Reagan’s Choice
Yesterday, the Middletown’s Times Herold-Record published a letter of mine, which stated the following:
A letter published June 16 said that we should have realized, when Ayatollah Khomeini gained control of Iran: “... our lives and our economy were no longer in our control because of oil dependency.”
President Carter did recognize the problem and in a televised speech, he predicted: “With the exception of preventing war, this is the greatest challenge our country will face during our lifetimes. It is a problem we will not solve in the next few years, and it is likely to get progressively worse. 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.”
Carter proposed 10 principles for our national energy plan, but those principles were attacked by oil conglomerates, and when Reagan took over, those principles were ignored and Carter’s programs gutted or terminated. The Republican Party continues to support Bush’s pre-emptive, imperialistic invasion of Iraq, which clearly demonstrates that destruction and conquest has become their choice.
Due to a 200 word limit on letters to the editor, Carter’s ten principles for our national energy plan were not published. However, this web site has no such limit. In 1977, Jimmy Carter, proposed the following national energy plan.
1. We can have an effective and comprehensive energy policy only if the government takes responsibility for it and if the people understand the seriousness of the challenge and are willing to make sacrifices.
2. Healthy economic growth must continue. Only by saving energy can we maintain our standard of living and keep our people at work. An effective conservation program will create hundreds of thousands of new jobs.
3. We must protect the environment. Our energy problems have the same cause as our environmental problems -- wasteful use of resources. Conservation helps us solve both at once.
4. We must reduce our vulnerability to potentially devastating embargoes. We can protect ourselves from uncertain supplies by reducing our demand for oil, making the most of our abundant resources such as coal, and developing a strategic petroleum reserve.
5. We must be fair. Our solutions must ask equal sacrifices from every region, every class of people, every interest group. Industry will have to do its part to conserve, just as the consumers will. The energy producers deserve fair treatment, but we will not let the oil companies profiteer.
6. The cornerstone of our policy, is to reduce the demand through conservation. Our emphasis on conservation is a clear difference between this plan and others which merely encouraged crash production efforts. Conservation is the quickest, cheapest, most practical source of energy. Conservation is the only way we can buy a barrel of oil for a few dollars. It costs about $13 to waste it.
7. Prices should generally reflect the true replacement costs of energy. We are only cheating ourselves if we make energy artificially cheap and use more than we can really afford.
8. Government policies must be predictable and certain. Both consumers and producers need policies they can count on so they can plan ahead. This is one reason I am working with the Congress to create a new Department of Energy, to replace more than 50 different agencies that now have some control over energy.
9. We must conserve the fuels that are scarcest and make the most of those that are more plentiful. We can’t continue to use oil and gas for 75 percent of our consumption when they make up seven percent of our domestic reserves. We need to shift to plentiful coal while taking care to protect the environment, and to apply stricter safety standards to nuclear energy.
10. We must start now to develop the new, unconventional sources of energy we will rely on in the next century.
A letter published June 16 said that we should have realized, when Ayatollah Khomeini gained control of Iran: “... our lives and our economy were no longer in our control because of oil dependency.”
President Carter did recognize the problem and in a televised speech, he predicted: “With the exception of preventing war, this is the greatest challenge our country will face during our lifetimes. It is a problem we will not solve in the next few years, and it is likely to get progressively worse. 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.”
Carter proposed 10 principles for our national energy plan, but those principles were attacked by oil conglomerates, and when Reagan took over, those principles were ignored and Carter’s programs gutted or terminated. The Republican Party continues to support Bush’s pre-emptive, imperialistic invasion of Iraq, which clearly demonstrates that destruction and conquest has become their choice.
Due to a 200 word limit on letters to the editor, Carter’s ten principles for our national energy plan were not published. However, this web site has no such limit. In 1977, Jimmy Carter, proposed the following national energy plan.
1. We can have an effective and comprehensive energy policy only if the government takes responsibility for it and if the people understand the seriousness of the challenge and are willing to make sacrifices.
2. Healthy economic growth must continue. Only by saving energy can we maintain our standard of living and keep our people at work. An effective conservation program will create hundreds of thousands of new jobs.
3. We must protect the environment. Our energy problems have the same cause as our environmental problems -- wasteful use of resources. Conservation helps us solve both at once.
4. We must reduce our vulnerability to potentially devastating embargoes. We can protect ourselves from uncertain supplies by reducing our demand for oil, making the most of our abundant resources such as coal, and developing a strategic petroleum reserve.
5. We must be fair. Our solutions must ask equal sacrifices from every region, every class of people, every interest group. Industry will have to do its part to conserve, just as the consumers will. The energy producers deserve fair treatment, but we will not let the oil companies profiteer.
6. The cornerstone of our policy, is to reduce the demand through conservation. Our emphasis on conservation is a clear difference between this plan and others which merely encouraged crash production efforts. Conservation is the quickest, cheapest, most practical source of energy. Conservation is the only way we can buy a barrel of oil for a few dollars. It costs about $13 to waste it.
7. Prices should generally reflect the true replacement costs of energy. We are only cheating ourselves if we make energy artificially cheap and use more than we can really afford.
8. Government policies must be predictable and certain. Both consumers and producers need policies they can count on so they can plan ahead. This is one reason I am working with the Congress to create a new Department of Energy, to replace more than 50 different agencies that now have some control over energy.
9. We must conserve the fuels that are scarcest and make the most of those that are more plentiful. We can’t continue to use oil and gas for 75 percent of our consumption when they make up seven percent of our domestic reserves. We need to shift to plentiful coal while taking care to protect the environment, and to apply stricter safety standards to nuclear energy.
10. We must start now to develop the new, unconventional sources of energy we will rely on in the next century.
posted by Jim O'Leary | 12:00 AM
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