Ideas and policies from the days of Jimmy Carter on energy independence and a massive push for development of alternate energy sources are all the rage again. It's worth noting that Carter's Energy Security Act of 1980 was dismantled within a few months by President Reagan. As fuel and oil prices fell, zero plans for the future were made, even with the creation of the Department of Energy in the late 1970s. The real cost of ignoring energy needs for the future is being calculated today and it will burn into every layer of our economy and into every lifestyle.

Carter's speech from the summer of 1979 [1] echoes all the rhetoric today: reducing imports, a brand new research and development of alternate fuels, a new commitment, windfall profits taxation, and on and on.

Current programs enacted by President Bush now have energy needs and food needs competing. As R. Neal posted yesterday [2], it seems more a backward movement than forward. Today's Washington Post reports [3] on the corn as fuel and corn as food battle.

As much as the leadership in Washington is to blame for abandoning real solutions over the last 30 years, we have to blame ourselves too - for letting them slide and for indulging ourselves even more and for increasing our reliance on the commercial structures which have expanded our needs for energy.

I keep hearing the Narrator's lines in the opening of the post-apocalyptic movie "The Road Warrior":

"To understand who he was, you have to go back to another time. When the world was powered by the black fuel. And the desert sprouted great cities of pipe and steel. Gone now, swept away. For reasons long forgotten, two mighty warrior tribes went to war and touched off a blaze which engulfed them all. Without fuel, they were nothing. They built a house of straw. The thundering machines sputtered and stopped. Their leaders talked and talked and talked. But nothing could stem the avalanche ... On the roads it was a white line nightmare ... In the roar of an engine, he lost everything. And became a shell of a man, a burnt out, desolate man, a man haunted by the demons of his past, a man who wandered out into the wasteland."