Bush reads from 1977 Carter speech
I was chatting online in IRC with a bunch of folks from the local Linux users group while the State of the Union was on. Bush was giving the performance of his life, since his political life basically depends on it, when he got to the part about energy. I was expecting him to talk about our ‘addiction to oil’ because that was the stuff Karl Rove released ahead of time to the media, but this is not a new idea. Jimmy Carter laid out the problem and the solution almost 30 years ago, and more eloquently at that.I made a joke about it in IRC, and a couple of the younger guys didn’t know what I was talking about when I said it sounded like a Carter speech from ‘77 so I jumped into Google and searched for ‘Carter energy policy’. One of the first matches I got was this speech by Jimmy Carter entitled ‘The President’s Proposed Energy Policy’ which was televised on April 18th, 1977. Here are some excerpts.
The oil and natural gas we rely on for 75 percent of our energy are running out. In spite of increased effort, domestic production has been dropping steadily at about six percent a year. Imports have doubled in the last five years. Our nation’s independence of economic and political action is becoming increasingly constrained. Unless profound changes are made to lower oil consumption, we now believe that early in the 1980s the world will be demanding more oil that it can produce.
Although we haven’t run out of oil as many in the 70’s were predicting, we did ‘turn a corner’ on production at that time in the sense that new, large oil fields are not being found at the same rate as before. Luckily for us, technology has allowed us to eek out more lower grade oils, and take oil from the soils where we couldn’t previously.
All of us have heard about the large oil fields on Alaska’s North Slope. In a few years when the North Slope is producing fully, its total output will be just about equal to two years’ increase in our nation’s energy demand.
But we do have a choice about how we will spend the next few years. Each American uses the energy equivalent of 60 barrels of oil per person each year. Ours is the most wasteful nation on earth. We waste more energy than we import. With about the same standard of living, we use twice as much energy per person as do other countries like Germany, Japan and Sweden.
We can’t substantially increase our domestic production, so we would need to import twice as much oil as we do now. Supplies will be uncertain. The cost will keep going up.
If we wait, and do not act, then our factories will not be able to keep our people on the job with reduced supplies of fuel. Too few of our utilities will have switched to coal, our most abundant energy source.
We will not be ready to keep our transportation system running with smaller, more efficient cars and a better network of buses, trains and public transportation.
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.
Since failing was not an option, Carter then went on to list the ten principles that would guide the US as we worked to solve the problem. The tenth principle is that we must start now to develop the new, unconventional sources of energy we will rely on in the next century.
Among other points he made, he stressed personal sacrifice and conservation. This did not go over well with 70s America. Average folks didn’t like the fact that a self professed Christian Nuclear scientist that had somehow become their president was telling them that The citizens who insist on driving large, unnecessarily powerful cars must expect to pay more for that luxury. They voted the bum out a few years later and proceded to ignore his scary energy plan.
Unfortunately, much of Carter’s prophesy has proven true. Equally as unfortunate is the fact that I suspect Bush’s grudging acnowledgement to these truths to be wholly insincere. I think Bush’s statements in the state of the union were made solely to gain quick political ‘brownie points’ with an America soured on his wars and his corrupt connections to the oil and energy industries that have driven us to it.
