Energy policies: ‘Forty-year failure’

In 1973, four weeks after the Arab oil embargo, President Richard Nixon went on national television to talk about an energy crisis that had been mounting for two years. He asked Americans to turn off their Christmas lights. In a gesture of greater substance, Nixon also pledged that within seven years the United States would be independent of foreign oil. Since then, eight presidents and 18 congresses have aimed to deliver on this 1973 promise. In the last four years alone, four ambitious energy bills were signed into law. Yet Americans, more than ever, are still at the mercy of foreign oil. Nearly 70 percent of oil supplies are imported today, up from 30 percent in the Nixon era. What happened? read more

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