agreed in principle to ban the imports. but reading from your testimony, it seems that neither italy nor greece will comply at least to the extent that would have been expected. and given your point that you've got india, you've got south korea, turkey, all increasing imports combined with what we know about the strong demand from china, what do you think the practical effects of these new sanctions will be? >> italy, spain and greece will have to comply with the eu sanction by july 1st. the question is would they do much between now and then to try to diversify their social supply? they have long-term contracts. i think it's not very easy unless the iranians decide to embargo them. the problems are specific for each country -- which refinery gets what from where and there's long-term commercial relations.

but it's likely that over the course of the year by the end of the year, they will not be allowed. they won't be able to import as much as they are right now. so we believe that they will have to decrease their supply by around 400,000 combined. the question is, are there other countries willing to pick up that slack from iran and in a way just shift the barrels as ambassador jones said. when you look at the countries which are really potential clients here, turkey can increase a little bit, and the question is how much will the u.s. face the sanctions. it's unlikely that a country in asia will take more iranian crude. and the question is really how much india and china are willing to become more dependent on iran as a source of supply. we don't believe, actually, that china will be very aggressive in

increasing its imports of iranian barrels because it will make them more dependent and more vulnerable to a potential disruption of iranian barrels, and they have somehow indicated that they're likely to keep the percentage of imports from iran stable which is around 10% of their crude imports. their crude imports are rising. so that 10% means a little bit more barrels than the year before, but it's not significant. the question is really india. but the volume we're talking about, 400,000 to 500,000 per day from iran which do not have a place to go in europe, it's unlikely they can absorb that much. in a way, iran will have difficult to be able to replace these markets. and we believe it's more likely actually that we'll have to shut down some production or at least have floating storage for some of that production before they

shut it down. >> then following on that, can you discuss the ways that iran could possibly circumvent the current sanctions both in terms of financial payments or physical delivery, then? >> well, they need a client who's willing to circumvent the financial sanction. and the way to do it is to deposit local currencies into a local bank that the iranians can draw from whatever they need to import back into iran. i think they'll have real difficulty to go through the international financial system. it limits, again, which countries have the capability and the ability to do that. >> so really, it's going to be incumbent on all those that are adhering to the sanctions. some pretty robust monitoring and some enforcement there. i would imagine. mr. -- dr. gruenspecht, i wanted to follow up with regards to the

eia's lower natural gas reserve estimates. indicated that they've dropped precipitously 40%, as i recall. do you expect that this lowering of the estimates may possibly discourage further exploration? is this going to have any impact one way or another? >> i would say not. again, whether the u.s. has 100 years of total recoverable resource at current rates or 90 years of total recoverable resources estimated at current rates. i just don't think it has much of an effect. i think the thing that would affect development would be the view of companies on the ground as to how much it costs them to drill a well and what they can recover by drilling the well. and the price so they care about the quantity they can recover by drilling a well.

what it costs them to drill a well and what they think the price is going to be. that's really what they're focused on. you know, whether we have 90 years of total recoverable resource or 100 years. >> i would agree with that. 40% reduction is noticeable. but as you put it in those context -- let me ask, then, how much of the eia reserve estimate, then, is actually driven by the production data that's out there? >> again, i would say that usgs is the primary agency in the united states government that does resource estimates. we do the work on reserves primarily. resources is a larger concept. the usgs had not done a

marcellus estimate in a long time. they had a very what we consider to be a very low estimate, one that we couldn't use. so we made up or developed our own. made up is a bad word. >> bad word. >> strike that from the record. and then after we did that, usgs came out with an updated marcellus estimate which was the 84 trillion cubic feet compared to their prior estimate. the 84 trillion cubic feet was significantly lower than the number that we had developed internally. you know, we're obviously sad that when they came out, we would update our work based on the usgs work. we did try to do that. >> so do you think that you will revise the estimate again? >> i think that this is a really tough area. i think there's too much emphasis put on that number, no matter whose number it is. i think that as we gain more and more experience with actual drilling, the numbers will always tend to evolve on total recoverable resource.

