Reason #74: Unleaded CAFE
Under President Jimmy Carter, the government set up fuel-efficiency standards that automakers had to follow when designing new cars. These were called CAFE standards, which stands for corporate average fuel economy. CAFE standards had a powerful positive impact. Between 1975 and 1985, the fuel efficiency of American vehicles improved by more than 50 percent.
Things were looking pretty good. If we could keep increasing fuel-efficiency, maybe we’d eventually even free ourselves from the oil-based entanglements in the Middle East. But then things stagnated again, and since 1985 there’s been no significant change in the fuel efficiency of our cars. We got through the OPEC embargo, but the whole crisis failed to teach us how to wean ourselves off oil and come up with more creative sources of energy.
Why, after all these years, haven’t we come up with a cogent, concentrated energy policy? Is it because of the oil lobby? Or because today the top three people in the U.S. government are all oil men? Have all our country’s leaders proven ineffective when it came to energy reform? Not quite.
When it Came to Energy, Carter Called It Like It Was
More than any other president before or since, Jimmy Carter tried to get this country on the right track in our approach to energy. In 1977, Carter gave a speech to introduce the American public to his National Energy Policy. He had a lot to say about U.S. dependence on oil. He saw it as our nation’s political Achilles heel.
Carter pointed out that Americans had used twice as much oil in the 1950s as in the 1940s. And in the 1960s we’d used twice as much as in the ’50s. Also, the amount of oil we’d consumed in each of those decades alone was more than all of humankind had used in its entire history!
Carter didn’t soft-peddle the facts. “Ours is the most wasteful nation on earth,” he said. “We waste more energy than we import. With about the same standard of living, we use twice as much energy per person as do other countries like Germany, Japan and Sweden … If we do not act, then by 1985 we will be using 33 percent more energy than we do today. We can’t substantially increase our domestic production, so we would need to import twice as much oil as we do now. Supplies will be uncertain … We will live in fear of embargoes.
“If we fail to act soon,” Carter continued, “we will face an economic, social and political crisis that will threaten our free institutions.” He was talking about the very same mess that our obsession with oil has since gotten us into.
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