Is it Safe Now to Admit Jimmy Carter Was Right?

Is it Safe Now to Admit Jimmy Carter Was Right?

Short answer? No. Longer answer? Hell no.

Fisking this dead horse follows:

Misunderstood, mocked, and maligned, the 39th president (1977-81) will forever be associated with the Iranian hostage crisis and the botched rescue attempt; the human rights-inspired Olympic boycott and grain embargo; inflation; the infamous rabbit attack; and, above all, skyrocketing fuel prices.

So far, so good.

Americans, who hate to be told they must change,

Bzzzzzt! Stop right there. This is petty and makes us sound like children. We're changing all the time. We don't like to be told what to do, period. That's an unfortunate side effect of liberty. You want people who like to be told what to do move to North Korea.

roundly condemned Jimmy Carter’s memorable “Crisis of Confidence” speech of July 15, 1979. In it, Carter outlined a program for achieving energy independence: “On the battlefield of energy we can win for our nation a new confidence, and we can seize control again of our common destiny.”

By wearing sweaters, not driving and creating the DOE which has done jack shit to make us anything approaching energy independent.

We admirers have long endured ridicule whenever we dared to defend Carter’s prescient plan for reducing U.S. dependence on oil.

usually because you don't understand economics or market capitalism. Or energy.

But today, after all the abuse and scorn heaped on Jimmy Carter and his supporters, we find ourselves paying more than $4 a gallon at the pump to fill our hulking gas guzzlers.

Hulking gas guzzler? Speak for yourself buddy.

It turns out that Carter was right after all.

Wishing don't make it so.

He was right in seeking to raise the fleet auto mileage standard to 48 miles per gallon by 1995. (Even U.S. automakers admitted at the time that they could easily achieve 30 mph by 1985.)


30 != 48. We have much stricter CAFE standards now and the cars are much much safer. That safety costs MPG. You can't have it both ways. You want 48 MPG you can't require kids in car seats and airbags et al.

Jimmy Carter was right in exhorting Americans to turn down their thermostats, even if he did look nerdy in a cardigan while urging us to do so.

A feelgood measure that would be about as effective of last years absurd Green Week on NBC. They kept the lights out in the broadcasting boot of an NFL game but kept the game lights on.

In his July 1979 speech, he was right when he said, “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 in 1977 — never.” That worthy goal quickly went by the board.

Yes because despite Carter's best efforts, the US recovered from his administration and the economy grew. Likewise the ban on both nuclear energy and domestic exploration made his own goal impossible.

He was right to encourage fuel conservation by proposing a 50-cents-per-gallon tax on gasoline and a fee on imported oil — in effect, a floor for fuel prices.

Yes, a 50 cent tax would further cripple the economy. How does he think the fuel costs for business will be recouped? By consumers. Yes we would drive less but every single good or service in America would be more expensive. It's gas on the inflationary fire. If that same tax were implemented today, we'd be paying $1.57 more per gallon. Does anyone thing that would help either the economy or our dependence on foreign oil?

Invoking the pioneering spirit of the 1960s’ moon mission, he was right to recommend a tax on windfall oil profits to finance a crash program to develop affordable synthetic fuels.

There's that word again. "Windfall". Nobody will define it or explain why it should apply only to Oil companies. Prithee, what "synthetic fuels" does the author have in mind? Liquid coal? Biomass?

Jimmy Carter was correct, too, in setting a goal of obtaining 20 percent of our energy from solar power by the year 2000.

No, Carter was delusional by setting that goal. That would mean we would be getting 2,000,000,000,000,000 joules from solar power or about 66 GWH (6600 MWh). That would mean a solar array of 137,392,967.78 square miles. Which is 36 times the size of the United States.

We balked, and his energy program, which was new and demanding, shriveled up and died. When oil prices began declining in the 1980s, the justification for change vanished altogether. The Reagan administration junked the proposed 1995 mileage standard and the rest of the Carter agenda.

And we thanked him for it. In fact the economy took off in it's wake


Amazingly, amid today’s record gasoline prices, Congress even now doesn’t quite get it.


Add it to the long list of things Congress does not get.

It was only last December that Congress approved new mileage standards, the first in 32 years. If they stand, the present fleet standard of 27.5 mpg will rise to 35 mpg — but not until 2020.

