economy generally has performed very well. we if at times we have not performed well. -- we have had times where we have not performed well. it has not been a huge drag on economic growth and prosperity. it may be in the future. that ought to give you some sense that we are very flexible and adaptable as a society. there are underlying strength in the american economy that we tend to underestimate it seems to me. host: that color reference to the postal system. the next segment will be the chairman of the coastal commission. -- postal commission. punta gorda, independent line. caller: i agree with the previous caller.

last week we saw some tremendous insight into the motivation behind the health care bill. john dingell made a comment that after the legislation was passed, that the legislation needed to be passed in order to control the people. the media is not picking up on this. nobody is talking about it. i would like to know why. guest: i did not see the comment. i do not know what he meant by it or the context in which it was put. i really cannot comment on that at all. all i can say is there are an awful lot of people in washington with an awful lot to say all the time. newspapers tried to reported all -- if newspapers were to try to report it all, it to be impossible. if i knew the context of his comments, i might able to reach a judgment if it was were

reporting or not. host: a do not mean this to a self-serving question, but are the members of the public well served by the economic reporting generally in this country? guest: there is always room for improvement. i started out as a reporter at "to the washington post co -- " the washington post." i do not know how big it is today. they have had cutbacks. the quality and quantity of economic reporting today is light years beyond what it was when i started out. if the public will served? they are as well served as you

can be in a world where it is impossible to say what will happen tomorrow. newspapers, magazines, radio, television -- we are all in perfect. we all exaggerated. -- imperfect. we all exaggerate. reporting is better when i started out. -- than when i started out. caller: i am just really exasperated. i am wondering why the american teabaggers and all these obama hating confederates are treating this president did badly. president bush ran during a "recession. he initiated to wars and tax cuts for the rich off the books.

-- "recession." he initiated two wars and tax cuts for the rich off the books. i am wondering why these conservative people are out here talking about socialism when most of them live in the south would depend on government contracts and do not pay their fair share of the taxes in this country. there subsidize states. you have to go on line and see which states are subsidized. the people are denigrating everything president obama is trying to do. $9 billion of shrink wrap money disappeared.

host: we got your point. we are almost out of time. guest: regardless of how you feel about the president, it seems to me that there was an awful lot of critical coverage of president bush when he was president just as though there is a fair amount of critical coverage of president obama today. that is the nature of our system. i am not an expert on the tea party movement. i would say one big difference between president bush's time and today is that we are just coming out of a really awful recession. when you have a slump as big as we have had, you are bound to get a reaction. i would prefer that partly down due to the severity of the economic decline. host: washingtolast question ism

washington. caller: if we could segue to the diplomatic policies and security implications. what would your opinion be about our going so much to the chinese which appeared to be an unstable nation composed of many different -- and our great debt to the oil-producing states. will this not have serious national security implications in the future? guest: i am more worried about the undervaluation of the chinese currency. they earn these dollars in international trade in part because their exports are advantaged by their artificially low currency.

they have to invest those dollars in something. that just increases the amount of debt that they buy. i think that is the fundamental source of economic instability in the world. we ought to be looking at that and not so much about the sheer amount of debt that the chinese have. what are they going to do with it? if they try to destabilize the world economy by selling all their debt, it would hurt them as much as it would hurt us and maybe more. it is not in their interest to do that. host: confined his commentary on the "washington post" website. he can also look for his book, "the great inflation and its aftermath." >> tomorrow, a conversation on the implementation of the health care bill would julie applebt.

after that, the offshore drilling announcement by the obama administration. it then an update on the economy, including the latest jobless numbers. nature in the morning, president obama travels to north carolina to deliver remarks of the economy. live coverage from charlotte begins at 11:30 a.m. eastern fronti. >> today the white house announced new gas mileage standards for new cars and trucks as part as a climate strategy. by 2016, auction of bills will be required to get 35 miles an -- automobiles will be required to get 35 mpg. up next on c-span, a panel

examines ways the u.s. can decrease its dependence on fossil fuels. then president obama talks about healthcare. after that, a conversation on health care costs and the federal deficit. >> of this month, s.c. the winners of c-span's student -- see the winners of c-span's studentcam competition. what the top winning videos every morning on c-span at 6:50 a.m. eastern. at 8:30 a.m. during the program, meet the students who made them. for a preview of all the winners, visit studentcam.org. >> a discussion on ways to reduce the use of fossil fuels. we will hear from representatives of oil companies on ways to reduce america's use of those fields. .

