America Has Mothballed Its Cardigan Sweater
The nation’s largest and richest state suffers rolling blackouts. Its largest investor-owned utility files for bankruptcy. Across the country, gasoline prices soar, hitting $2 and more a gallon, and some experts predict $3 a gallon when the summer driving season hits. Newly emboldened, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries asserts itself for the first time in years by attempting to control production and maximize its revenues. Meanwhile, in Washington, the new administration assembles a panel to devise a new energy policy.
It all sounds suspiciously like a replay of the mid-1970s. After all, President George W. Bush’s energy honchos, Vice President Dick Cheney and economic advisor Lawrence B. Lindsey, seem to be borrowing a page from the strategy book of James R. Schlesinger, President Jimmy Carter’s energy czar. In 1977, Schlesinger devised the ill-fated national energy policy in total secrecy, consulting neither congressional leadership nor White House staff. Cheney and Lindsey have been similarly secretive in coming up with an energy policy, which will be disclosed this week. In the mid-1970s, furthermore, the Ford administration’s key point men on energy security issues were a top aide in the White House and a high-ranking official in the Pentagon: Cheney and the current Defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld.
Still, don’t expect Bush to appear on national television in a cardigan sweater or the Big Three automakers to scrap sports-utility vehicles in favor of fuel-efficient compact cars. While today’s energy challenges recall the shortages and rising gas prices of the 1970s, the White House’s and the nation’s reactions to them could not be more different. During the last 30 years, the United States has undergone a fundamental political and cultural shift. Insisting on abundance, the nation rejects calls for conservation or regulation. Americans find little solace or concerted action from their government. The Nation--and its leaders--look more to Wall Street than to Pennsylvania Avenue to address the crisis.
In the 1970s, Americans acknowledged the apparent arrival of an age of limits. President Richard M. Nixon believed that America had exhausted its glory days as unquestioned world leader and faced a more challenging international environment. President Gerald R. Ford concluded that inflation and stagnation would force Americans to curb their appetites for ever more goods and services. Carter famously declared that “we have learned that more is not necessarily better, that even our great nation has its recognized limits.”
During the dismal winter of 1976-77, oil and gas shortages shut down assembly lines and closed schools across the country. Snow fell on Miami Beach; solid ice stopped barges on the Mississippi. In Detroit, the once-proud symbol of U.S. industrial might, utilities reduced voltage, dimming lights and darkening moods across the state of Michigan. “The great American ride,” as novelist John Updike called it--30 years of unchallenged power, uninterrupted progress and unbroken prosperity--had run out of gas. Calls for discipline and sacrifice filled the airwaves.
Today’s mood could hardly be more different. While Ford and Carter asked Americans to demand less, the Bush administration has focused exclusively on measures to increase supplies of gas, oil and nuclear power. Last week, Cheney announced plans to construct more than 1,000 power plants over the next 20 years, to lay 38,000 miles of pipeline and to renew exploitation of coal and nuclear power. He set aside the health and safety concerns that have dogged coal producers and nuclear power plants for decades. The administration has considered not only opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil exploration, but also drilling for natural gas in the Bridger-Teton National Forest, the scenic lands that border Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks in Cheney’s home state of Wyoming.
The vice president described conservation as “an important part of the total effort,” but he not only repudiated the notion that Americans should quench their thirst for energy but also rejected the very idea that Americans could “do more with less.” The measures Americans implemented in the Carter years are not even on the table: a “gas-guzzler tax” on low-mileage cars; tax credits for solar power and home insulation; and new fuel-efficiency standards for buildings, cars and refrigerators.
The administration’s unwillingness to stress conservation highlights the most conspicuous legacy of the gas lines and rationing of the 1970s. A generation ago, Americans still looked to the public sphere--to government and political activism--to address national problems. Few doubted that Washington should develop a national energy policy. While the nation took its first halting steps toward deregulation in those years, energy policy still relied on a complex web of tax rules, regulations and price controls. From extraction to distribution, government supervised all phases of energy production, and millions of Americans depended on publicly owned and operated power authorities to supply their heat and electricity.
In the 21st century, Americans rely on the private sphere to meet national challenges, from poverty to transportation, energy production to trash collection. Across the contemporary political spectrum a powerful conviction reigns: The private sector simply works better than the public; it offers more creative and efficient, less expensive and intrusive approaches to social problems.
Despite the current success of California’s remaining public-power authorities, the Bush administration looks almost exclusively to market-based remedies to the energy shortage. In his remarks on energy, Cheney explicitly criticized the suggestion that “government step in to force Americans to consume less energy.” Indeed, the administration rejects the very idea of a national solution to the energy problem, of a comprehensive policy, of forging consensus among competing interests.
Cheney remembers that the first energy crisis careened out of control because national leaders could not balance competing interests. They recognized that ending price controls could stimulate production, but worried that unregulated prices would boost inflation and irritate consumers. Meanwhile, unions and environmentalists, small businesses and energy producers, Frostbelt cities and Sunbelt states all made different demands. Nixon and Ford simply stonewalled, avoiding the clash of interests that dogged U.S. politics. After all, according to House Speaker Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill, energy represented “perhaps the most parochial issue that could have ever hit the floor.”
Carter hoped to end the energy crisis and, in one top advisor’s words, “to restore and recreate our sense of community and of the common good.” Sporadic fuel shortages, Carter believed, made the United States vulnerable to foreign blackmail and domestic economic havoc. The Baptist moralist in Carter found the waste of resources morally repugnant, while the nuclear engineer in him believed that careful study and sound policy could remedy the problem. Moreover, an attack on the energy crisis fit Carter’s conception of presidential leadership. Only the president, Carter insisted, could be counted on to make policy for the nation as a whole--to consider shivering tenants in Boston as well as smiling oil barons in Austin.
But that expansive vision of collective purpose withered along with Carter’s hopes of a national energy policy. Amid the mayhem and malaise of the 1970s, Americans looked elsewhere to solve their problems and define their communities. The Texas oilmen who occupy the nation’s two highest offices embody that anti-government, entrepreneurial ethos. For better or worse, they lead into a new energy crisis a nation remade in the days of gas lines and odd-even rationing. We still live in their shadows.
