http://forbes.house.gov/News/DocumentSingle.aspx?DocumentID=95102did anybody have a thread on his appearance today @ Washington Journal?
he actually quoted Jimmy Carter's Energy Speech of 1977 while touting his new "Manhattan Project for Energy Independence" which ''calls for the United States to achieve 50% energy independence in ten years and 100% energy independence in 20 years and will award competitive prizes to the first individual or group who can reach any of seven established energy goals.''
http://forbes.house.gov/News/DocumentSingle.aspx?DocumentID=94607the major goals, which will be the subject of prizes:
- Double CAFE standards to 70 MPG while keeping vehicles affordable
- Cut home and business energy usage in half
- Make solar power work at the same cost as coal
- Make the production of biofuels cost-competitive with gasoline
- Safely and cheaply store carbon emissions from coal-powered plants
- Safely store or neutralize nuclear waste
- Produce usable electricity from a nuclear fusion reaction
now, compare them to the goals from Carter's forward-looking (some might say extrasensorily perceptive) energy speech, which was gutted, of course, by republicans, and especially the Reaganites as soon as he took office:
The first principle is that 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.
The second principle is that 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.
The third principle is that 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.
The fourth principle is that 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.
The fifth principle is that 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.
The sixth principle, and 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.
The seventh principle is that 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.
The eighth principle is that 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.
The ninth principle is that 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.so Forbes' ideas are a sort of half-baked, incomplete, sometimes unrealistic (nuclear waste?) version of that terrible president, Carter, whose Energy Policy, if enacted, and acted upon for the last 30 years, would have, I daresay, changed the energy, political, and environmental landscape, at the very least
Point is, why is this sort of approach getting no play, and WHY doesn't Obama use Carter's prescient policy statement as a basis for his own energy plank?
It's certainly not as comprehensive/far reaching as Carter's. Is it because he's afraid of the pugs' attack on him as being the second coming of the man from Plains?
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