+Luft appeared before the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee
Summary: Gal Luft tesified before the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee on ways to break oil's monopoly in the transportation sector.
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+Gal Luft's Washington Post oped on energy independence
Summary: When the founding fathers declared our independence, they could not have imagined that, 232 years later, the United States would be so spectacularly dependent on foreign countries.
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+Korin appeared before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs
Summary: Anne Korin tesified before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs on Rising oil prices and national security.
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+Luft appeared before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs
Summary: Gal Luft tesified before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs on sovereign wealth funds.
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Summary: IAGS congratulates Senior Fellow Dr. Isaac Berzin for his inclusion in TIME Magazine's 2008 list of the world's 100 most influential people. Berzin received this honor for his important scientific contribution to the development of alternative fuels and for his leadership role in the global movement to end the world's oil dependence.
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Summary: In the context of $100 oil, Sovereign Wealth Funds owned by petrostates
have potential to upset the West's economic and political sovereignty.
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Summary: Dependence on Russian crude oil and natural gas as well as government control
over the oil and gas sectors best summarize Poland's energy situation.
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+The Terrorist Threat to Liquefied Natural Gas: Fact or Fiction?
Summary: While the U.S. continues to pursue LNG as a way to diversify its natural gas resources in order to meet anticipated
future shortfalls and increase energy security, opponents and proponents of LNG have been locked in a bitter debate with no solid conclusion.
Proponents are correct in that both safety and security measures currently in place make LNG terminals and ships extremely hard targets for
terrorists. However, it would be imprudent to believe that terrorists are either incapable or unwilling to attack such targets. It would be
equally imprudent to assume that these targets are impenetrable.
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Summary: Every day, more of the world’s oil comes from a secretive gang of countries that couldn’t care less about your gasoline bill. Gal Luft offers a way in which consumers can fight back
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Summary: You hear it all the time: We've got to reduce our dependence on foreign oil; it's a matter of homeland security. Fine. Nobody's arguing. But the solutions that get offered -- drilling in ANWR, mandating better automobile fuel efficiency, pushing ethanol -- don't really solve anything. They're politically impossible, or too expensive, or contrary to free-market forces. They're losers. Energy-independence advocate Gal Luft looks for winners. What separates him from other energy specialists are his pragmatic solutions. He doesn't peddle pie-in-the-sky political strategies. He's a realist. He has a single goal: freeing America from the grip of foreign oil. And he wants to do it now. He offers four ways to solve the energy crisis which also happen to be four reasons why Gal Luft is the most hated man in Riyadh, Detroit, and Des Moines.
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+Gal Luft's report to NATO on dependence on Middle East oil
Summary: Conventional wisdom, concerned only with smooth functioning of the market, says that ownership of oil is meaningless, that it does not matter much if most of the world’s oil is owned by one regime or the other. But in the case of the Middle East resource ownership does matter.
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Summary: At first glance, Iran looks like an energy superpower. It is the second largest oil producer in the Organization of
Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). It owns 11 percent of the world's conventional oil reserves, second only to Saudi Arabia. It also sits on
16 percent of the world's gas reserves, the largest reserve after Russia. A closer look, however, reveals that Iran's energy sector is a house of cards. It is neglected, crumbling and underinvested.
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Summary: President Bush announced his intention to expand the Strategic Petroleum Reserve as a way to strengthen America's energy security. The 20-year effort to increase the emergency stockpile from its current capacity, 691 million barrels, to 1.5 billion barrels would provide enough oil to compensate for a loss of nearly 100 days of net oil imports, almost double today's reserve. The administration should consider a radically different and much cheaper approach to boosting our security: make ANWR our strategic reserve.
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Summary: China's rapid economic growth has led it to scour the world for energy resources. Across the globe, China’s efforts to acquire oil are far-reaching and aggressive. However, all along the way, China’s efforts are being met with political, economic, strategic and environmental roadblocks. Faced with the challenge of trying to overcome many hurdles, China has been taking many steps, some more controversial than others, to achieve its goals.
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Summary: As tension between Sunnis and Shi'ites mounts from Iraq to Lebanon another front is opening in the deepening strife between the two parts of the Muslim world: The race to acquire nuclear capabilities.
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+Ahmadinejad's Gas Revolution:
A Plan to Defeat Economic Sanctions
Summary: Ahmadinejad has placed Iran on a course to immunity from international sanctions by addressing its prime vulnerbility, refining capacity, with
a three pronged strategy: building refineries, strengthening relationships with refined products exporting countries unlikely to abide by a sanctions regime, and most importantly,
shifting Iran's transportation fleet from gasoline to natural gas.
