Jimmy Carter: Undelivered Energy Speech (July 1979)

Jimmy Carter: Undelivered Energy Speech
originally scheduled for delivery on July 5, 1979

ENERGY SPEECH
Digital Photocopy of Section I
The long-predicted energy crisis has come. It is no longer something that experts say will happen sometime in the future. It is here. It is now.
Today, tens of thousands of Americans waited in gasoline lines -- as millions have done over the last several weeks. Many of you had to cancel holiday plans on Independence Day. Farmers and truckers have experienced shortages of diesel fuel. It is hard to get gasoline at any price -- and the price is rising fast.
People are asking: How did this happen to us -- and why? Will it be a permanent fixture of our lives? And what are we going to do about it?
Tonight I want to answer those questions. I want to speak to you honestly about the unpleasant realities of our short-term situation. And I want to point the way to a future of energy security.

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The underlying cause of the crisis is the same as it has been for many years. That cause is our massive, deeply dangerous dependence on the OPEC oil cartel.
This cartel controls both the supply and the price of oil. It is increasingly willing to manipulate both, bleeding the industrial world of its wealth. Some of the OPEC countries are unstable or unreliable. The danger of interruptions in supply is a profound threat to our economic well-being and our national security.
A generation ago we sent more oil out of the country than we brought in. By 1973, just before the first oil embargo, we were still importing only one-third of our oil, and paying only $2 a barrel for it. Now we import nearly half of what we use. And after last week's shocking OPEC price increase, we will be paying up to $23.50 a barrel -- compared to $12.50 only six or seven months ago.

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The current gasoline lines are directly related to this vulnerability.
Seven months ago, the revolution in Iran cut off its oil production entirely. As a result, the United States lost a hundred million barrels of oil. We can never get that oil back, from which we draw gasoline and home heating oil. Iranian production has now been resumed, but at a much lower level. The result is a continuing shortage.
Before Iran, the world produced as much oil as it demanded Now, the world produces more than one and one-half million barrels less per day than it requires. This leaves our country with about 750,000 barrels per day less than we need. While OPEC production has dropped since the Iranian revolution, we have also had a steady decline for ten years in our domestic production.

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The shortage is global. It is real. And because there is a shortage, there are gasoline lines.
The lines are an irritation and an inconvenience for millions of Americans. They are a threat to the livelihood of many of us. But the stakes are far higher than that.
Yesterday, we celebrated the anniversary of our independence as a nation. For 203 years, we have stood proud and free. We have met challenge after challenge -- and we have overcome them all.
Now our very independence is in danger. The threat is not military but economic -- but it is no less real, no less serious, no less grave.

snip

http://www.globalpublicmedia.com/articles/202

Peak Oil was understood decades ago and that this day is coming. The US choose NOT to focus on renewable energy and now we will pay the consequence.

Now we are in deep trouble.
It will take years to convert to an alternate fuel source.

UNLESS:
The government will allow ethanol to be used in all 50 states.
The propaganda about it costing more to produce and not safe for your engine is all hog wash.
When I travel through Iowa, I always use the ethanol blend in my car and my parents live in Iowa and only use ethanol, their car has 80,000 miles and still runs fine.

Ethanol could be produced and then supplied through the same fuel stations we now have, no need for huge conversions to hydrogen or natural gas or other sources

Ethanol is total renewable, no end to the production as long as we can grow corn.

replace oil...but at this point we need look at a bundle of solutions that are only stop-gaps.

look at the mid-west
Parts of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota
South Dakota, North Dakota
Nebraska, Kansas
Missouri, Arkansas
Those are just the big producers of Corn
Corn can be and is grown in nearly all of the lower 48 states.
Farmers currently hold back on planting to control the yield to prop up prices, it is a game they must play to survive.
If there was an endless demand, they could grow full crops and not worry about prices.

the status quo to change we could find ways to reduce the consumption and find alternatives.

We need to demand this and also take personal responsibility ourselves for our energy consumption.

In reality, according to DOE statistics, the supply of crude oil stocks and refined petroleum products in storage across the U.S. during 1979-80 "shortage" in most regions across the country was as high as it had been during previous years. Supplies were not reaching the retail consumer because the big refiners reduced output and distributors were withholding product from the market as prices ran up.

I looked at this in 1980. The facts were available then, but were overshadowed by massive energy industry-driven hysteria that drove Carter from office. More than any other factor, Carter's failure to deal effectively with fuel supply and price speculators was responsible for the embrace of Ronald Reagan by the American people.

More than any other factor, the collusion of the energy giants in keeping US gas prices well below skyrocketing world prices and spot market prices today is responsible for the false sense of economic invulnerability that afflicts Americans under the * regime.

The contrast is startling. For more on this, see: http://www.progressivetrail.org/articles/040825Levey.shtml

the hostage crisis in particular.

and we have no plans

so definitely we knew. We should have been prepared long before now.

Even now, we are doing little, even on a personal level.

Edit: delete comma

Yes, a quarter-century later, we could be well along toward a renewables-based energy grid and a sustainable, domestic jobs-growth economy. But, that's precisely the reason the major oil companies backed Reagan-Bush in the 1980 election. Profits are still THE reason behind realpolitik.

For what we've wasted in Iraq, we could still make the transformation. An ongoing funding source for a renewable energy fund could be based on .50 a gallon tax on gas (part of that going to tax rebates for modest income persons). There are other sources of potential revenue, and a way to reverse excess consumption: inverting the obscene tax breaks for 5,000 pound SUVs, and a similar tax on residential energy consumption would be another. The current tax structure rewards those who commute alone in Hummers and live in 5,000 sq. ft. McMansions.

There are plenty of plans for reform, but control over policy . . . well, we all know who has that at present. It'll take some kind of cataclysmic crisis to shake things up, I'm afraid.

Wasn't that a line from George C. Scott in one of his movies?? I can't ever remember the name,but its as true now as it was then.