U.S. energy policy: It’s complicated

For as clear a sign as you could want of the nation’s haphazard approach to energy policy, look no further than the roof of the White House.

In 1979, solar panels blossomed there, installed by President Carter to symbolize his commitment to weaning the country off oil. Seven years later, President Reagan took them down; at the time, a White House spokesman said the panels were in the way of a repair job, but few missed the symbolic significance of the move. President George H.W. Bush later put up a smaller array to heat the White House pool. That was it for presidential photovoltaics until this week, when a pair of senior Obama administration officials announced that new panels would go up to heat water and provide some electricity at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

President Obama is taking a risk by making a symbolic gesture that so clearly links him to Carter, who lost favor with Americans after donning a sweater and urging them to make personal sacrifices for the sake of energy conservation. To many environmentalists, Carter is a hero whose energy initiatives might have saved the nation from its current environmental and economic troubles if they hadn’t been mostly dismantled under Reagan. But for conservatives, he was a scold whose ideas were disproved when Reagan’s free-market policies seemed to have a bigger role in ending the energy crisis than Carter’s attempts at market manipulation. Neither side is entirely right, or wrong. But by now we should have learned enough from the successes and failures of the two presidents to produce a coherent energy strategy — if only Congress weren’t too paralyzed by partisan bickering to enact one.

Carter certainly made some mistakes. His green apologists often forget that he was a big booster of coal. His goal was to reduce the nation’s reliance on oil and end the price spikes of the 1970s; climate change wasn’t yet on the political radar, and few understood that emissions from coal-fired power plants were producing an atmospheric buildup of carbon dioxide that was altering the planet’s temperature. Hence, Carter backed policies discouraging the use of oil for generating electricity and encouraging coal-fueled power instead. Carter also tried to encourage the extraction of oil from shale, an environmentally disastrous practice.

He also continued to impose price controls that had been established under President Nixon after the Arab oil embargo of 1973. But the federal ceiling on the per-barrel oil price discouraged oil companies from exploring for new supply, thus causing the very shortage of oil that Carter so feared. Reagan quickly eliminated the ceiling, which is part of the reason prices stabilized and remained relatively low for more than two decades afterward. Price controls were so thoroughly discredited that they’re seldom mentioned anymore in the national energy debate, for which we have Reagan to thank.

But we’re finished criticizing Carter and praising Reagan. Many of Carter’s remarks about energy seem prescient today, when global demand for oil is again outstripping supply (a problem temporarily eased but not solved by the economic crisis), the nation’s reliance on oil is creating foreign policy nightmares, and we face a climate threat caused by the burning of fossil fuels whose urgency is becoming increasingly clear.

Carter, who created the Department of Energy (which Reagan tried to eliminate), approved generous tax credits for home installation of solar panels, backed groundbreaking energy-efficiency standards for appliances and buildings, encouraged tighter automotive fuel efficiency standards and called for generous federal funding of research into clean-energy alternatives. Much of this was approved by Congress but was almost entirely undone under Reagan, with disastrous consequences.

A booming solar power industry collapsed by the mid-1980s, killed in part by lower prices for electricity that made solar less competitive, but mostly by the elimination of Carter’s tax credit. California is trying to jump-start the solar industry again by imposing carbon limits and setting a renewable power standard, none of which would be necessary if the business hadn’t been strangled a quarter-century ago. Similarly, had Carter’s research initiatives not been defunded by Reagan, it’s likely that by now they would have resulted in technological innovations to reduce the price of renewable power and improve efficiency.

Reagan’s disdain for automotive fuel economy standards was echoed by Congress, which failed to raise them again until 2007 after they hit a peak of 27.5 miles per gallon for passenger cars in 1985. Had the standards continued to rise, cars in the United States would doubtless be at least as fuel efficient as they are in Europe and Japan, saving untold billions of dollars from lower fuel consumption, not to mention billions of tons of greenhouse gases. Because the United States is by far the world’s biggest consumer of oil, this would have significantly lessened both today’s oil supply difficulties and our climate worries.

Carter’s biggest mistake was political, not policy-based. A Navy veteran, he too-well remembered the personal sacrifices Americans had made during World War II and thought the energy crisis could produce similar feats of patriotic self-denial. But it was unrealistic to think that high gasoline prices would have the same rallying effect as a world war; Americans were turned off by his pleas to turn down the thermostat.

Putting the United States on a more sustainable energy path is about investment, not sacrifice. Americans don’t have to live Third World lifestyles to reduce fossil fuel consumption, but they do have to be willing to spend a little now to make a lot more later. Wind farms and solar plants are expensive to install, but they get cheaper over time because their fuel is free.

The same principle applies to energy-efficient appliances, home weatherization, hybrid cars or a national cap-and-trade program: All have upfront costs but pay dividends down the road. Jobs in the fossil fuel industry would be lost if caps were imposed on carbon emissions but would be gained in clean-energy research, development and installation. And while heading off climate change or decreasing consumption of foreign oil would be costly, it would be far costlier to do nothing because of the economic havoc that would surely be wrought by rising temperatures and global unrest.

Obama could stand to do a better job of making that case. If he and Congress fail to act, Obama will, like Carter, be remembered as a president whose political skills didn’t match his far-seeing policies. And the next president will just rip his solar panels off the White House roof.