Hat tip: Common Dreams
It is a problem we will not solve in the next few years, and it is likely to get progressively worse.
We must not be selfish or timid if we hope to have a decent world for our children and grandchildren.
We simply must balance our demand for energy with our rapidly shrinking resources. By acting now, we can control our future instead of letting the future control us.
One choice is to continue doing what we have been doing before. We can drift along for a few more years. Our consumption of oil would keep going up every year. Our cars would continue to be too large and inefficient. Three-quarters of them would continue to carry only one person — the driver — while our public transportation system continues to decline. We can delay insulating our houses, and they will continue to lose about 50 percent of their heat in waste.
We will feel mounting pressure to plunder the environment. We will have a crash program to build more nuclear plants, strip-mine and burn more coal, and drill more offshore wells than we will need if we begin to conserve now. Inflation will soar, production will go down, people will lose their jobs. Intense competition will build up among nations and among the different regions within our own country.
If we fail to act soon, we will face an economic, social and political crisis that will threaten our free institutions.
Of course, this was a serious President speaking (18 April 1977). He has been maligned for supposedly bringing a mood of despondency and weakness to the country, and being hopelessly naive, but that’s not what I see in that speech, nor in the infamous “Crisis of confidence” speech (15 July 1979):
I am tonight setting a clear goal for the energy policy of the United States. Beginning this moment, this nation will never use more foreign oil than we did [two years ago] — never. From now on, every new addition to our demand for energy will be met from our own production and our own conservation. The generation-long growth in our dependence on foreign oil will be stopped dead in its tracks right now and then reversed as we move through the [next decade], for I am tonight setting the further goal of cutting our dependence on foreign oil by one-half by the end of the next decade —
To give us energy security, I am asking for the most massive peacetime commitment of funds and resources in our nation’s history to develop America’s own alternative sources of fuel — from coal, from oil shale, from plant products for gasohol, from unconventional gas, from the sun.
These efforts will cost money, a lot of money, and that is why Congress must enact [a] windfall profits tax without delay. It will be money well spent. Unlike the billions of dollars that we ship to foreign countries to pay for foreign oil, these funds will be paid by Americans to Americans. These funds will go to fight, not to increase, inflation and unemployment.
We often think of conservation only in terms of sacrifice. In fact, it is the most painless and immediate way of rebuilding our nation’s strength. Every gallon of oil each one of us saves is a new form of production. It gives us more freedom, more confidence, that much more control over our own lives.
I do not promise you that this struggle for freedom will be easy. I do not promise a quick way out of our nation’s problems, when the truth is that the only way out is an all-out effort. What I do promise you is that I will lead our fight, and I will enforce fairness in our struggle, and I will ensure honesty. And above all, I will act.
This is a President who has vision, who has the best interests of his country and of ALL his citizens in mind, who has ambitious goals and did not shy from asking for all to contribute to them. In essence, he was launching a “Manhattan Project” for energy (and that was after having already created the Strategic Oil reserve, launched house insulation efforts, kickstarted solar energy development, and reinforced CAFE standards). He said it would require efforts and sacrifices from all, but that it would be worth it in terms of efficiency, quality of living and jobs – and freedom.
That was almost 30 years ago. 30 wasted years (well, 20. The early 80s saw the results of Carter’s efforts to reduce consumption, before it was all wiped away in a new orgy of consumption and waste, the “American way”.
If Carter had been listened to, maybe it would not have been necessary to waste thousand of lives, hundreds of billions of dollars and the worldwide reputation of the USA in a reckless foreign adventure, maybe GM would not be in the crisis it is now, maybe the USA would be the world leader in wind and solar energy instead of Germany and Japan, maybe sprawl would not have extended so far as to make public transport totally impractical.
But no, he was “naive” and “weak”. I say he was right. He was a visionary. He will stand the test of history a lot better than his successors. But it’s still time to follow his lead, to dust off his policy proposals and act on them NOW. It’s going to be harder than it would have been 30 years ago, but it will still be easier than if we wait longer. It is still possible, barely, to be in control of events rather than being pushed around by them.
