“This is the doleful legacy of Reaganism. We have become a nation that believes that you can get something for nothing. We thought that the energy crisis would be solved . . . somehow, and that no one would have to suffer….”
“Somewhere in his peripatetic travels, the much-maligned Jimmy Carter — an artless politician, to be sure — must scratch his head at the reverence still accorded Reagan. The way things are going, the Gipper’s visage will be added to Mount Rushmore. Not that anyone will notice. It’ll be too expensive to drive there.”
– Richard Cohen, “Wish Upon A Pump.” Washington Post, July 8, 2008. Quoted in Joe Romm, “Who Got Us in this Energy Mess? Start with Ronald Reagan.” Climate Progress.
A feature of MasterResource is chronicling the failed analyses and prognostications of the Energy Statist School, those who subscribe to chronic, global market failure and forced transformation away from consumer-chosen energies.
Richard Nixon, not Ronald Reagan, is the father of the energy crisis, the crisis being shortages of oil and gas as manifested in gasoline lines, closed schools, idled factories, and other maladies.
But in postmodern style, an Orwellian approach whereby things are made opposite by words and thoughts, Joe Romm found Reagan to be the overlooked culprit for energy woes and Jimmy Carter the much-maligned hero of decades past.
Here are excerpts of Joe Romm’s 2008, post, “Who Got Us in this Energy Mess? Start with Ronald Reagan.”
Ronald Wilson Reagan is the “culprit in chief” when it comes to the “current energy debacle” explains Richard Cohen in “Wish Upon a Pump.” I could not agree more.
Reagan is a key reason we have only about one-sixth of the soaring global market for windpower …. Reagan gutted Carter’s entire multi-billion dollar clean energy and energy efficiency effort. He opposed and then rolled back fuel economy standards. Reagan turned all such commonsense strategies into “liberal” policies that must be opposed by any true conservative, a position embraced all too consistently by conservative leaders from Gingrich to Bush/Cheney and now to John McCain.
The only real difference between Reagan and Bush/McCain is that the latter have embraced the Frank Luntz strategy for conservatives, in which they claim rhetorically that they support clean energy technologies while actually promoting anti-technology policies. That is why anti-wind McCain goes to a wind company to talk about climate.
The media was oblivious to what the Teflon president did in the 1980s, and they continue to lap up phony rhetoric of the anti-clean-energy conservatives today…. Well, not all of the media. Cohen gets it right in his terrific op-ed, most of which I reprint below:
Those of you with keen memories may recall that the energy crisis is not new. In 1977, Jimmy Carter called it the “moral equivalent of war.” In the sort of speech a politician rarely delivers, he told a not-particularly-grateful nation that his energy program was going to hurt, but “a policy which does not ask for changes or sacrifices would not be an effective policy.” The core of his initiative was conservation. Carter had earlier asked us to lower our thermostats and wear sweaters. He wore one himself.
Reagan, who succeeded Carter in the White House, wore only a smile. For him, there was no energy crisis. Whereas Carter had insisted that only the government could manage the energy crisis, Reagan, in his first inaugural, demanded that government get out of the way. Speaking of general economic conditions at the time, he said, “Government is not the solution to our problem.” He went on to call for America to return to greatness, to “reawaken this industrial giant,” and all sorts of swell things would happen. It was wonderful stuff.
To contrast the two speeches is like comparing the screeching of a cat to the miracles of Mozart. Yet today, Carter’s speech reads as prescient. Most of his dire predictions — “It is a problem we will not solve in the next few years, and it is likely to get progressively worse through the rest of this century” — have generally come true, although not quite as soon or as calamitously as he had warned. The pity of it all is that in American politics, being right is beside the point.
The worst part of Reaganism was its political success…. For a time, it worked — the cost of gas went down — and Carter, that scold in the silly sweater, was banished. As they say in New Orleans, “Laissez les bons temps rouler!” (Let the good times roll!) Upbeat? You bet. But not a business plan.
[Romm interjects: Note to Cohen: Ironically, one reason for Reagan’s political success is that oil prices collapsed in the mid-1980s, because the high energy prices coupled with the aggressive government-led efficiency and conservation policies he gutted — including doubling the fuel economy of U.S. vehicles — led to more supply and less demand.]
…. This is the doleful legacy of Reaganism. We have become a nation that believes that you can get something for nothing. We thought that the energy crisis would be solved . . . somehow, and that no one would have to suffer. We still believe in the magical qualities of America, that something about us makes us better. Yet we have a chaotic and mediocre education system that desperately needs more money and higher standards, but we think — don’t we? — that somehow we will maintain our lifestyle anyway. Hey, is this America or what?
Somewhere in his peripatetic travels, the much-maligned Jimmy Carter — an artless politician, to be sure — must scratch his head at the reverence still accorded Reagan. The way things are going, the Gipper’s visage will be added to Mount Rushmore. Not that anyone will notice. It’ll be too expensive to drive there.