WASHINGTON, DC - U.S. Senator Jack Reed (D-RI), chairman of the Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats, today delivered a speech at 2020 Vision's third annual National Summit on Energy Security stressing that energy dependence and climate change are serious threats to our economy and national security.

"We are clearly in an era of extraordinary transition in which climate change, energy supply, and sustainability will reshape the world, influence our economy, our national security, and the way we live. Resolving these problems will be among the most complex and challenging issues that the next president will face," said Reed, a West Point graduate and former Army Ranger.

The text of the speech follows:

REED: We are clearly in an era of extraordinary transition in which climate change, energy supply, and sustainability will reshape the world, influence our economy, our national security, and the way we live. Resolving these problems will be among most complex and challenging issues that the next president will be facing.

The underlying issue is our reliance on fossil fuels as the primary source of energy.

According to the Energy Information Administration, 85% of our fuel supply comes from fossil energy, and 96% of transportation fuels are petroleum-based. Fossil fuels and energy production are responsible for nearly 70% of the greenhouse gases emitted annually.

Left unchecked, our continued reliance on coal, oil, and, to lesser extent, natural gas will diminish environmental quality, make the world more dangerous, and threaten our economy.

Although President Bush rightly warned the nation about our addiction to oil, his Administration has delayed action to substantially reduce our dependence and to minimize the impact on our climate:

In the last seven years, oil consumption rose by nearly a million barrels a day and the amount of oil we are importing has grown. The U.S. is projected to spend $390 billion on imported oil in 2008 - 46% of which will be supplied by OPEC and from nations that have regimes that are unfriendly in their respects to our country.

As a candidate in 2000, then-Governor Bush also promised that he would "require all power plants to meet clean-air standards in order to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide within a reasonable period of time." Yet within the first 60 days of the Administration, this commitment was abandoned.

Since then, the Administration has also resisted efforts to regulate greenhouse gases.

Having its hand forced recently by the Supreme Court, the Administration last week effectively punted its responsibility to provide a framework for limiting greenhouse gas emissions by issuing an Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking with a comment period extending to November 2008.

And meanwhile, the EPA has prevented states from taking effective action by implementing their limits to greenhouse gasses from motor vehicles, most particularly with respect to California.

Because we've lost time, the next president will have to exercise extraordinary leadership to rally the country and the rest of the word to address these issues.

The failure to reduce our dependency on oil has made us more vulnerable to national security problems. Indeed, our oil addiction finances oppressive regimes that, in one way or another, promote instability. Diverse civilian and military voices have made this point repeatedly.

Last year, the Military Advisory Board of the Center for Naval Analysis stated that, "Climate change acts as a threat multiplier for instability in some of the most volatile regions of the world." They added that "climate change, national security, and energy dependence are a related set of global challenges.... Because they are linked, solutions to one affect the others."

Tom Friedman, a noted columnist, has linked our oil dependency to underwriting undemocratic, authoritarian regimes in what he calls the First Law of Petropolitics: "The price of oil and the pace of freedom move in opposite directions in states that are highly dependent on oil exports for their economies.…Soaring oil prices are poisoning the international system by strengthening antidemocratic regimes around the globe."

Now, the recent run-up in gasoline prices has been a harsh reminder of many of these aspects and a harsh reminder of our vulnerability. Gasoline is now selling nationally at about $4.11 a gallon. The public is dealing with these extraordinary consequences.

Now, whatever role of manipulation has played in these prices, the fact remains that oil and other fossil fuels are finite resources, and there is increasing demand for them throughout the developing world. Even if oil prices subside temporarily, they are a warning that domestic and global reliance on fossil fuels will have dangerous economic, political, and environmental consequences.

We will remain vulnerable until alternative energy sources are developed. There are no quick fixes, although many have been proposed.

The recent call for increased drilling in sensitive environmental areas off the coast and in Alaska is not the answer. The development of oil in these areas will provide no short-term relief for consumers.

The Energy Information Administration estimates that it will take until 2017 for these new supplies to come on-line (if they are developed), and they won't reach full production until 2030. Even then, they will not make a significant contribution to our energy supply. I would also note that oil companies have approximately 68 million acres today that have been leased for exploration, but are actively being drilled for oil.

