Oil Solutions Initiative

The Oil Solutions Initiative is a joint effort between the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) and the Brookings Institution'sEnergy Security Initiative to bring together people and organizations with plans to reduce U.S. dependence on oil. The key objective is to identify and outline innovative policy solutions that could help achieve these goals. The initiative is based on the proposition that "breaking America's dependence on oil is a political, environmental, and economic imperitive." ¹

"The goal is to achieve alignment on critical bottlenecks that prevent the reduction of U.S. dependence on oil, and the corresponding policies that will enable us to overcome these bottlenecks. These recommendations will be brought to the next Administration and Congress, and the ultimate goal is to also use [the] findings to educate government, business, and social leaders on issues related to U.S. oil dependence." ²

Participants

"Participants will include orginizations, individuals, and authors with expertise to reduce U.S. dependence on oil." ³ The contributors represent think tanks, non-profit orginizations, research institutions, and economic developers.

Among them, Brookings Institution ⁴ and Council on Competitiveness ⁵ have issued policy propositions to the 44th Presidential administration. Google has issued it's plan for oil dependence reduction ⁶, and MIT brings a report on fueling our transportation future ⁷. Amory Lovins of Rocky Mountain Institute discusses switch-grass as a potential alternative to oil in Discovery's series, "

Visioning summit

The visioning summit will span one and a half days. The first morning will focus on goals, barriers, and opportunities, both as a plenary session and as breakout groups.

The afternoon will split into breakout groups, with each group focusing on a key bottleneck. Each breakout group will be professionally facilitated and will brainstorm policy recommendations to overcome the bottleneck before prioritizing its top five policy recommendations. After the breakout session, there will be a plenary session in which each group will present its findings to the entire group; the larger group will then vote electronically for the best recommendation from each group. Prioritization will be based on criteria such as economics, climate change impact, energy balance, workforce impact, and other impacts.

The second half-day will focus on fleshing out the top recommendations. There'll be a focus on implementation, including quantification of the overall oil impact, the establishment of strong performance metrics, the definition of timescale, budget and funding sources, and next steps. ⁸