THE PATRIOT
James Woolsey, the former chief of the Central Intelligence Agency under the Clinton administration, lives in a rambling farmhouse in rural Maryland. I arranged to meet with Woolsey after my Pentagon visit in the hope of getting a wider perspective on the marriage of war and oil. Woolsey is in many ways a consummate Washington insider—someone who served as one of the voices in the room when key decisions were made about America’s foreign policy in the Middle East. But since he left the CIA he has become a twenty-first-century Paul Revere, warning the public of the national security threats posed by America’s dependence on foreign fuel.
A dry-witted, sharp-featured brainiac who was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford and got his law degree at Yale, Woolsey, now in his sixties, spearheads an increasingly influential group of conservative and liberal experts alike inside Washington who argue that weaning America off foreign oil is the most ethical, effective, and affordable way to win the war on terror. This group is known as “cheap hawks.”
“Americans need to know that their oil demand is fueling Al Qaeda,” he told me as we ambled through a bare cornfield near his house. “Nearly $100 billion has been spent on spreading anti-U.S. propaganda around the Middle East, and almost all of that is oil money.”
To reduce the flow of those “billions for hate,” as Woolsey calls it, he and his fellow cheap hawks have advocated a demand-side reduction plan similar to the one President Carter promoted in the 1970s. Woolsey and other cheap hawks see alternative energy technologies as a tactical necessity—not just in the field of combat, but as a means of moving America at large off of oil. They have been pushing for federal policies promoting the widespread adoption of hybrid cars, renewable power, and fuels such as ethanol and biodiesel that are made from corncobs, garbage, manure, and switchgrass. A far cry from green idealists, cheap hawks come on strong as pragmatists.
War, reasons Woolsey, is a grossly expensive and inefficient way to defend America’s energy interests, and is becoming ever more so. “Our military energy burdens will only grow heavier as the war on terror demands more fine-tuned and complex tactics, including an ever more agile and dispersed force,” he told me, “and more extended deployment in the field.” Woolsey also cautioned that terrorism in the Middle East is much more likely to drive oil prices up than is peak oil. “The biggest threat to our economy in terms of oil dependence is the possibility of a terrorist strike against the oil and pipeline infrastructure in the Middle East. Overnight, we could see oil prices double or triple to $200 or $300 a barrel.”
But for all his caution and concern, Woolsey is an optimist who fervently believes in the power of technology to end America’s oil dependence and reduce the need for its military involvement in the Middle East. In fact, he has fashioned his own home into a kind of living laboratory of the types of practical solutions that he believes will dig the United States out of its energy crisis. He took me on a tour: the roof was rigged with solar panels, the walls and windows were double-insulated, the fireplaces were equipped with “heatilators” to ventilate warmth from the chimney, and the kitchen appliances were Energy Star–qualified—all of it serving to make the house electrically self-sufficient “in case of shortages or terrorist attack,” he said.
By far the most important and underutilized weapon in the war on terrorism, according to Woolsey, was the gleaming white plug-in hybrid Toyota Prius in his garage, which sported the bumper sticker “Bin Laden Hates This Car.” “The most immediate and important technology challenge for America right now is reforming our car fleet—that’s the biggest deadweight dragging on our oil demands,” he told me. “It’s not just our environmental duty to drive efficient cars, it’s our patriotic duty.”
These fellas are fast, proud, fearless go-getters with rebel hearts—that about sums up the American spirit, don’t it?
–NASCAR fan
3 Road Hogs WHY A HUNDRED YEARS OF JOYRIDING HAS US RUNNING ON EMPTY
At dawn on a hazy autumn morning, the rising sun spilled over the steel grandstands of the Talladega Superspeedway like foam from a cracked can of Bud. This image likely came to mind because I was lying beneath a tarp in a scrubby Alabama meadow carpeted with empty beer cans—an area known as Talladega’s Family Parking Field C. The 2.66-mile Talladega racetrack, located about 50 miles east of Birmingham, is the world’s second-largest car-racing venue, with a mile-long grandstand built to accommodate more than 140,000 fans. Around my A-frame L.L. Bean tent were some 40,000 parked vehicles, most of them flatbeds, SUVs, Winnebagos, and camper vans filled with groggy pilgrims rising to greet a day that would bring them the nation’s biggest semiannual NASCAR racing event.
The National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing holds “17 of the top 20 most-attended U.S. sporting events,” according to its Web site, and its races are widely referred to as the nation’s most popular spectator sport. This was my first visit to a NASCAR event, and I had come to see what may rank among the world’s most lavish displays of fuel consumption: forty hot rods, each getting about 5 miles per gallon, hurtling around a strip of asphalt in an infinite loop. I admit I came to the event with a certain lack of regard for its premise: burning huge amounts of fuel and rubber for the sole purpose of driving around in circles. The ritual seemed careless to me at a time of war in the Middle East, unchecked global warming, and soaring energy prices. But hours later I would leave Talladega with a less skeptical take on the NASCAR phenomenon and a better understanding not just of carburetors and checkered flags, but of who we are as a nation—a thrill-seeking, speed-loving, self-propelled, forward-charging culture.
Talladega is NASCAR’s XXL, Big Gulp–sized speedway—the most treacherous and most exciting. Its long straightaways and unusually wide track allow for cars to build up to and sustain speeds of more than 200 mph and to run three or four abreast. Racers don’t brake for turns at Talladega the way they do at smaller tracks; instead they mash their gas pedals to the floor. These conditions raise fans’ expectations for the “big one”—a massive, harrowing multicar wreck.
Field C, which a week earlier had housed only wildflowers and Alabama Longleaf pines, was now a sprawling tribal village with makeshift neighborhoods and orderly avenues webbed throughout the settlement. Families had been dwelling there for days before the race, many erecting well-appointed encampments with awnings trimmed in Christmas lights, lawn chairs, picnic tables, movie projectors, outdoor grills, and coolers stocked with cold American beer. Hoisted above the camps were Confederate flags and tributes to the denizens’ favorite racers, above all Dale Earnhardt Jr., #8. “Junior” (who has since changed to #88) is the son of the legendary NASCAR champion who lost his life in the last turn of the 2001 Daytona 500. The drivers were competing on this fall day in a 500-mile race that was part of “the Chase” (the ten-race playoffs) for the Sprint Cup, the top prize in racing.
I had awoken to the ambient stench of beer-soaked crabgrass, cigarette butts, fire pits, and the charbroiled remains of the previous night’s cookouts. I groped for soap and toothpaste and made my way to a public trailer marked “$5 Showers.” En route, I caught sight of my neighbor shuffling out of his tent wearing nothing but his briefs. He nodded hello, and as he leaned over a propane stove to flip his pancakes, I saw the numeral 8 shaven expertly into his thicket of back hair. This tribute to Junior was a single-digit poem about America’s devotion to speed—a display of fan loyalty so brash, intimate, and wholehearted that I stopped in my tracks, feeling awed and strangely jejune. I’d never been a sports fan of even mild convictions, let alone known loyalty so absolute.