Some lessons are hard to learn. Three times in the past two decades, the U.S. has been burned by its unbridled appetite for energy and its dependence on foreign oil. First came the OPEC embargo in response to the Arab-Israeli war of 1973. Iran administered the second oil shock six years later. Both episodes produced some national hand-wringing and a spate of conservation measures that cut imports in half between 1977, their peak year, and 1985. But when world oil prices collapsed in 1986, the nation's per capita oil consumption began to climb again, the fuel efficiency of American cars slid downward, and oil imports returned to the levels of the 1970s.
Now comes the bill for that profligacy. U.S. troops are fighting a war spurred at least partly by fear that Saddam Hussein's seizure of Kuwait would give him decisive control over the Middle East's oil. With the real cost of energy dependency -- in both dollars and lives -- more apparent than ever, Americans may at last be receptive to a durable energy plan. And George Bush is prepared to lead them to it, but only halfway.
Next week the President is expected to unveil a national energy policy that will favor increased use of natural gas and nuclear power and stepped-up oil exploration -- including a controversial proposal to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. But the plan is almost certain to ignore any significant steps to promote conservation. Most notably, although automobiles, buses and trucks account for two-thirds of U.S. oil use, the program is expected to shun the two most effective means to put the brakes on fuel consumption: a hike in the gas tax and a higher federal fuel-efficiency standard for U.S. autos.
Nearly two years have passed since Bush asked Energy Secretary James Watkins to shape a plan. Watkins, former head of Ronald Reagan's commission on AIDS, conducted 18 public hearings and waded through 22,000 pages of written comments from individuals and organizations. From these, he culled dozens of proposals, which he forwarded late last year to the White House's Economic Policy Council, where many of them were handled like incoming Scuds, shot down quickly before they could have any impact.
The big gunners were three White House aides: Budget Director Richard Darman, White House chief of staff John Sununu and Michael Boskin, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. The troika treated most measures that would compel conservation as unwarranted government interference in the free market. "Watkins' proposals just got blasted by Sununu, Darman and Boskin," says a White House official. "They just tore them apart."
The plan the President will make public preserves mostly those Energy Department suggestions that suit the Administration's step-on-the-gas philosophy. The most controversial by far will be a call for Congress to permit oil exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, an ecologically sensitive area that has been closed to drilling since it was established in 1960. Environmental groups, fearing irreversible damage to the ecosystem, are promising to fight that proposal with an all-out campaign that could turn into this year's version of the bitter Robert Bork confirmation battle. "We'll fight to the end," says Sierra Club spokesman Marty Hayden. "There's no compromise on ANWR."