All Blog Posts from Couric & Co.

Believe it or not, there’s a place on the planet that sees one inch of rain every thirteen years. It’s a desert in Chile called Salar de Atacama. It’s the driest place on earth – a fact even introduced once on "Jeopardy" -- but for producers of lithium, this desert is one of the richest. Above ground is a vast wasteland of dried clumps of clay, some the size of a child’s bicycle. Nothing grows out here. Below ground, though, is a different story.

“This is the best place on earth," Ron France told me in the middle of the desert. Neither of us could have traveled to many places that were more remote. France is president of Chemetall, an American company that produces lithium. Lithium is the world’s lightest metal, and the energy source in the batteries of cell phones, laptops and Blackberrys.

Snow melts off the nearby Andes mountains and is trapped underground is this closed basin. One-hundred thirty feet below the surface, the water gathers in salt water brines. Chemetall, France’s company, pumps the brine above ground into a series of ponds. In a process that lasts eighteen months, the desert sun evaporates out other salts. The beauty is that the sun does almost all the work. What’s left is lithium brine, which is shipped to a nearby factory for processing into lithium carbonate powder and shipped to battery-makers, mostly in Asia.

Demand for lithium is about to soar. This fall, Mercedes will introduce into showrooms its first plug-in hybrid car. Its power will come from a lithium ion battery and the lithium alone in that battery will weigh twenty pounds. (The lithium in a cell phone weighs one-tenth of an ounce.) A half-dozen other carmakers have plans for their own plug-in models, powered by lithium. Chevy claims its new Volt will get at least 250 miles per gallon.

Three major companies dominate the world’s lithium market. The metal itself is produced in only a half-dozen countries, including a small site in Nevada, but half the world’s lithium comes from the Salar de Atacama. That’s why Ron France thinks of this remote place in Chile as the best on earth.

So remember the Salar de Atacama. If plug-in hybrid cars catch on, the focus of America’s energy policy could start to shift away from OPEC pipelines in the Middle East to lithium brine pools and Chile. And you never know when the name might come in handy as an answer on a “Jeopardy” re-run.”

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Conversations about energy in this country are a lot like Groundhog Day. Lawmakers agree that climate change is a problem, vow to do something about it, and then argue about taxes and jobs and nothing really gets done.

The energy bill that squeaked through the House last week now faces the Senate and an uncertain fate. It may not be perfect. The cap and trade plan is as hard to follow as an episode of "Lost", and it will likely mean we'll all pay more for utilities.

But the bottom line is that it forces us to take the first steps toward ending our dependence on coal and oil and to begin to develop new and cleaner ways to keep this nation running.

Yes, smoke billowing from a factory means people are hard at work inside and industrial communities do need the assurance that a green nation won't put them in the red.

Change can be scary, but the consequence of doing nothing is even scarier. At some point we must focus on the future, even if that means some growing pains along the way.

That's a page from my notebook.

I'm Katie Couric, CBS News.

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Last year, candidate Barack Obama left Iowa with the wind at his back, having scored an upset victory in the first caucus of the 2008 election.

Today, he returned to The Hawkeye State with a message about the wind, and how we can harness its power for energy.

While wind power provides only about two percent of our electricity now, the AP reports the wind industry generated 13,000 jobs last year.

The president's energy plan focuses on renewable resources and the creation of green jobs, but it has lawmakers from coal-producing states like Kansas seeing red.

As old debates continue about what's best for state economies versus what's needed to clean up the environment, Earth Day feels a bit like Groundhog Day.

President Obama claims his plan can satisfy both interests, but his staffers admit it's an uphill battle.

Ultimately, Congress will decide if today's talk turns into action, or just becomes a lot of hot air.

That's a page from my notebook.

CBS News White House correspondents Peter Maer (top left) and Mark Knoller (bottom left) interviewed President Bush in the Roosevelt Room at the White House.

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We had to wait nearly an hour for President Bush to enter the Roosevelt Room for our radio interview.

But actually, we’d been waiting more than seven years.

My colleague Peter Maer and I have been pitching the White House to grant us an interview with the president since the year he took office.

Most recently, we were told that Mr. Bush doesn’t like doing radio interviews. He doesn’t think his comments get a fair shake when we only use “snippets” of what he says in our radio reports and on the hourly radio newscasts.

Well, that’s the nature of the business. But through the magic of this podcast, you can hear everything thing he said, in the context in which he said it.

We were given 15 minutes, and tried to wring every nanosecond out of it.

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Click here to listen to the entire interview with President Bush.

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This week at the Democratic presidential forum in Nevada, virtually every candidate promised “energy independence”—some version of getting America off its addiction to foreign oil. But what would that take? How much would it cost? Why has every president since Nixon promised to do this—and nobody has? For answers, we turned to retired Marine Corps commandant General P.X. Kelley, who is the co-chair of the new Energy Security Leadership Council — which has brought business and military leaders together for a different energy future.

1. Every presidential candidate from Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to Mitt Romney and John McCain has promised some form of “energy independence?” Is it possible for America to eliminate our use of foreign oil?

Calls for energy independence notwithstanding, oil is a fungible global commodity that essentially has a single world price. This means that events affecting supply or demand anywhere will affect oil consumers everywhere. As such, a country’s exposure to world oil prices or oil price shocks is a function of the amount it consumes and is not significantly affected by the ratio of “domestic” to “imported” product. For instance, Canada, Norway, and the United Kingdom are all oil exporters and still paid $75 this summer like the United States. The goal is to reduce the importance of oil to our economy and better manage global energy interdependence.

Furthermore, America is an integral part of a global economy defined by an incredibly complex network of interdependence. Making America energy independent wouldn’t insulate our country from the indirect economic effects of energy shocks that could strike our trading partners. So, America could spend untold dollars in the pursuit of energy independence and, at the end of the day, it won’t actually achieve the ultimate goal of economic stability and prosperity for the American people. Moreover, a comparison of America’s current and future energy consumption and production suggests that energy independence will not be possible for many decades.

2. What sort of sacrifices should Americans expect to have to make?

The energy security plan we have developed includes several major reforms, particularly mandates for more fuel efficient vehicles and steps to increase domestic oil production...

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