The Green New Deal and Beyond. Stan Cox
were violent, as roving bands of truckers set fire to empty trucks and shot at the windshields of drivers who refused to stop. Nine states called out the National Guard. By the time the shutdown ended in early July, one driver had been shot and killed, dozens more injured.57
As enraged truckers were laying siege to Washington, President Carter, by then in his third year in office, prepared to deliver what was being billed as his most important speech yet. It would be his fifth address to the nation on energy policy, a sign of how that issue had so far dominated his presidency. (Four months later, the Iran hostage crisis would displace the energy crisis as his administration’s most pressing concern.)
On July 15, 1979, Carter delivered his speech live on prime-time TV.58 Right at the top, he declared that the threat everyone was calling an energy crisis was actually a crisis of confidence, of self-indulgence, of consumption. “Human identity,” he said, “is no longer defined by what one does but what one owns.” In an echo of today, he decried the “fragmentation and self-interest” that was roiling the nation. ABC’s Frank Reynolds would later characterize that portion of the speech as “almost a sermon.” To today’s ears, the proposals Carter rolled out in his speech sounded something like a Green New Deal, 1970s-style. He envisioned investing massively in alternative energy sources, restricting oil imports, creating an “Energy Mobilization Board,” establishing a “bold conservation program,” and making energy affordable to low-income Americans. He proposed spending an additional $10 billion on public transportation and asked Americans “to take no unnecessary trips, to use carpools or public transportation whenever you can, to park your car one extra day per week, to obey the speed limit, and to set your thermostats to save fuel.” He added, “Every act of energy conservation like this is more than just common sense, I tell you it is an act of patriotism.”59
In 1979, the terms Carter used in naming his proposals didn’t mean quite what they might during today’s climate emergency. The Energy Mobilization Board’s (EMB) mission, for example, would expedite the regulatory process to put high-priority fossil-energy projects on the “fast track.” The top tier of projects for the EMB included oil and gas drilling on federal land, extracting oil from shale, coal gasification, coal liquefaction, and building new oil pipelines. Renewable energy and energy conservation projects would be treated as lower-priority initiatives. Less than two weeks after Carter pitched the EMB in his big energy speech, the House voted it down. Concerns, according to one observer, included perceived encroachment upon states’ rights, expansion of bureaucracy, and “reluctance by members of the Republican party to support a key element in the President’s energy program in an election year.”60
In his July 15 speech, Carter had also called on Congress to authorize one major energy conservation initiative: a standby plan for rationing gasoline.61 Although it took a while, Congress passed such a measure in 1980. Five billion ration coupons had been printed up during the Nixon years and were ready to go.62 Rationing would be triggered in the event of a 20 percent shortfall in the national gasoline supply, and household gasoline allowances would be fixed at 20 percent below normal consumption.63
In the end, rationing would not be needed. Oil supplies stabilized, economic stagnation suppressed fuel demand, and the resulting glut pushed world prices down. No future need for rationing was anticipated. Furthermore, the Army reportedly was concerned that if the coupons, which featured an image of George Washington, got out into circulation, change machines might mistake them for dollar bills. In June 1984, Nixon’s old coupons were pulled out of storage at the Pueblo Army Depot in Colorado, shredded, and buried.64
The energy claustrophobia of the 1970s was summed up by historian Jefferson Cowie:
[T]he nation running out of energy was both a reality and a metaphor, and the problem of limits shaped the entire discussion. It haunted Richard Nixon, stymied Gerald Ford, all but destroyed the Carter presidency, and opened up the space for the Reagan restoration of the new Gilded Age. . . . By the time Ford filled in after Nixon’s resignation, the litany of a restricted future had become less abstract and more particular until Carter was forced to concede that “dealing with limits” was the “subliminal theme” of his presidency.65
Carter had declared in his 1979 speech that “beginning this moment, this nation will never use more foreign oil than we did in 1977—never.” But the president did not reaffirm that pledge in his 1980 State of the Union address. Instead, in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan two months before, he announced what came to be known as the Carter Doctrine. The United States would put the world on notice that it would use military force to protect its interests in Southwest Asia, the Arabian Peninsula, and other oil-rich regions.
After almost four subsequent decades of burning fossil fuels—and having seen the beginnings of the climatic impact of all those emissions—we can ask whether the energy conservation proposals of the 1970s could have evolved into a transition to independence from fossil fuels. To take one small example, if Congress’s standby gas-rationing plan had been triggered, and had per-capita consumption remained at the rationed amount until the present day (taking population increase into account), we could have saved 920 billion gallons, more than six years of today’s U.S. gasoline consumption.66 That would have kept 9 billion tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere. It wouldn’t have been enough to prevent the climate emergency, but perhaps forty years of living under such a limit could have set off a chain reaction of progressive moves throughout the economy aimed at dealing with energetic and ecological limits. Left unconstrained, however, the fossil fuel business, and the myriad commercial goods and services that extend from on it, continued to grow like unchecked tumors.
One legacy of the 1970s did persist: the Carter Doctrine. Ensuring the flow of fossil energy became a top priority for the U.S. military, which, not coincidentally, has become one of the world’s largest petroleum consumers. Several wars later, much of our armed presence around the world remains dedicated to securing U.S. access to foreign oil, natural gas, and other mineral resources.
MAKING FOSSIL AMERICA GREAT AGAIN—AGAIN
Federal energy and environmental policy would suffer a severe case of whiplash following the inauguration of President Ronald Reagan in 1981. Toward the end of Reagan’s first term, James Everett Katz of the University of Texas wrote that the president had “returned the USA to an era when the energy industry and the government cooperated amiably with each other. Gone are the equity concerns that were an integral part of the Nixon, Ford and Carter Administrations’ energy policies. Instead, a minimum of governmental involvement in energy planning is advocated, and Reagan’s energy philosophy has backed free market forces instead.”67
Six months into that first term, Reagan’s team put out a National Energy Plan, which turned out to be a search-and-destroy mission against any of the even faintly green or humanitarian provisions that had been in previous energy plans under Carter.68 All conservation and renewable energy policies were targeted for elimination. Consideration of social impacts? Gone. Price controls to keep fuel and utility bills within reach of low-income households? Out. Consumer protection? Sorry, no more of that. Katz noted, “The plan also offers little hope that the government will take an active role in handling energy shortages or emergencies.”
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