If these leases were tapped, we could increase production substantially.

Regardless of all the recent debate about energy, the simple fact is that the United States consumes approximately 25% of world's annual oil output and we have roughly between 1.5% and 3% of the world's oil reserves. There is no way we can expect ourselves to become "energy independent."

What the increase in energy prices may lead to is the realization that the course we are on is not sustainable, and will hopefully lead to better national policy about energy.

While prices and supplies provide the public with direct evidence of the consequences of our dependence on petroleum, the environmental and political consequences of climate change are less explicit. Nonetheless, they are very real, and for us and for future generation, extraordinarily significant.

Each ton of heat-trapping carbon dioxide that human activity releases into the atmosphere remains there for 100 to 500 years, amplifying the warming effect on our planet, changing the climate, and fundamentally altering ecosystems, landscapes, and public health. The more carbon that is piled into this ecological debt today, the more drastic the consequences will be in the future.

Some of the effects of warming on our planet are already observable.

Higher ocean temperatures have led to an increase in the number of intense hurricanes in the North Atlantic over the last century.

In 2007, the extent of Arctic sea ice was 23% less than the previous all-time minimum observed in 2005.

There has been an effect on human health, with increased mortality from extreme heat and changes in infectious diseases, such as dengue fever and tick-borne disease.

No matter what steps we take, some of the negative effects of climate change are likely inevitable.

Writing in the Center for Strategic and International Studies' report, The Age of Consequences, last November, John Podesta and Peter Ogden noted that "there is no foreseeable political or technological solution that will enable us to avert many of the climatic impacts" of a projected increase in global temperatures of 1.3 degrees Celsius by 2040.

Podesta and Ogden laid out what these changes will mean: There will be a destabilizing effect on "mega delta" regions in South Asia, particularly in Bangladesh where a growing population will be displaced inland.

Existing unrest in Nigeria, a major oil supplier, will be heightened as it faces increased land loss to a combination of sea level rise and desertification.

Water supplies in the Middle East becoming more constrained, increasing tension among nations in the region, which is already noted for some tensions.

In some respects, these scenarios may be optimistic. Indeed, the warming that human activity causes may lead to "feedbacks," such as the release of billions of tons of carbon currently trapped in permafrost, which will further exacerbate the warming effects on the planet.

At higher temperatures we are likely to see the disappearance of the snowpack that supplies the West Coast of America with drinking water and irrigation. In South Asia, the glaciers that fortify the Indus and Ganges Rivers will vanish, ensuring that there will be some level of conflict in the region.

The combination of the loss of wetland habitats and ocean warming and acidification will likely cause fisheries to collapse in many parts of the world.

Lord Nicholas Stern, author of the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change for the British government, notes that under a "business as usual" approach, there is a 50% chance that we will experience a 9 degree temperature increase. Aside from the catastrophic environmental consequences, such change, he estimates, will shrink global GDP by 5% to 20% -- a loss equivalent to that of a world war but lasting far longer.

Some have said that the United States in this crisis should not lead on climate change until growing economies in the developing world, particularly the Chinese, agree to reduce their emissions.

While China has now surpassed the U.S. in overall carbon emissions, the United States, I believe, has a special obligation to lead.

The U.S. still contributes more greenhouse gases per capita (25 tons per year) than any other country -- five times more than China. According to Lord Stern, we must reduce emission to a global average of 2 tons per person by 2050 to stabilize greenhouse gases at acceptable concentrations. We cannot realistically expect China, or other developing countries, to allow such a wide disparity to be maintained. We need to set the example.

There's also a carbon legacy that we are responsible for.

As noted NASA climate expert James Hansen explains, carbon dioxide from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution is still present in the atmosphere today, contributing to the warming our planet is experiencing. He estimates that the responsibility of the U.S. for the level of greenhouse gases is three times greater than any other country.

And finally, the United States, by addressing these challenges, will also have an extraordinary opportunity to expand our own economic base by providing the technologies, the techniques, and the expertise that will help ourselves and the world develop the technology that we need and the policy that we need to lead the economic and environmental aspirations of this generation and generations to come.

