Energy crisis has been building for years

By JIM WRIGHT
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
When President Carter called the energy crisis of l979 a "moral equivalent of war," his critics scoffed. But there's a sense in which he was absolutely right. Achieving victory in either requires some individual sacrifices.
Then, as now, our country was experiencing a nationwide oil shortage, and the public was suffering punishing increases in prices for gasoline, heating oil and natural gas.
Spot shortages temporarily closed many service stations, and motorists lined up for blocks to get service whenever a station received a new supply of the precious fluid.
Successive price increases for crude oil set off an inflationary wave that permeated our economy. Natural gas derivatives such as plastics of all sorts, synthetic fabrics and even commercial fertilizer -- as well as everything that had to be transported -- posted sudden price increases. These pervasive inflationary pressures played hob with our national finances and contributed significantly to the rejection of Carter's re-election in 1980.
Some seemingly have forgotten the financial blows inflicted by the Arab oil boycotts of 1973 and '79.
Facing the second of these, our nation finally got it right -- stimulating more domestic drilling for new oil reserves; making them last by secondary and tertiary recovery; reducing waste via national fuel efficiency standards, the encouragement of car-pooling, better public rail transportation and a 55 mph speed limit on national highways; helping people insulate and weatherize homes, stores and other buildings; and the governmental promotion of synfuels, nuclear power plants, and solar and wind energy experiments as well as several coal liquefaction and gasification plants.
It was a coordinated, national four-point effort: enhanced discovery, recovery, conservation and substitution. Each of those elements was essential to success. Together, they measurably began to reduce our demand for foreign oil. The Arabs and other producing countries, observing our success and our determination, relented and ended their boycott. Things returned more or less to normal for a while.
Had we persisted, we'd be energy-independent today.
Shameful part
Oh, but here is the shameful part: Seeing our foreign tormenters stepping back from their belligerent stance (after all, we'd been their best customers), we quickly grew complacent again. One by one, we canceled, underfunded or let expire our arsenal of self-protective weapons. They were selling us foreign oil again, and such moderate sacrifices as lower speed limits and fuel-efficient autos were ... well, inconvenient.
Within a few years, we were right back in the same hole. Just a few more years, and the hole grew deeper.
Now, inured to higher gasoline prices and driving bigger and bigger SUVs at 70 and 80 mph, we're paying $3 per gallon for gasoline and watching our utility rates climb to unprecedented highs while the five biggies of Big Oil report history's largest profits and Exxon Mobil casually hands a $400 million going-away present to its departing CEO.
And now the United States is no longer the only big customer of foreign oil. Our investments in China and India are building two industrial rivals in need of oil, and several leading petroleum-producing countries are even more hostile to us than before.
Today, we import some 30 percent more than we did in 1979, and gasoline prices have virtually doubled just since 2000.
We'd had abundant warning. America should have been prepared for this latest painful shortfall, which Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman reluctantly conceded last week has reached "crisis" proportions.
Our government recently has authorized the blending of ethanol with gasoline. Bodman expressed surprise that refineries initially have encountered some problems in the blending, transporting and distribution of the blended fuel.
My question: Why on earth hadn't the Energy Department discovered those problems before now? We've all known for years, haven't we, that the time for ethanol blends was hastening toward us -- for the sake of our dwindling supplies and also for the air we breathe?
And if this is finally a recognized "crisis," where is our government's sense of urgency?
Jim Wright is a former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.