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But it can. The oil and gas that make up about three-quarters of America's fuel were created in finite supply millions of years ago. At the rate they are being burned, they will begin playing out sometime around the year 2000, give or take a decade or so. The power sources of the future—solar, thermonuclear fusion, geothermal and coal-derived fuels—remain just that: visions for the future, with no certainty that such sources will be available when present reserves of oil and gas go into steep decline. And the use of coal and nuclear-fission power is not expanding nearly rapidly enough to fill the looming energy gap. Hence, the U.S. faces the terrible threat of closed factories and cold, dark homes unless its politicians can master a new kind of challenge: taking painful steps now to grapple with a crisis that will not reach its most dangerous point until long after the President, his aides and most of the Congressmen who will vote on his program have ended their terms of office.
To be sure, there have been rumblings, louder each year, of the coming crunch. Natural gas shortages threw more than a million adults out of work, and about a million youngsters out of school, for brief periods during the bitter winter just ended. Power shortages might well close factories and schools and black out homes in the Pacific Northwest next winter, because a prolonged drought has curtailed hydroelectric power production and utilities have not built enough coal and nuclear power plants to take up the slack.
Domestic oil production in recent weeks has hit an eleven-year low. The nation last month imported almost half of its petroleum, leaving the economy dangerously vulnerable to embargoes or price gouging by foreign suppliers. The U.S. bill for imported oil shot up from $2.7 billion in 1970 to $34 billion last year, draining from the country purchasing power badly needed to create jobs. Yet the Nixon and Ford administrations were unable to devise plans that Congress was willing to accept for stretching out supplies. Nixon's Project Independence, aimed at making the U.S. self-sufficient in fuel by 1980, was never more than an unrealistic and empty slogan.
The best measure of Jimmy Carter's seriousness in trying to do better is the man he named to be Mr. Energy, in charge of drawing up the Administration's plan. The President spent extraordinary time and anguish in selecting his top energy aide. Once he made his decision, he publicly labeled the appointment his "most important nomination." His choice: that tall, rumpled, totally unpretentious and incisively brilliant intellectual, James Rodney Schlesinger.
Under Presidents Nixon and Ford, Schlesinger successively headed the Atomic Energy Commission, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Department. To the public, he is best known as the tough-minded Defense Secretary whom President Ford purged in his 1975 Halloween "massacre." It was a lucky firing, in a way, because it made Schlesinger, a nominal Republican, available to advise Carter. The Georgian met Schlesinger for the first time during the campaign; preparing for his second televised debate with Ford, Carter asked Schlesinger, who had just returned from a trip to China, to brief him. The President-to-be was immediately impressed.