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Schlesinger, 48, is designated eventually to become Secretary of Energy, a new Cabinet post that Carter has asked Congress to create in order to consolidate the work of three independent agencies and programs now spread among nine of the eleven Cabinet departments. For now, Schlesinger is an assistant to the President for energy affairs. "The energy problem is very simple," he muses, puffing on one of his ever present briar pipes. "Demand is growing rapidly. We are running out of fuel. We've got to do something about it. We have an embarrassment of riches of ideas. The question is: Are we going to do something?"
To some energy hawks, the answer seems to be only a qualified yes. In his first fireside chat, a cardigan-clad Carter called on Americans to make personal sacrifices for the sake of adequate energy supplies. Later, he said he was willing to accept a 10% to 15% drop in his rating in popularity polls as soon as his program is made public. The program only partly lives up to its advance rhetoric. True, it is tough. But it also puts considerably less than full trust in the rigorous remedies of a free market. As Schlesinger puts it: "We are not going to introduce an energy Utopia."
Americans will be asked—possibly even ordered—to conserve energy by insulating their homes and factories. They will have to pay gradually increasing fuel bills, pay higher—and rising—gasoline taxes, drive smaller cars, perhaps breathe air polluted by coal fumes, take the first steps toward using solar energy to heat at least their water, and learn to cope with the perils of nuclear power. But they still will not be required—at least under the options that Carter is most likely to choose—to pay the full world free-market prices for energy or to face immediately the stiff taxes that many economists advocate to force gasoline prices up to $1 or $1.50 a gallon and impose drastic conservation. Nor, mercifully, will they be asked to make any such radical, and unthinkable, alteration in life-styles as moving out of hard-to-heat individual homes into energy-saving apartments.
The program basically seems a cleverly conceived exercise in the art of the possible and probable. Schlesinger is well aware that he faces a series of devilish dilemmas. Letting prices rise abruptly, for example, could aggravate an already worrisome inflation, and cutting back too savagely on energy use could slow economic growth and wipe out jobs. Moreover, a democracy operates by popular consent, and there is as yet no national consensus that a real crisis exists. Many Americans suspect—wrongly—that energy shortages have been contrived by avaricious oil and gas companies out to make greater profits. Beyond all that, Schlesinger properly realizes that the power of Government to cope with energy problems, or for that matter any problem, is limited, and consequently that he should not recommend to the President desirable but politically unfeasible programs. To visitors, he often muses that democracies should not too often demonstrate their own ineffectualness.