He is the only President to have succeeded in reducing wasteful consumption and energy dependence, and his successor blew that “windfall” pretty quickly instead of making it permanent. It is high time to rehabilitate him and his proposed policies instead of being ashamed of them.
Thank you for that.
I have always respected him for what he’s done for human rights (and for having the courage to cede the Panama Canal) but I had forgotten about his equally farsighted energy policy.
Bush should be leading his press conference with the nitty-gritty stuff, such as:
I forget the stats on what those can do to lower consumption, but it’s significant.
And, my personal tip: Give the thumbs down to every Hummer you see. It’s fun.
would save the US 10 times the amount of oil estimated to be in the Arctic Refuge according to Robert F. Kennedy jr.
I’m all for conservation but I have a question about the mpg rating on cars and the call on people to drive more slowly (i.e. 55 mph).
It seems that my cars (a corolla and an altima) actually get better highway gas milage than the listed rating when I’m travelling at 65 – 75 mph rather than 55 mph.
Has the 55 mph number been updated to account for newer technology or is it rooted in the optimal speed for gas guzzlers of the 60’s and 70’s?
Does the 55 mph number exist more for safety purposes that fuel conservation purposes?
Am I wrong about getting better gas milage at 65 – 75mph?
I don’t top off the tank when I fill it either, so I can measure, with reasonable accuracy, how much gas I’m using between fillups.
The mpg figures are arrived at using a combination of dynamometer and controlled driving tests (this document outlines the testing procedure and formula). Apparently, the calculation still assumes a top highway of 55, a holdover from the early 80’s (see this document for some of the problems).
That said, your actual mileage depends on how you drive, how well you maintain your cars and other factors. Basic physics would imply that you’d get better mileage at 55 than at 65 (all else being equal), if you feel like conducting a field experiment.
was a failure as a leader in a lot of ways.
But his defeat was a bigger disaster for the world than even Al Gore’s. Carter was the last honest politician.
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Jimmy Carter and his Center for Human Rights has done well in the world for 25 years and received the well-deserved Nobel Peace Prize.
The Jealousy of #43 Drips from his Face!
Oui – Liberté – Egalité – Fraternité
was a failure as a leader in a lot of ways.
What ways?
I always thought the post-presidencies of Carter and his successor pretty much said it all about their basic characters: Carter started Habitat for Humanity. Reagan sold himself as spokesmodel for some Japanese manufacturing company for a million dollar fee.
For those in a hurry: We are screwed. There, now you can ignore the rest of my post. 🙂
Here I’m only going to be talking about the US.
Simply tugging at one end of a ball of yarn only makes the internal knots tighter. Energy policy is intimately tied to two other systems: transportation and the hollowing of the cities, and indirectly to the oil and automobile industries.
Our mass transit system is a combination of public and private investment. Public in the trillions of dollars spent on instituting the road infrastructure. Private in the trillions of dollars spent on automobiles. Concurrently billions of dollars are spent each year to maintain, replace, and expand both the infrastructure and the means of private access to the infrastructure.
This is the direct cost, the indirect costs include the loss of real estate value in the cities, real estate investment in ex-urban areas, health affects from pollution, mis-opportunity due to the investments listed above, foreign policy initiatives driven by oil dependence, and military expenditures driven by the foreign policy initiatives.
Naturally, both overt and secondary monies spent in a particular area implies a group whose economic interest lies in keeping the money flowing into the set, or sub-set, of goods and services dependent on the flow of those monies. (We need not accept ‘economic determinism’ to acknowledge the foregoing proposition.) This interest is a combination of public, private, and corporate entities.
What Carter failed to do, IMNSHO, is fully grasp the political, sociological, and economic system he was attempting to affect. To put it in a nutshell, he was proposing to massively downsize the automobile, real estate, and energy businesses, and all of the secondary businesses that rely on them, without proposing a systematic change that would provide a mechanism to get from here to there. Even merely talking about change was threat enough to cause the loose coalition to move into action to defeat his proposal.
So, 30 years later, the same coalition is even more powerful, the affects of not starting the shift are more apparent, and the mis-investments are larger, more complex, and coming ‘due & payable.’