Carter had a powerful energy idea

Jay Hakes
Sunday, April 22, 2007

Thirty years ago this month, a solemn Jimmy Carter sat behind the historic Resolute desk in the Oval Office to announce to a prime-time national television audience his new comprehensive energy plan. In the most memorable line of the evening, the president declared the challenge of energy "the moral equivalent of war."

The Carter energy strategy was both praised for its ambition (the written version had 113 parts) and derided for its interventionism -- critics tried to brand it with the acronym MEOW.

Contrary to common mythology, Carter was far from a lonely voice calling for strenuous action. After the Arab oil embargo of 1973-74, both of his predecessors, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, called energy the nation's top priority and set an ambitious goal for "energy independence" (eliminating reliance on foreign oil by 1980, no less).

New Speaker Thomas "Tip" O'Neill, D-Mass., gave energy such high priority that he immediately took the unprecedented step of establishing an omnibus committee headed by Rep. Thomas "Lud" Ashley, D-Ohio, to shepherd the complex Carter plan quickly through the House. Congress scuttled Carter's recommended gasoline tax, and a bitter divide over natural gas deregulation in the Senate stalled the whole energy package for a year and a half. But with considerable support on both sides of the aisle, most of his plan did become law.

Similarly, when the Iranian revolution led to another severe oil shortage in 1979, Carter took the politically dangerous step of starting to decontrol crude oil prices by executive order and produced a flurry of energy bills, many of which also won eventual congressional approval.

Calls for energy independence continue to reverberate through the energy debates of today. On the whole, however, the rhetoric of that earlier era creates considerable dissonance for the modern ear.

In his address of April 18, 1977, Carter used the word "sacrifice" (or "sacrifices") eight times and argued: "Conservation is the quickest, cheapest, most practical source of energy." He repeatedly decried the "waste" of scarce fuels. Moreover, energy plans in the 1970s set bold goals and put meat on the bones to achieve them. Nixon, Ford and Carter called for sharp drops in oil imports and Carter set a goal of obtaining a fifth of America's needs from renewable energy by the turn of the century. Ford and Congress set strict standards for automobile fuel efficiency to offset high-priced foreign oil.

To help displace fossil fuels, Carter and Congress established generous tax incentives for solar energy and gasohol -- now called ethanol. U.S. use of renewables remains at 6 percent, the same as when Carter took office, but the European Union last month raised eyebrows by calling for the same 20 percent goal for renewables by 2020.

Since oil imports have risen from 9 million barrels a day in 1977 to the current level of 12 million, there has been a tendency to view the efforts of Carter and others to cut reliance on oil from unstable sources as quixotic. But a closer look at the data shows otherwise.

By the time Carter left office, imports had dropped to 7 million barrels a day. Within a few years, they fell to 5 million. The plunge was the result of higher oil prices, a weak economy, the Alaska oil pipeline and new federal policies such as the auto efficiency standards. The slide in oil imports defanged the grip of oil-exporting countries on the world market and helped achieve considerable independence from foreign suppliers.

Since then, the trend of oil imports, rather than a straight line upward, has been a hockey stick. Foreign deliveries dropped sharply and then (after earlier supply and conservation efforts were largely abandoned) started a new upward trajectory, allowing OPEC to again seize control of the market early in 2000.

The largely unremembered "victory" in the war on imported oil was temporary. It is still worth noting, however, in an age when many think that making dramatic cuts in the security risks of dependence on Persian Gulf oil or in greenhouse gases resulting from the combustion of fossil fuels is just too difficult.

It remains to be seen whether America has the appetite for a new moral equivalent of war to deal with oil imports and climate change. But the lesson of the successes in the earlier war is that we shouldn't operate under the delusion that efforts to deal with these great challenges -- which are indeed daunting -- have to prove fruitless.

Jay Hakes, head of the Energy Information Administration from 1993 to 2000, is director of the Carter Presidential Library.