fuel -- reduce america's use of those fuels. >> who would morning. my name is michael crow. together with the new america foundation, we are sponsoring this discussion today which we hope will be somewhat differentiated between typical discussions where one talks about theories as to why we cannot advance american energy independent. today our discussion will focus hopefully on the revolutionary steps necessary to achieve that as a goal and objective. lastly, some of you might have read the article with a graphic about the move and countermove scenarios of an israeli attack

on the iranians and what may happen. at the bottom it said, and to the militarail and -- militarily challenge. as a child, i was living in areas where children have forgotten how to read and no longer had and civilization of the political complexity of our energy stream. i thought today we would go to our panelists. i will call on them one at a time. they can quickly introduce themselves and attacked this question of, how do we actually achieve energy independence? i will start with sunil paul who has a fantastic ideas. >> thank you. i and the founder of an organization. -- i am the founder of an

organization that encourages a scale thinking. fide job is the founding -- my day job is the founding partner of spring ventures. i think the most important thing, there are a lot of new ideas out there being able to convert aualgae into fuels. they are break through new ideas. what is necessary almost as much of those technologies is a realization of what it means to be secure -- energy secure. a useful analogy is one put out by an article. it uses the analogy of salt.

it used to be strategic economy. wars were fought over it. war was fundamental to energy. the reason why today assault is the strategic commodity is that we do not care who has the power over salt trade. we do not fight wars over it. it is not because a substitute was found. it was not because we mine more in the united states. it is because we discovered an alternative to that energy preservation. salt was used to preserve food. and now we have other ways to preserve food, particularly refrigeration. that alternative of managing energy is the kind of innovations that we are thinking about. what is an alternative way to deal with oil for

transportation? that is what we fundamentally need. there to companies that i am involved in -- two companies that i'm involved in. one is converting sugar to versus type -- to various types of oil. another company has the highest conversion ratio of woodey biomass trees into products like ethanol. there are many other examples like that. many arun has found as well. i am sure he will talk about them. we can scale these to the scale

that is necessary, not necessarily to eliminate the use of oil, but to give as alternatives so it no longer becomes that strategic commodity. >> you are using the salt analogy. we have to have more alternatives to break the alternatives of using the system. we need to embrace complexity. that is difficult to do sometimes. >> that is right. right now when you produce electricity, there are a number of different ways of doing it, coal, etc when you want to move a truck or an airplane, there is only one way to do it. if you have to get stuff out to the ground. >> gary, i'm going to turn to you next and your focus having run bp asia for more than a decade.

what is going on globally and what that all means for us and how there are solutions that changing the angle of our perspective. >> thank you. my name is gary dirks. i am the director of light works -- lightworks. i would like to state -- take a step back and look at this from a global perspective. i like to start with a quote i find compelling that came out of the international energy agency's world energy outlook in 2008 it said, "the world energy system is at a crossroads. current global trends in energy supply in consumption are

unsustainable. environmentally come economically, or socially." their role is to look at the world energy perspective and comment on where it is going and the security of the system. you might ask why a group like this would say something so provocative. i think the way to under stand it to understand it is asking what the forecast -- i think the way to understand it is by asking what the forecast says. primary energy demand growth grows by about 1.5% per year globally. the implication is that i 2030 we will have to have a 40% increase over today's energy provision in order to meet and demand.

the bulk of that demand will come in developing asia and the middle east. the international agency projects it will cost $26 trillion in order to meet that scale. about 50% of that is for power and more than 50% is developing world. what the implications? the implications are that we will see a revolutionary shift in the demand pattern away from the developed world toward the developing world's. -- world. you have to ask yourself, where's the money going to come from? how will it be mobilized to produce nudges the supply of energy but the ability to distribute its to places where it is needed?

i think it creates a revolution in its own right. i would like to be that when for a moment and step back and say few words about the current system. you probably would say, he would be saying this having spent 34 years in the industry. it is a marvel of human achievement, the energy supply system we have today. it has literally appalled over hundreds of years. -- evolved over hundreds of years. it represents tremendous support by public institutions and a massive amount of public and private investment. it really does what it is supposed to do. if not more important, it has coevolved with the system for consumption.

