Have you forgotten what real leadership -- and real straight talk -- look and sound like? Well here's a refresher course. Back in 1977 much maligned, President Jimmy Carter, showed genuine leadership and political courage. Following the Arab oil boycott of 1973 Carter took a cold look at world oil supplies and declared them an emergency just waiting to happen. He laid out his vision and his proposed solutions in a prime time television address.
I was only going to include snippets from that speech, until I began reading it. Carter was prophetic and, like most prophets, ignored. Read this thing and try if can to tell me where Carter got it wrong in 1977. Send it to all the smug conservatives you know who like to use Carter as the quintessential liberal boogieman.. you know, the guy who "gave away the Panama Canal." (Which, we all know now, turned out to be precisely the international disaster conservatives predicted -- ah, not.)
Anyway at the end of this 31-year old speech I include a link to a brand new study on this precise subject. As you will see Carter nailed it in every regard. And now we are paying the price for listening to the reassurances of all those "just drill more holes in the earth" simpletons who dismissed Carter's warnings as just so much liberal hand-wringing:
(President Jimmy Carter delivered this televised speech on April 18, 1977.)
It is a problem we will not solve in the next few years, and it is likely to get progressively worse through the rest of this century.
We must not be selfish or timid if we hope to have a decent world for our children and grandchildren.
We simply must balance our demand for energy with our rapidly shrinking resources. By acting now, we can control our future instead of letting the future control us.
Two days from now, I will present my energy proposals to the Congress. Its members will be my partners and they have already given me a great deal of valuable advice. Many of these proposals will be unpopular. Some will cause you to put up with inconveniences and to make sacrifices.
The most important thing about these proposals is that the alternative may be a national catastrophe. Further delay can affect our strength and our power as a nation.
Our decision about energy will test the character of the American people and the ability of the President and the Congress to govern. This difficult effort will be the "moral equivalent of war" -- except that we will be uniting our efforts to build and not destroy.
I know that some of you may doubt that we face real energy shortages. The 1973 gasoline lines are gone, and our homes are warm again. But our energy problem is worse tonight than it was in 1973 or a few weeks ago in the dead of winter. It is worse because more waste has occurred, and more time has passed by without our planning for the future. And it will get worse every day until we act.
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.
The world now uses about 60 million barrels of oil a day and demand increases each year about 5 percent. (Today it's 87 million barrels a day) This means that just to stay even we need the production of a new Texas every year, an Alaskan North Slope every nine months, or a new Saudi Arabia every three years. Obviously, this cannot continue.
We must look back in history to understand our energy problem. Twice in the last several hundred years there has been a transition in the way people use energy.
The first was about 200 years ago, away from wood -- which had provided about 90 percent of all fuel -- to coal, which was more efficient. This change became the basis of the Industrial Revolution.
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