A little more on Jimmy Carter’s Energy Policy Leadership

Just 2 weeks into his term of office he made a famous ‘war footing’ speech in which he announced the development of a national energy policy which called for taking energy conservation seriously as part of comprehensive energy legislation to address energy resource security, reducing energy waste and accelerating research into solar and other forms of renewable energy and to establish the DOE.

The policy was to address 10 principles including:

• Call on Americans to learn to live thriftily.

• That healthy economic growth can and should continue and that required increase energy efficiency. He stated that an effective energy conservation program would create hundreds of thousands of new jobs.

• 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.

• Reduce vulnerability to embargoes.

• 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 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’.

• Prices should generally reflect the true replacement costs of energy.

• Government policies must be predictable and certain. Both consumers and producers need policies they can count on so they can plan ahead, and he would work with the Congress to create a new Department of Energy.

• Conserve the energy forms that are scarcest.

• Develop the new, unconventional sources of energy that we will rely on in the next century

These policy principles seem pretty relevant still today to address climate change.

He also set up the National Energy Act of Nov 1978, including the National Energy Conservation Act and Public Utilities Regulatory Policy Act, Solar Energy Policy in June 1979 (and installed solar water heating in the White House), he made a commitment to spend $1B to stimulate solar and other renewable forms of energy, and enacted the National Energy Security Act of 1980.