my mobile unit runs on vegetable oil which costs about seventy cents a gallon and it is true that you sometimes smell like a big mac but mister lowe how is that for your diet continuing i agree with you i brought this up because i think there probably should be a i mean we should use every available source of reducing our dependence on foreign oil and i think be making a terrible mistake if we think that we can solve this problem simply by getting more plug in hybrids or e or you know any other flex fuel vehicles there is a problem  what is the object of the exercise from my perspective the object of the exercise is reducing the amount of oil that we rely upon to power our transportation fleet if we have alternatives to oil that may be used less efficiently in some respects but that are indigenously available that we are getting from products and i would add to your ethanol question the obvious immediate opportunities of sugarcane based ethanol coming from sources other than dangerous wahhabists and islamafascists in the middle east for example and in latin america also the possibility that we will shortly see cellulosic ethanol become a real contributor these are in other words alternative sources of fuel that you may be well right are not as efficiently used or that we consume more of than we might consume of oil on a per mile basis but yet if the object of the exercise is to stop transferring wealth to people who are trying to kill us i think that is a good trade off to be making you are absolutely right it is flexible fuel and these alternative fuels are just one piece of a comprehensive approach that we call in the set america free coalition that i could envision a president's issuing an executive order that he is not going to wait for them that since the department of defense is the largest consumer of energy in the world since the federal government purchases thousands of vehicles a month that he would just execute an executive order that says after september th we are not going to purchase anything that is not a hybrid that does not have the dual fuel capacity and that does not have the capacity for a plug in conversion i can envision this on west wing i can also envision it the next administration it would also seem to me that this might be something that even some of our friends who are somewhat skeptical about broader applications in congress might agree to as far as the federal government's leading by example would any of you have any thoughts about the impact of a federal government executive order or federal legislation that would  and i do think perhaps it is an opportunity to tell detroit look we are going to preorder a large number of these you know you are not going to go broke when you have the federal government buying x amount of vehicles am really sympathetic to those concerns i think we need to buttress that industry and we need to not penalize that industry to the extent that we can but you know there has been such a lack of the bully  hearing as much about this as our plans in the middle east and as we are hearing about anything else and we just hear nothing and i am hopeful that that will change in the next administration regardless of what party controls the white house mister gaffney could i just add to that there is no reason why this should wait for the next administration the president has diagnosed our condition as addicted to oil this president i mean you talk about nixon's going to china this is an opportunity i have argued it with my friends in the administration this is an opportunity for this president to make you are absolutely right the federal government an early adopter that will enormously catalyze the kinds of industrial retooling and changes that are working level we go in to our business partners in industries that have tremendous resources and we say we want you to work on such and such chemical that will have a huge impact they say there is no demand they say there is no market when you get a market and there is a demand we will come back and work on it i am talking about major multinationals in north america today and around the world three years ago i went forward and said hey we have got brand new technology i sat with some major corporations and said we are going to start moving into this area they said you are kidding yourself there is no market what the government needs to do is to demonstrate that there is a market and a capability that is what you would do with that activity mister blumenauer mister chairman i appreciate your courtesy i feel extraordinarily strongly that recommendation come from this committee that the federal government be that early adopter that the federal government work with friends like we have here on this panel to decide what is the earliest feasible date and we set down a marker i am mindful that the war in iraq is the most energy intensive military operation in the history of the world four times more intense than was the first gulf war sixteen gallons of fuel per day per soldier it is putting our soldiers lives at risk it is costing an inordinate amount of money this would have a broad ripple effect and i would hope we could work with the committee and our friends here to establish that marker and to move it forward the chairman i think that the gentleman has made an excellent suggestion and i one quick question before we end the hearing i am going to ask each one of the witnesses at the conclusion of the questioning from mister inslee to each give us a one minute summary statement of what you want the committee to remember as we leave the gentleman from washington  mister vieau i wanted to make sure that we had clarity i was asking about the costs both of the batteries and of the operating costs and i wanted to make sure we got the right answer i want to ask you when the batteries become part of the original manufacturing when it is not a conversion but when in fact it is part of the original manufacturing we are doing two hundred thousand units every couple of months this is a mainstream part of the industry and i believe we are going to get to that position when we get to that position could you give us first a projection of what that cost may be relative to just a hybrid today and i realize it is just a projection and second what the per mile cost at that point will be of running the car when it is on the electrical mode versus gasoline per mile today again these are projections but if you can just give us your best shot we would appreciate it mister vieau on the first part i think i can give a pretty clear answer the