and again, i don't think it's that material for the 25-year horizon that i think we have been looking at in our projections long term that the iea looks at. in fact, we have more production and lower natural gas prices in this outlook than we had in the previous one. and that really reflects the lowered, you know, the drilling costs and the well productivity. >> i think this is an important part of what it is that we're talking about and understanding what's going on. again, the president's state of the union that he gave last week, he, again, repeats the fact that -- i shouldn't say it's a fact. the statement that this country only has 2% of the world's oil. well, when we're talking about reserves versus resources and recoverable, we all -- you all know at this table that the number can be all over the board

here. and it's how we define it. and i think sometimes it's a pretty loose definition that would lead people in this country to believe that we really don't have much of a recoverable resource. so it's important that we use the right terminology and try to be as accurate as we can, recognizing that we're dealing with a very fluid assessment again as our technologies and our capabilities expand. did you want to finish up? >> no. >> okay. no, i appreciate that. mr. chairman, that's all that i have. thank you. >> thank you. let me ask one other line of questions. dr. gruenspecht, in your testimony, you, in discussing the world or the international energy outlook, you say renewable energy is projected to be the fastest growing source of primary energy over the next 25

years. the renewable share of total energy use increases, in your projection, from 10% in 2008 to 15% in 2035. do you also have in your report an analysis of what those trends would be with regard to renewable energy? in the united states? >> yes we have particularly in our annual energy outlook, there's a lot of information on renewable energy. again, it's very fast growing for two reasons. one, in the transportation sector, you have the mandates for the biofuels, which even though we don't believe that the target at 2022 would actually be met, that certainly is driving renewables in that sector. and we have a lot of renewables in the electricity sector. the share of electricity

generation from renewables, i think grows from, like, 10% of generation to 16% of generation. so that's a pretty big increase. generation is going up. although not too fast. we have renewables being pretty fast growing in the united states. on the electricity side, it's mostly driven by the state renewable portfolio standards. there's also some interaction between the transportation side and the electricity side because the plants that produce cellulosic biofuel, and there will be some over time, those plants will throw off somet gog. it's a very interesting story. >> does the analysis that your agency has made, is it consistent with this as far as renewable energy being the fastest growing source of primary energy over the next 25

years? >> well, it's certainly growing very rapidly, yes. i was just checking my testimony. according to the world energy outlook, the share of non-hydrorenewables, primarily wind and solar in power generation rises from 3% in 2009 to 15% in 2035. and hydro, which is a major source of generation, maintains its share at 15%. so overall, we're saying all would be about 30% of world power generation by 2035. >> okay. all right. i think this has all been very useful testimony. we appreciate you all being here. and we will try to stay in touch with you as these trends change. thank you very much. >> thank you.

secretaries of state from around the country metaphor their conference. rock the vote heather smith president says 2012 is an opportunity to get people mobilized in the process. this 1 hour 20-minute discussion took place at the mayflower renaissance hotel >> our first presenter today is mr. james coux to serves as the relatively new executive director of i-civics, the non-profit organization created by former u.s. supreme court justice sandra day o'connor, who was the recipient of our very own nas margaret chase smith award just a couple years ago at our winter conference. he investigated the impact of technology and the internet on legal education and studied the intersection of video games and moral development.

he helped find legal university, provides training for professional development for poverty lawyers across the nation. he holds a ba in social studies. from harvard university, and a juris doctor from harvard law school. we ask him to speak about the committee to us about i-civics, which is a curriculum in many of our states, a number of teachers and others are using this curriculum in their government and civics classes. mr. chapman and i serve as chairs in our own states in local committees that are working closely with our supreme courts and our judicial system and others to advance the use of justice o c'connor's initiative. we're pleased to have mr. ku here and welcome and thank you