they form an ecosystem that has been designed for the purpose of reducing costs, maximizing reliability and availability, maximizing the overall convenience of energy. service stations did not just come in this planet on corners convenient for people to use. having electricity in our homes is something that we take for granted. why is this important in the context of a revolution? it is important because this system is sophisticated. it is competitive. it is adapted. it really resists change. it has the capacity to resist change because the costs are so low. there is something about it that is vulnerable.

this is a global vulnerability. it can only be adapted to those things it can send and price -- sense and price. neither energy security nor the climate challenge can be private. if you look at the forecast from the international energy agency, you see that we have a long way blength fundamental shift that will inherently create security issue. oil has to go from 85 million barrels a day to over 100 billion barrels. without intervention, it takes it to over 1000 parts per million in the atmosphere. this is the big challenge. this is what the revolution has

to be about, how do we deal with the shift in demand? the system is deeply resistant to change . >> i hear you say the scale is a revolutionary opportunity. scale is also the barrier, because it is driven down so far because of the wave of innovations. you have scale both for us and against us in this. of other people say the way to reduce our dependence on anything is to use less of this and to the spartans in a technological view. can you talk to us about energy efficiency in some the things you worry about? >> that is right. i am the director of economic social policy. we do focus on the link between

continued energy productivity and a robust economy. we are finding that scale is the critical issue. we have an expensive energy relatively speaking. since 1970, our economy has worked to a great extent -- we have brought down by over half. that is a great accomplishment. energy efficiency has provided about 3/4 of the new energy related demand for goods and services. we still have a supply side focus. productivity has been the sleeper comedy invisible resource -- sleeper, the invisible restores. we have to bring that forward. suggestion of evidence coming forward, unless we achieve a scale, our economy may not be as

robust as in the past because it has about other economic activities to move forward. i might take a moment about the devices. i have four different things that tells a story. they all look alike. there are about the same weight. -- they are about the same way and do this is a toothbrush. -- weight. this is a toothbrush. this is a flash drive. it is fairly fat for its size. this is the smallest. if we continue the current path, we may be tapping into the 500 mb perspective with efficiency. if we continue with an accelerated path, we may be thinking about a 40gb pattern.

the semiconductors could get this to a 16gb calf should we choose to develop that restores -- path should we develochoose o develop that resource. the president has announced offshore drilling as a possible way forward. there may be a critical link. i am thinking that my kid is about 20 billion barrels of oil. -- that might get us about 20 billion barrels of oil. the only way it can come forward is if we make an active choice and choose to develop the resource. we think critically about new designs. >> i hear you saying something

that people in the united states have not grass for digressed yet. innovation has to always be moving -- the people in the united states have not grasped yet. innovations half to always be moving forward. -- lave have to always be moving forward. >> images of the future are critical to choice oriented behavior. it is going to have to be purposeful effort in a consistent way that drives these kind of changes. it needs to be underpinned by an understanding of the role of energy productivity at large. >> we live in a world where a market and policy forces combine to create to the environment in which we advance.

forces shape and guide the market outcomes. one area people talk about this policy revolution. >> i am lisa margonelli. and the director of the energy policy initiative. -- i am the director of the energy policy initiative. i watched how micro economies of oil work together. one thing that sticks in my mind is the mckinsey global institute estimated that over the next 40 years, we need to have the productivity growth of the industrial revolution. that means we need to have the industrial revolution in triple time. that is a huge whoosh of activity and of said to the equivalent of the previous industrial -- oupset to the

equivalent of the previous industrial. how do we make sure the we are on that path? one thing that is really a problem in the u.s. at the moment is that the issue of greenhouse gases has become the competitiveness issue. right now -- this may seem strange. it seems like it is a huge political issue. there is a letter confusion in the u.s. in asia and in europe, policies are in place to take advantage of this massive remodeling of the global energy system. when you look at europe's standards for automobiles, he have to wonder how u.s. automobile companies will compete. when you that south korea's and it is on the smart -- resources

on the smart grid and the u.s. is trying to pull together funding and we have 50 different public utility commissions in 50 different states -- we are trying to get everybody facing in the same direction. south korea has this thematic drawn-out of how much money they are going to save and how they will recycle the dollars into their economy and create 50,000 jobs a year voting appliances for the smart grid. in the u.s., because we have to discuss greenhouse gases, we cannot see that we are missing this huge competitive opportunity to get out and get a jump and the in the same place as the rest of the world for their -- jump and be in the same place as the rest of the world