Shining A Light On A Great Gipper Gaffe

Right now, Jimmy Carter is getting pilloried by our media over meeting with Hamas (as I’ve said before, Bushco’s policy of thumbing its nose at people they don’t like has worked so well, hasn’t it?), as Prof. Marcus noted here earlier, but I happened to come across the following note from somewhere in yesterday’s New York Times (the source escapes me at the moment).

In an effort to improve energy efficiency (as noted here)…

Carter even had solar collectors installed on the White House grounds to heat the executive residence's water.

Then Carter lost re-election to Ronald Reagan in 1980. The solar panels at the White House eventually came down - and Reagan and his aides gutted the solar research program.

"In June or July of 1981, on the bleakest day of my professional life, they descended on the Solar Energy Research Institute, fired about half of our staff and all of our contractors, including two people who went on to win Nobel prizes in other fields, and reduced our $130 million budget by $100 million," recalls Denis Hayes, the founder of Earth Day, who had been hired by Carter to spearhead the solar initiative.

Reagan and Congress stopped aggressively pushing new auto efficiency standards, acceding to Detroit's desire to leave them at Carter-era levels. They let the solar tax benefit expire, and the nascent solar industry went belly- up.

It was time to let the markets work their magic and stop all this government tinkering, Reagan and conservatives said.

Bad stuff? A recipe for the fix we're in today?

A number of environmentalists and conservationists say so.

Although the corporate average fuel economy, or CAFE, standards already were saving 3 million barrels a day, "they could be saving us a further 3 million or 4 million barrels a day" if they had been ramped up, says Dan Becker, director of the Sierra Club's global-warming project.

And that was noted in October 2005, by the way (and as noted here from May of that year)…

Today, despite the best efforts of the Bushies, the bin Ladens, and the rest of the oil industry, Carter's few surviving initiatives have borne fruit.

It is now more economical to build power generating stations using wind than using coal, oil, gas, or nuclear. When amortized over the life of a typical mortgage, installing solar power in a house in most parts of the US is cheaper than drawing power from the grid. (Shell and British Petroleum are among the world's largest manufacturers of solar photovoltaic panels, which can now even be used as roofing shingles.) And hybrid cars that get 50-70 miles to the gallon are increasingly commonplace on our nation's highways. Instead of taking a strong stand to make America energy independent, Bush kisses a Saudi crown prince, then holds hands with him as they walk into Bush's hobby ranch in Texas. Our young men and women are daily dying in Iraq - a country with the world's second largest store of underground oil. And we live in fear that another 15 Saudis may hijack more planes to fly into our nation's capitol or into nuclear power plants.

Meanwhile, Bush brings us an energy bill that includes eight billion dollars in welfare payments to the oil business, just as the nation's oil companies report the highest profits in the entire history of the industry. Americans struggle to pay for gasoline, while the Bush administration refuses to increase fleet efficiency standards, stop the $100,000 tax break for buying Hummers, or maintain and build Amtrak. George Bush Jr. is arguably right that gas prices are spiking because we don't have an energy policy. But instead of blaming Clinton, he should be pointing to the Reagan/Bush administration, and to his own abysmal failures…

I believe the Hummer exemption was recently removed, though standards were relaxed for lighter vehicles. And please don’t remind me again that Obama voted for the energy bill – not a bright move, but it helped his state.

And by the way, oil is now at $117 a barrel.

273 days and counting, people…