Fatih Birol, author of the IEA’s World Energy Outlook which published today. (via dihard)

Most of our foreign oil goes straight into our cars.  So weatherizing our homes and commercial spaces, building a new electric grid, and developing massive-scale renewable energy farms (all good, necessary, economy-boosting actions) won’t quite cut it.  They will reduce our energy use, yes, but that will be mostly coal and natural gas.  If we’re going to tackle our addiction to oil, we need to tackle transportation (and as this 22-year projection makes clear, we have no other choice).

If I were drafting the legistation I would ensure that the bailout of American automakers has a clear price attached: you must produce sustainable cars that go far beyond the 40ish MPG of the Prius.

And then there is our mass transit systems, which have been undermined by legislators for decades.  A federal investment in public transport — perhaps bringing it to the level that the government is currently funding highways, which is four times as much as mass transit — would do a great deal to slash our dependence on oil.

Van Jones writes that as a result of chronic underinvestment in public transport,

fewer than 3 percent of trips are made by public transport. If we increased that number to 10 percent of all trips (to the European level), we could reduce our dependence on oil by more than 40 percent, which is nearly as much oil as we import from Saudia Arabia every year.