He's missing the forest for the trees. He doesn't understand that CAFE is an average of all vehicles produced by a given maker. That's not to say that there aren't a great number of vehicles available today that meet or exceed the goals set for 2020.


Our leaders’ idea of promoting alternative energy is touting future, non-existent technologies, and that false savior, ethanol. Ethanol consumes nearly as much fuel to make as it produces, while collaterally raising food prices and damaging the environment.


Hooray! He got one right. Kudzu is more promising for ethanol/biomass fuels and won't distort the food market.

The latest panacea is drilling in the Arctic and offshore, a short-term solution of dubious value that is wildly popular among oilmen and congressmen up for re-election, and in the Bush administration — which evidently hopes to use high gasoline prices as a wedge for opening off-limits areas to exploration for its Big Oil constituency.

Bzzzt! Sorry, nobody but nobody said drilling is a panacea. Not no one, not no how. Are we talking about energy independence? If so, where else are we going to get our oil from?

Meanwhile, Congress has failed to take the simple step of renewing federal tax credits for wind and solar power that will expire at year’s end. Every week of congressional foot-dragging on renewing the tax credits further dries up venture capital for critical solar and projects.

Remind me again...who controls Congress?

Why is Congress deadlocked over this critical issue? How have our perceived options become so narrow and skewed?

No, the interests of said Congresscritters are narrow and skewed and don't always track with reality let alone pie in the sky fantasies about energy independence.

It is because without any public debate, a de facto U.S. energy policy has evolved and is now in place: to cling ever tighter to our oil-based economy and its lucrative profits for the scions of the status quo, and to marginalize all who are not on board with this.

Right. There has been absolutely no debate anywhere about energy. Have you been living under a rock? The problem is one of scale. The amount of energy we use is staggering. Seriously, the calculations we're talking about here are huge huge numbers. We are not going to conserve or solarify ourselves out of this.

And now we are in the exact bind that Jimmy Carter tried to prevent three decades ago, when we were reeling from the concussive effects of oil supply disruptions in 1973 and 1979. Acting with promptness difficult to fathom today, our elected leaders then enacted year-around Daylight Savings Time, dropped the speed limit to 55, and established government price controls. And, oh so fleetingly, we downsized what we drove. All gone.

And the effect of those policies on the net energy consumption and/or dependence on foreign oil was zero.

Consequently, the United States last year imported 3.6 billion barrels of oil, three times the 1.2 million barrels imported in 1973. We not only are consuming record amounts of oil, we import nearly 60 percent of it, about 13 million barrels per day. In 1977, U.S. oil imports totaled 8.5 million barrels a day, or 46 percent of consumption.

Remember, under Carter’s energy plan we were to hold the line at the 1977 oil import figure, in barrels. Had we done this, the percentage of U.S. oil imported today would be around 40 percent. Additional savings from Carter’s conservation and his alternative energy and synthetic fuel programs would surely have cut oil imports even further.


So...what? We'd be simply not consuming that oil? You cannot have it both ways either you drill like crazy to go independent or you literally cripple the US economy by putting a maximum ceiling on the amount of oil we will purchase for domestic consumption. The cheat rate would be astronomically high.

But it happened so fast, we say.

One hundred years ago, historian Henry Adams, in explaining his “Law of Acceleration,” observed that technological change occurs at an ever-quickening pace throughout history. “A law of acceleration, definite and constant as any law of mechanics, cannot be supposed to relax its energy to suit the convenience of man.”

Today, change occurs at such blinding speeds that the rise and fall of technologies and nations happen in a single lifetime.

An energy crisis is again upon us. Soaring gasoline prices and oil imports are daggers aimed at the heart of our stumbling economy.


Oil is steadily declining in price of late. Our economy isn't stumbling by any measure.


It is time to give Jimmy Carter’s proposals a second hearing.


Sure, it's good for a laugh. Plus it helps me identify which morons actually buy this stuff.

This is what he said in July 1979: “You know we can do it. We have the natural resources. We have more oil in our shale alone than several Saudi Arabias. We have more coal than any nation on Earth. We have the world's highest level of technology. We have the most skilled work force, with innovative genius, and I firmly believe that we have the national will to win this war.”

So his implicit answer is drill, dig and burn. The EPA has blocked every attempt to increase exploration and refining since Carter was president.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

So....the autism thing

For Gerard