ZPEnergy.com - Looming energy crisis requires new 'Manhattan Project': US scientists

The United States urgently needs an effort similar to the Manhattan Project or NASA's moon mission to confront a looming energy crisis, scientists said at a high-level energy conference here.

Soaring global demand for energy and rapid depletion of resources need to be addressed by a long-term government-led project similar to the World War II-era effort to develop an atomic bomb, University of Southern California scientist Anupam Madhukar said at the annual National Energy Symposium on Thursday.

"A sense of urgency is needed like the Manhattan Project or sending a man to the moon," Madhukar said.

But the scientists spoke of the difficulty of a paradigm shift in the way the United States addresses its energy needs to fend off an energy crisis on the order of the 1970s, scientists and politicians at the symposium said.

They agreed that it would take 50 years to shift energy consumption policies in a more sustainable direction, pointing at how, for most of the 1800s, the United States relied on wood for its energy needs.

After forests were depleted, it took half a century for the country to make the shift to coal, and it will take just as long to shed what President George W. Bush has called "our addiction to oil," according to scientists.

"There has never been a year in history when we have used less energy than the year before, and it would be optimistic to think that we could reverse that trend," said Nathan Lewis, professor of chemistry at the California Institute of Technology.

The United States consumes one-fourth of the world's energy. China, India, Germany, Japan and Bangladesh have a combined population of 2.9 billion, and together consume less energy than the United States, with a population of 290 million.

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