"The moral equivalent of war."
Tonight President Obama will talk about the Gulf oil catastrophe, and, hopefully, overall energy and climate policy. A look back at President Carter's fight over energy brings some context to this situation.
On April 18, 1977, 33 years ago, President Jimmy Carter gave a White House speech on energy and asked the country to change direction.
"Tonight I want to have an unpleasant talk with you about a problem unprecedented in our history. With the exception of preventing war, this is the greatest challenge our country will face during our lifetimes. The energy crisis has not yet overwhelmed us, but it will if we do not act quickly."
Carter said solving this energy problem would be "The moral equivalent of war." Please, please read the speech, and its ten principles. It will help set the stage for understanding where we are today.
If we fail to act soon, we will face an economic, social and political crisis that will threaten our free institutions.But we still have another choice. We can begin to prepare right now. We can decide to act while there is time.
That is the concept of the energy policy we will present on Wednesday. Our national energy plan is based on ten fundamental principles.
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.
It turned out to be a very, very hard fight. The right's new network of corporate-funded "think tanks" was setting up shop and beginning to spread their poisonous, divisive, anti-government propaganda. They didn't like the idea of government trying to solve problems. The big oil giants certainly didn't want government researching alternatives to their gravy train. We understand the right's operation today, but people did not yet understand what was going on because the country had never been subjected to a destabilization campaign of this magnitude -- from the inside.
You can really feel the effect of the right's campaign when you read a speech Carter gave two years later. On July 15, 1979, President Jimmy Carter gave what is called the "Crisis of Confidence" speech. It's also known as the "Malaise" speech. I consider it to be one of the great speeches by a President. Carter again talked to the country about energy policy, pleading with people to take this seriously. He said, "The energy crisis is real. It is worldwide. It is a clear and present danger to our Nation. These are facts and we simply must face them."
Well, we didn't face them. Instead the country elected Reagan who immediately took the solar panels off of the White House, killed mass transit and alternative energy programs and steered the country on a path of toward dominance by the wealthy and big corporations - especially oil companies.
Now it is 2010, we have been at war in the Middle East for years, carbon in the air is raising the planet's temperature and melting the Arctic ice cap, and ... the oil in the Gulf. President Obama is giving his first Oval Office speech this evening and all of this is the broader context. Will he take on the entrenched interests that defeated Carter and brought us Reagan and later the two oil-company executives who invaded Iraq, encouraged buying Hummers and left us with a $1.4 trillion deficit?
As Carter said, "It is a clear and present danger to our Nation. These are facts and we simply must face them."
Energy speech:
Crisis of confidence speech:
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Borrow, baby, borrow.
Drill, baby, drill.
And the devil take the hindmost.
Will Americans at long, long last respond?
Will they take the lead of their President?
Will they get up out of their easy chairs, get on their feet and get busy?
President Obama has issued the challenge. More than that, he is providing the leadership we need.
And maybe this time it will be different. Maybe.
I'd like to think that there indeed is hope this time around.
And I do sense a sea change in American politics as a result of the Great Recession and the spectacle of the Gulf oil spill.
A sea change that comes at what is perhaps the last minute.
Count on it.
Okay, that's just funny. The only place Obama is leading us is to a better oligarchy through corporatis
The rest of your post generally makes sense, but why bash Carter whose policies BASED ON REASON, the ones that survived three decades of the Right Wing Reagan onslaught at least give us a fighting chance to achieve energy independen
I don't get it.
You have definitely been touched by His Noodly Goodness (the Flying Spaghetti Monster's, that is)!
Today, the U.S. has displaced about 10% of this with biofuels, and the technologi
Thank you, Mr. President. We are in your debt.
We'll never forgive you for it but it was still the right thing to do.
Isn't it interestin
Are you trying to compare apples and oranges?
But that doesn't mean I still wouldn't like to see Obama try...even if Jimmy failed.
http://sca
Ronald Reagan's hero was Calvin Coolidge, the designer of the great depression
A big difference is that Jimmy Carter was a Good Man who loved his Country. Not sure that we can credit Obama with either of those attributes
Reality. Get ya some.
Carter and Obama believe that Americans should be treated like adults, but instead Americans seem to think and act like spoiled children, wanting it all, wanting ot cheap, and wanting it now -- all without consequenc
I don't give a rat's arse as to whether the echo chamber "widely regards" Carter as a "weak and least effective" president. Just because it is widely believed doesn't make it true.
The energy crisis of the '70s should have awakened the nation to action, but it didn't. Now, we have the greatest environmen
We don't have many more chances. If you reflect the attitude of a majority of Americans, we're done for.
Nice analysis, Nostradumb
The UN’s Intergover
“Claims such as ‘2,500 of the world’s leading scientists have reached a consensus that human activities are having a significan
Hulme, Professor of Climate Change in the School of Environmen
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I was espousing this same theory during that time period but the ability to reach a curious and caring audience was basically non-existe
How far have we come since that time period? The fact that Obama will almost certainly deliver a watered down version tonight of Catrers old speeches really means that we're actually not quite back to even from the tailspin that the materminds of the right intentiona
FANNED AND FAVED