FedEx CEO Fred Smith, other US business leaders and former generals are calling on the USCongress to improve the country’s energy security in response to the turmoil across parts of the
Middle East and North Africa.Smith is a leading member of the Energy Security Leadership Council (ESLC), a project ofSecuring America’s Future Energy (SAFE). The ESLC describes itself as “a group of businessexecutives and national security leaders who believe that our dependence on oil, much of itimported from unstable and hostile regimes, poses an unacceptable economic and national securitythreat”.
The organisation has urged Congress to move forward on critical legislation designed to combatthe threats posed by America’s “dangerous and ongoing dependence” on petroleum. Inparticular, the group is lobbying for electrification of transportation and more efficient vehicleconsumption of oil-based products.
“It is one of the United States’ greatest economic risks to be tethered to these increasingsupplies of imported petroleum from unstable and often unfriendly parts of the world,” said Smith,who is co-chairman of the ESLC. “It’s unsustainable. The country has to mobilise and take someaction to finally address this problem, which has been going on now for an awfully long period oftime.”
“I think as we see the events in Africa and North Africa and into the Middle East itself it justis another reminder of how fragile the stability of that region is. That’s in itself a dauntingissue, but from the standpoint of our energy security, it’s even more important,” General CharlesF. Wald, USAF (Ret.), Former Deputy Commander of U.S. European Command and original creator of thewar plans that were eventually used in the 1986 bombing raid of Libya, said. “I think we’ve hadseveral wake-up calls in the past. It is time for our country to become less dependent on importedoil.”
In 2006, ESLC released its Recommendations to the Nation on Reducing U.S. Oil Dependence,helping shape 2007’s Energy Independence and Security Act. In September 2008, the ESLC released ANational Strategy for Energy Security, a new plan building on the accomplishments of 2007 byproposing the electrification of the short-haul transportation fleet along with all of the requiredinfrastructural upgrades necessary for that effort, and other measures, including increased oil andnatural gas production.
