“The United States cannot afford to wait for the next energy crisis to marshal its intellectual and industrial resources. . . . Our growing dependence on increasingly scarce Middle Eastern oil is a fool’s game—there is no way for the rest of the world to win. Our losses may come suddenly through war, steadily through price increases, agonizingly through developing-nation poverty, relentlessly through climate change—or through all of the above.”
James Woolsey, U.S. Director of Central Intelligence (1993–1995)