In this complex arena, there is no single or simple solution. Rather than a silver bullet, we need an array of options that help us diminish our dependence on oil and other fossil fuels.

Too often in the past, the federal government has banked on choosing the right technology, for example hydrogen, to achieve "energy independence." That strategy has not worked. Instead, the federal government needs set an overall goal for energy savings and greenhouse gas reductions and invest and promote a wide variety of solutions to meet those goals.

The solutions may not all be revolutionary, but some will have the potential to be transformative in the same way as perhaps the Internet was with respect to communications.

In the U.S., advances in biotechnology may lead to second and third generation biofuels that will be transformative. Rather than relying on corn or food crops for energy production, a variety of feedstocks may be used to produce biofuels that can carry more energy and produce less carbon than today's ethanol.

In addition, these fuels may be transported through today's fuel infrastructure and used in today's vehicles. While this is not a reality now, these technologies hold hope, in future years, to be, indeed perhaps "disruptive technology" that will completely change energy production.

And while we long for these types of technology, we must avoid putting our eggs one basket and we must take steps that we know will work very quickly.

As a first step, Congress passed the Energy Independence and Security Act (EISA). By improving building codes, raising efficiency standards for light bulbs and appliances, and increasing fuel economy standards for cars for the first time in a generation, the bill will reduce oil consumption by 2.9 million barrels per day by 2030 and will reduce greenhouse emissions by an estimated 6-7 percent.

Now, California has shown that we can continue to have economic growth without using more energy. Since the 1980's, efficiency improvements have kept energy consumption there at the same level per capita even as that state experienced significant growth. And we can and must do the same as a nation.

There are other possibilities we can turn to: Hybrid electric and electric vehicles offer the possibility of reducing oil dependence and carbon emissions significantly.

Under a realistic deployment scenario, Electric Power Research Institute and NRDC estimated that cumulative GHG emissions reductions from 2010 to 2050 could range from 3.4 to 10.3 billion metric tons and will ultimately cut oil consumption by 4 million barrels per day.

While we need to do more to improve battery technology and to make these vehicles more affordable, we know we can produce these vehicles because we already are.

The Vectrix, developed in my home state of Rhode Island, is the first electric motorcycle, and holds the promise of substantially reducing emissions and pollution.

The Tesla Roadster was a remarkable achievement, demonstrating the shelf battery technology to produce a vehicle with a range of 250 miles on single charge.

In another transportation arena, one of the consequences of higher oil prices has been the return of many people to mass transit. The carbon savings through more extensive use of mass transit could be significant - nearly 2.5 tons of carbon emissions per person per year if we increase mass transit. That requires public investment, and that I think is something that should be our honor definitely, going forward today and in the next administration.

Buildings are the most significant contributors to greenhouse emissions - nearly half in fact of total emissions.

The weatherization of a home can help reduce carbon emissions by 1 ton per home. Each year, the federal government helps approximately 100,000 low-income families. It saves them money, and it also saves the nation energy. It's been estimated that with the weatherization, this energy savings could amount to 18 million barrels of oil each year.

Another area we have to look at, in fact, one of the missing elements of the 2007 energy bill was a Renewable Electricity Standard. By adopting an RES that requires 15% to 20% of electricity to be generated from renewable resources, we can cut emissions by between 180 and 263 million metric tons and save consumers between $10.8 billion and $16.4 billion dollars.

All of these are not as exciting or remarkable or attractive as some of the esoteric discussions of new fuels, but these types of building code improvements, these types of renewable electricity standards, new technologies, new battery technologies, each of them can add I think significantly.

There is no simple, single magic solution to the problem.

What we really need to do is to begin. We need to begin to focus our efforts on these critical challenges that pose dire consequences for our economy, our environment, and our national security.

The bottom line is that we have tools and the knowledge to make the change we need.

What is needed is leadership, particularly presidential leadership that shows the world that we will make a serious effort to address climate change and we will make a concerted effort to break our oil addiction.

And in that great challenge to America, I look forward to working with the next president to make those commitments a reality.