating with Oak Ridge, and with science teachers across the country, as we beef up the sections on the environment and science in WomenMatter at www.womenmatter.com.

This is our responsibility as women in this country who deal at the local level, with our personal lives and our community lives, to know what’s going on and to be able to let our legislators know that we’ll support them if they support the kind of science and the long term view that we understand too. Thank you very much Dr. Marilyn Brown from Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

BROWN: Thank you Nancy.

* * *

BAUER: Professor Jones, we’ve now heard from Paul Krugman and Marilyn Brown, and we’ve learned about thinking globally and thinking technologically, and also having to take it personally. Tell us, most people in most nations don’t solve their problems ahead of a crisis. We know that, we talk about the fact that Holland has really good dikes. They lost seven thousand people in that flood before they redesigned and rebuilt their dikes.

And we know in this country there was an oil shock in 1973. Congress, I think Estes Kefauver, held hearings about renewable alternatives to oil. And I think what happened was that the big oil companies bought up the solar companies, and the small people who had solar energy companies ended up being out of business, but nothing happened. This is not the first time we’ve thought about windmills and solar and whatever.

So now we’ve had the big shock, Americans respond. Possibly it takes a crisis for us to respond, people have said. But we’ve had Katrina. And just as we wake up to the fact that, guess what? People might have not studied geography, but we now know that winds and storm surges not only blow from the South onto the Gulf of Mexico, but they destroy our refineries, which happen to be in the Gulf of Mexico. I mean now people can go onto talk show programs and television quiz programs and know about the Gulf of Mexico. It’s been a geography and an engineering lesson for us all.

And just as we get used to knowing that the oil is in the Gulf of Mexico and drilling there is good for my car and for my house but it’s going to be blown up through the next hurricane, which could be any minute, what do we learn? We learn that China wants to live like us, and so whatever we get out of there and whatever is not destroyed by a hurricane, we’re going to have to share with them, because there’s one pool of oil in the world and there are a lot of people who are living a better and better life and want to use it.

So I ask you, Linda Jones from Smith College, do a post-Katrina teaching for us. Katrina has happened. If we were students at Smith’s engineering program, what would you make us learn?

JONES: In terms of what I want the students to learn, or what I’m expecting them to learn, certainly as engineers I’m expecting them to sift through their technical information, their courses through differential equations and statistics and their courses in fluid mechanics.

But you know I think it boils down to something relatively simple, Nancy, and that is I want them to learn to look and listen before they react. And by that I mean that I really want them to have an awareness of the environments that surround them. And it’s not just a local environment in this day and age. Certainly the winds over Beijing are not stagnant. That air is moving, those emissions that are being produced by coal fire plants in China are certainly not just remaining over Beijing or Shanghai. They’re moving over the surface of the planet entirely. So we’re influenced by that.

So insofar as what I would love to have my students learn and then act on, it’s really quite straightforward. I need them to have the ethical know-how to be effective in altering or transforming processes. But perhaps even more than that, the technical know-how and the cultural sensitivity and global awareness to actually convince others that when we have pending disasters. And when they act as preventive engineers or responsible engineers, for them to be able to inform others and do so in a way that causes others to listen and to think about a particular. Those are ultimately my goals for these particular students.

BAUER: So that they would have to learn then to see the world through Chinese eyes. That is, the Chinese don’t want to be sick from pollution, and they’re running out of water, they don’t have enough water. But at the same time, if they don’t make enough money, they can’t make life better for themselves.

JONES: They have to understand that we as people, no matter where we are, all want a better life for ourselves. But we don’t necessarily have to do so in a deleterious way. And so there are huge cultural needs there in terms of working with individuals, respecting their worlds, and yet at the same time, making them aware of the ramifications of continued behavior. And that requires women who are extraordinarily technically confident, articulate, and aware. And those are the sorts of things we’re trying to do in this particular education with causing these women to not just take their engineering courses, but to also couple Asian history to that if, for instance, they are really hoping to work in China at some point, to actually speak Chinese. These are the sort of individuals we’re training here.

BAUER: It’s very exciting because at that point then, they can not only be in prevention, but they can be in informing the rest of the public. And so instead of the back room nerd that we all had the jokes about, we’re now talking about women who can speak up, understand culturally how people live, and of course women around the world do have a female life that we share and understand the implications for families and communities.

JONES: Absolutely.

BAUER: But also they become a political force. Because unless we speak up, we’re not going to be able to explain to ourselves and to others, and particularly to those who spend our taxpayer dollars, that there’s no point in just making military noises at the Chinese when they actually are totally interconnected with us.

The dollars that they make selling to us all those things we buy and wear, they have to get their dollars, they take those dollars and we have to get those dollars back, because they lend us the money by buying our bonds. And when they buy our bonds, our mortgage rates go down. And if they don’t buy our bonds the mortgage rates go up, our interest rates on loans go up, and we lose investment dollars and new jobs.

So when Congress people say I’m going to save your job, or I’m going to get you a job, or I’m going tell you how I’m going to save you on your taxes, and I’m going to help you have a house, we need a whole generation – more than one generation – of people who can explain and understand that these are false promises. They’re pieces, and bits and pieces of what we need to know and what the facts are out there. So this is going to be one very surprised legislature when they find out that the public understands how these bits and pieces work.

And of course, as long as we supply the votes and we supply the money for the campaign, so that we still have a privately funded campaign system in this country, that the women of Smith College, along with WomenMatter and the women of WomenMatter, of all generations, we can let our legislatures know that we don’t want narrow, short-sighted solutions. And they can’t count on us to be selfish and self centered. They don’t have to say, “Vote for me and I’ll give you something in your backyard.” It could be, “Vote for me and together we can think about the future in a more rational and logical, and maybe creative way.” So we don’t let them assume that we only want protection for ourselves, our jobs today, our gas prices today, and not play the self-interest game just to get our money and our votes.

JONES: That’s absolutely right. We can no longer remain in technical and political silos, it’s all intertwined. And we have to make others aware of that.

BAUER: And thank you very much Professor Jones from Smith College, for WomenMatter.

JONES: You’re very welcome.

ANNOUNCER: WomenMatter.com is the place to get the facts, weigh the trade-offs, and sharpen your conversation with your legislators. For WomenMatter, Facts and Trade-offs, this is Victoria Jones.