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+India's Hidden Civil War: Consequences for Energy Security
Summary: Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, an Oxford and Cambridge-trained economist not given to careless exaggeration, recently referred to a domestic political crisis as "the single biggest internal security challenge ever faced by our country". Yet despite the longtime prominence of this problem within India and its potentially catastrophic effects on India's energy sector, many energy analysts outside of India are unaware of its existence. The security challenge in question is posted by the Naxalites, a loosely organized group of "Maoists" who now have an estimated 20,000 soldiers under arms and are waging a war against the Indian state, terrorizing and destabilizing much of the Indian countryside. The success or failure of their campaign against the government will have profound consequences for India's stability, and, most particularly, its energy security. For the Naxalite insurgency is strongest precisely in the areas of India with the richest natural resources, especially the coal which powers the Indian economy.
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Summary: Africa has become a key oil exporter to China. In 2005 China imported
nearly 701,000 bpd of oil from Africa, approximately 30 percent of its total oil imports. China anticipates increasing that amount to 25 percent in the next ten years and has been carefully paving the way to ensure its objective is met.
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Summary: Islamic terrorists have identified the world energy system as the Achilles' heel of the West and have made attacking it a central part of their plan. With just 1 million barrels a day of spare capacity, there is almost no wiggle room in the oil market to compensate for supply disruptions. Striking oil, which jihadists call "the provision line and the feeding to the artery of the life of the crusader's nation," is relatively easy and effective.
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Summary: As we come to grips with the tragedy wrought by Hurricane Katrina, three of the
worst structural flaws in the nation's energy system must be examined: the overconcentration of oil and
gas infrastructure in the part of the country most prone to natural disasters, the lack of refining capacity
and the near-complete dependence of vehicles on petroleum.
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Summary: Iran's decision to resume its uranium conversion activity in defiance of Europe and the United States raises the specter of sanctions imposed against Tehran by the U.N. Security Council. Sanctions always have been a favorite punishment against the rogue state. But as the Iraqi case shows, they are easily breached and do little to bring about behavioral change. In Iran's case, economic sanctions may be a double-edged sword. IAGS' Gal Luft notes that before we tout them we must carefully assess whether they would be effective and who would be the prime casualty of such a policy.
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Summary: The number of pirate attacks worldwide has tripled in the past decade, and new evidence
suggests that piracy is becoming a key tactic of terrorist groups. In light of al Qaeda's professed
aim of targeting weak links in the global economy, this new nexus is a serious threat: most of the
world's oil and gas is shipped through pirate-infested waters.
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Nearly three years into the global war on terrorism, there is still an incomplete recognition
of the strategic importance of energy security. The current focus on energy security remains
lacking and limited, with a rather outdated reliance on the more traditional perspective of
concentrating on the risks posed by instability and insecurity in the Middle Eastern oil-producing region.
The Middle Eastern theater mandates such focus for three reasons: by virtue of its role as the major source
and gateway for global energy, due to the instability rooted in the very nature of its regimes, and as the
original source of the new wave of Islamist terrorism.
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The energy security of the United States is closely linked to the state of its water resources.
No longer can water resources be taken for granted if the U.S. is to achieve energy security in
the years and decades ahead. At the same time, U.S. water security cannot be guaranteed without
careful attention to related energy issues. The two issues are inextricably linked, as this article
will discuss.
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+How utilities can save America from its oil addiction
Every American president since Richard Nixon has promised to reduce America's demand for oil while
investing in new energy sources. Largely due to lack of political will, all have failed.
Rather than a sustained, comprehensive effort to reduce demand for oil, America's energy plan
has never been much more than a compendium of subsidies and tax breaks playing to the interests of
various lobbies.
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A new study titled "Carrying the Energy Future: Comparing Hydrogen and Electricity for Transmission,
Storage and Transportation" by the Seattle based Institute for Lifecycle Environmental Assessment (ILEA),
evaluated the energy penalties incurred in using hydrogen to transmit energy as compared to those incurred
using electricity.
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While recognized standards exist for the systematic safety analysis of potential spills or releases
from LNG (Liquefied Natural Gas) storage terminals and facilities on land, no equivalent set of
standards or guidance exists for the evaluation of the safety or consequences from LNG spills
over water. Heightened security awareness and energy surety issues have increased industry’s
and the public’s attention to these activities. The Sandia National Laboratories report reviews several existing studies of LNG
spills with respect to their assumptions, inputs, models, and experimental data. Based on this
review and further analysis, the report provides guidance on the appropriateness of models,
assumptions, and risk management to address public safety and property relative to a potential
LNG spill over water.
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In recent years there has been increased awareness of
the risk of terrorist attacks on nuclear facilities, which
could have widespread consequences for the
environment and for public health. This POSTnote is a
summary of a longer report on this issue, which has
been prepared by POST, following a request from the
House of Commons Defence Select Committee in July
2002 in its report on Defence and Security in the UK.
Summary,
Full Report