second part may be a little more challenging for me on the cost of the system today as we talk about a system that is available for less than ten thousand dollars next year coming down in the range of forty percent over a three to five year period this is a system that we create which has redundant capabilities in it to an existing vehicle we must create a system that adds more materials and more competency than if you put it in the car so clearly if you build a system into the car which is being done today the cost is go be significantly less and i would say it will be in the range of another thirty to forty percent less than that by eliminating redundant components so take that ten thousand dollars system down to three thousand dollars or four thousand dollars and you have a system that could be implemented to create an eighty percent fuel savings and a sixty percent reduction in emissions i do not have a number off the top of my head that tells you on a per mile basis exactly what that translates into i am not sure if i can get any help from anyone here create a market research program for the automakers to demonstrate to them that there actually is a market out there from our vast number of partners there is a lot of interest in buying these cars the only thing we ever get asked is how soon can we get them  our view is that congress through its appropriations can support advanced battery research to make sure that the battery problem gets solved and then at that point it becomes incentives both from the federal government's purchase of these vehicles to incentives for consumers to purchase these vehicles doing is moving fuel around inside the country so there is a tremendous imperative i mentioned i was on the defense science board's review of this there is intense interest in figuring out how to make the defense department more energy independent and this technology i think can play a role we should not be in the business of picking winners and losers we should be moving aggressively to facilitate an industrial base that taps into the best of these technologies and does so i think in a dynamic way i am all in favor of an executive order i would be delighted to work with you on that if i could i think one of the issues we are going to bump up against probably in crafting of it is in trying to encourage american sources to be utilized especially as that conflicts for reasons we have been talking about all morning with how fast you can do it finally mister chairman as i have said in my testimony repeatedly there is a national security imperative to all of this we are i believe in mortal peril of an oil collapse of some kind i do not know whether it will be from a terrorist's taking out a key facility or whether it will be from some government or other deciding not to to us but this is a peril that we see coming we need to be doing all of these things as aggressively as possible i will commend you if i may mister chairman i would like to submit for the record the set america free blueprint that this coalition of national security minded people labor people all different kinds of environmentalists and so on have come together around specifically because i think what it suggests is we will wind up doing every single one of these recommendations later if not sooner and later is going to be harder the chairman my father always said try to start out where you are going to be forced to wind up because it is prettier that way so we hope that we are now on that new course i thank you mister gaff mister lowe the first money i ever made as an actor when i had a moment to invest it i invested in an alternative energy source that was over twenty years ago so this is an area that i have cared about for a long time but it is recent events in the world global warming reaching this sort of critical mass that has gotten me off the sidelines and brought me here today i am not a big proponent of taxes i am just not that said i do think there is a time when you invest in something that has the potential to create new industry particularly the kind of new industry that secures our nation  our environment and so i would urge you and your colleagues to do whatever you can to help whether it is by the early user tax credits or by any other economic incentives that you can come up with to jump start this industry particularly with the plug in hybrid cars that are ready to go on the road today the chairman thank you mister lowe very much mister vieau mister vieau in january bob lutz the vice chairman of general motors stepped up in front of the public and said that he has found some battery technology in boston massachusetts that is changing their view about the limitations of batteries and they believe that the technology exists today sufficiently so that they are willing to commit to a new model of electric vehicle based around this competency i am go repeat what i said earlier i think the strongest message that we can make is that we do not believe that you have any legislative opportunity in front of you that can provide a greater return for a limited investment using current infrastructure than what we mit when the soviet union challenged us with sputnik president kennedy asked jerome wiesner a professor from mit to become his science adviser and to help shepherd through this goal of putting a man on the moon and returning to earth in eight years and we were successful when the soviet union threatened us potentially with a nuclear strike that could destroy our communications capacity mit developed a  new technology that first was called darpanet and it is now called the internet and we have deployed it ubiquitously around the world hopefully our technology the technology at a which has come out of m us the capacity to break our dependence on imported oil and to give this technology to the rest of the world as well it is that important for our energy security and also for our national security this panel i think has helped  to really focus us on this issue speaker pelosi created this select committee as her only select committee in her first two years as speaker of the house and it was to have these kinds of hearings and i can promise you that in the legislation which we are considering this year the kind of tax incentives and regulatory changes are now being seriously considered that can hopefully open up these new technologies to adoption and to telescope the time frame it takes  in order to see them deployed ubiquitously not only across our country but across the world we thank you for your testimony today this hearing is ad