for your presentation. [ applause ] >> thank you secretary, and what a great opportunity it is to address this group and talk to all of but the work that we're doing in i-civics and a lot of folks are doing around the nation on civic education. what icivics does is provide young people with the knowledge, skills and dispositions for intelligent citizenship, and it's so important for us as we're talking today about voter engagement to think about how do we prepare young people, tomorrow's voters, to be not just capable of voting, but being able to do so intelligently and in an engaged way where they're participating in democracy and they're working to advance our nation in our individual states and community. i don't think it would be a surprise to folks in this room who are really paying attention to politics and to the way people are engaging in politics that there are a lot of folks participating in the

political system who aren't terribly well educated about how our system of government works, that we have three branches of government, for example, on how they interrelate to each other or how many supreme court justices there might be at any given moment in time. there is actual research that backs up the fact that tomorrow's voters, today's young people, are significantly lacking in information and knowledge about the way that their government works. the most recent national assessment of educational progress in civics which took place in 2010, showed that almost 80% of high school seniors are lacking proficiency in civic knowledge. that's a very, very high number, and because these are high school seniors we're talking about literally today's voters as of right now, this is in 2010, and we've gotten to this point, it's kind of the history goes on for a long time but if you look back at where all of us started with public education,

really the original purpose of public education was to create citizens and those of you who are familiar with your own state constitutions would know that 40 of the state constitutions actually cite the important of civic literacy in the constitution itself, and 13 specifically identify civic education of the primary purpose of public schools. so we have a very strong and storied history of civic education as the basis of our educational system and you can ask, well, what happened, how did we arrive at this point where 80% of high school seniors are lacking proficiency? and quite a bit has happened. probably one thing is that we have taken civic education for granted. so in the last 10, 20 years, as other priorities have come up in terms of science, technology, math, english, as we all know, those are now the subjects that are being tested for which funding is tied and so other subjects in the social studies

and the arts have fallen by the wayside. so i don't think it's for lack of interest or concern that civic education has fallen away. it's more that we haven't really thought about it and maybe started taking it for granted. but another thing has also been happening, and that simply providing civic education is not enough. it's really important that we provide good civic education. civic education that's keeping up with the times, really being aware of how are kids learning today, how do we engage them today, what's interesting, exciting, fun for them to be part of. a recent study out of harvard that look at the, surveyed the field of civic education and concluded that the majority of the k-12 students learn about citizenship by read being it in a textbook and filling in worksheets and basically listening to their teacher's lecture, and as all of you know, probably the best way to get interested in civic ed kaition is to really get involved and to

learn about how do, how does the national and state and local government pertain to you as a young person, as an adult and to be very practical about it. it's not just enough that we for example start testing kids on civics, although that is the kind of thing that's now starting to happen in the states around the u.s., like florida. but to figure out how to make sure that civic education is relevant to our young people. that she they see it as important and as exciting as all of us believe it is, that democracy is something that they can participate in and believe in. so as secretary ricci earlier stated icivics was founded by justice sandra day o'connor soon after she stepped off the bench. very briefly, in terms of how we got started, she looked around and realized that there's really strong and vociferous and often ungrounded atacks on the court system in

the u.s., and the courts really don't have anybody to stand up for them. they don't do their own pr or have a a lot of outreach. so she realized that if this continued, it would threaten the tradition independence of our court system. so she began to ask around, what can we do, and people pointed to the decline of civic education as a basic fundamental ignorance of what the court dos and do not do. and she got together and assembled a bunch of folks and said, how can we educate the children in way than what exists now and overwhelmingly the response was we have to be where the kids are today. and where the kids are today is not necessarily textbooks and work sheets. where they are today is that 97% of american teenagers play video games. and as those of you with teen

majors would know, they spend an average of at least 44 hours a week in front of a tv or computer screen or another digital device. so that is where the kids are. so we took a big leap of faith and said, well, this is where civic education needs to be and we did a callout for some of the leaders in the educational field of educational technology and video games. and said we need to do this, we need to make the participation in democracy as exciting as any of these games and we did. that we created video games that are fun and exciting and engaging and i wish we could do the video screen here today, because i would share some of the games with you. i encourage you to check it out. we are at www.icivics.org, and we have our games there. we now have 16 games that cover all of the different branchs of

government and in particular, some of the ones of specific interest to this conversation, we have one that asks students to think about what values they care about in an election and pick candidates, they are all fictional so we are staying away from specific candidates right now, but then basically test them on are they matching the way that they value different public policies against the kinds of of candidates they would be voting for in a few years. there's another game that we just release about how to run a presidential campaign that teaches how the elect toral college works. i-civics games are catching on and aour games have been played of three and a half million times because they are great in a school setting.

