Jimmy Carter has three weeks left to meet a self-imposed deadline for tackling what may well be the hardest challenge he will face throughout his presidency. Shortly after taking office, he promised to unveil a comprehensive national energy program by April 20. As that date nears, the President is huddling with aides and scribbling pithy comments in the margins of position papers. For the past two weeks, he has been summoning groups of union leaders, oilmen, builders and other constituencies that are likely to be affected to a series of 21 White House miniconferences on energy. For the last, at week's end, 19 ordinary citizens, chosen at random from around the country—including two students, a housewife and a cattle rancher—huddled in the Executive Office Building with Administration energy experts.
Once the plan is completed, Carter intends to announce it himself, most likely in an evening speech on prime-time TV to a joint session of Congress. The touch of drama will be appropriate to the gravity of the issue: whether the U.S. can make a start on assuring adequate energy supplies could well determine whether it can continue to be a major industrial force and one of the world's two superpowers.
The problem is a peculiarly difficult one that the U.S. political system and the American temperament are not well tuned to solve. Since the birth of the nation, energy and the United States have been almost synonymous terms: metaphorically, in the boundless vitality of the American people; literally, in the seemingly inexhaustible supplies of cheap fuel that made possible the transformation of a handful of impoverished colonies into history's richest nation. Frontier mythmakers celebrated the idea that Americans could summon limitless supplies of energy for whatever needed doing, most notably in the tales about Paul Bunyan, who could harness his ox Babe to straighten out the bends in rivers with a single tug. If Faust, the archetypal European, believed that the world was created anew each morn, Americans had a more practical faith: the world and its riches were inexhaustible, easily accessible and—above all—theirs. The American megalopolis of superhighways, hermetically sealed buildings and shopping malls enclosed in artificial climates seems almost designed to squander energy in the unconscious belief that it can never run out.