they are playable in a single class period. they include performance results so the students and teachers can review how they are doing and they are -- we offer over 50 lesson plans that you can put together and teach an entire semester worth of civics. and they are fun, we work hard with game developers to make sure that they are bonifide games and not quizzes with pictures and lights and sounds to make it seem more fun. these are games that we get feedback all the time that the kids get exposed to the games in school from their classes and they go home and continue playing them. we get notes from parents saying they have to pull the kids away from the computer to make them go to bed at night. we feel we hit on something successful. and in our preliminary research, it shows our games are improving

civic knowledge and retention by anywhere from 15% on up, and that actually scoreses when you do both of our games and lessons are up almost 50%. but all of it starts with schools and schools that that are emphasizing civic education and that is where i hope we can work with you to make sure that civic education gets the attention and resources that it deserves so we can preserve our democracy for generations to come. we make sure our resources are absolutely free. you can get to all of our games and lesson plans and there's no charge for any of them. and they are also aligned to all

the standards that the states have. some have some have it weaved in to other you courses. we we encourage you to look into how to strengthen those requirements in your state. and do it before high school. i got it in the last semester of my senior year, the theory is when that is right before you are going out to vote, but that is exactly when nobody is paying attention. it's to late to get to young people. we work with middle school kids and if we could we would work with younger. there's a prime age, and those of you with teenagers know this, there's a time where kids are concerned with just is and fairness, it's a prime

opportunity to connect they are personal and family experiences to their communities and then from their communities to the state and beyond. at a point when they are still not quite cynical about the way the world looks and interested in learning how all these things effect our democratic values. i hope you all look for strengthening the standards, particularly for young people when they are open to learning how all of this works. and also, of course, as secretary ritchie mentioned we have state leadership teams that include secretary chapman, i encourage you to join our i'm as we, and think about how to advance civic education and get more schools to be aware of the free resources that help teachers teach this subject matter in a more engaging and

fun way. again, i'm sorry i cannot share with you visuals of the game. i would be happy to show you the games individually. i have brought some with me. or answer questions later on. thank you for all that you are doing to advance democracy and the education and how young people are learning to be citizens and not just citizens but smart, engaged and active citizens. thank you. >> thank you, mr. wu. >> i know there will be a few questions and i just want to say in minnesota our chief justice of our supreme court has been one of the drivers. it's been true in other states as well. the international association of council has weighed in and become active. and we have teachers up from third grade to college making use of these, so we know it can be used for a wide range of our young leaders and young citizens

as they are growing up, are there questions about i-civics in general? please, speak into the microphone, thank you. >> not so much, well, i guess a question from the standpoint, i'm secretary condos from vermont. one of the things that we have foupd and as a former state senator who chaired the education committee, we struggled with this issue and we actually tried to put the civics curriculum back into ed, because of no child left lbehind, they have abandoned civics and left it up to the towns to fund it on their own. so i think there's issue there is that we need to relook at from a national level to try to get this thing reinstituted. i know my own office. we work with, what we call, boys

and girl state and high school and doe, we will be promoting, over the next couple of weeks we will be doing on their interactive learning network that beams out to the schools themselves, we have a constitutional amendment change in 2010 that went through that allows 17 year olds to vote in the presidential primary if they will be 18 by the general eelection. and the theory is that they ought to have a say in who they are voting on and since it's a primary function, we okayed that and it passed overwhelmingly, 75% to 80%. we run a poster and essay contest, from grade school, middle school and high school to talk about civics and at the grade school, it's a poster