There’s been lots of finger pointing going on in Congress of late. They blame big oil, then speculators, and now the President. The President in turn blames Congress. All of this could have been avoided, but our elected officials made sure it would not be, and here we are.
Let me take you way back, I mean way-way back to 1975. There was somebody who recognized our growing dependence on foreign oil and who spoke out about it. Do you know who it was? The picture to the right is him… OK, I’ll tell you, President Gerald Ford. Here’s a President that some ridiculed at the time and declared him to be somewhat, stupid.
In Ford’s State of the Union Address, he announced: “We, the United States, are not blameless. Our growing dependence upon foreign sources has been adding to our vulnerability for years and years, and we did nothing to prepare ourselves for such an event as the embargo of 1973.”
He didn’t look to others for solutions or blame, he offered a solution. A program that would have included: “200 major nuclear power plants, 250 major new coal mines, 150 major coal-fired power plants, 30 major new refineries, 20 major new synthetic fuel plants, the drilling of many thousands of new wells, the insulation of 18 million homes and the manufacturing and sale of millions of new automobiles, trucks and buses that use much less fuel.”
You might be asking yourself, What the Heck Happened?
If you want to learn more, click here to read the Op-ed from the N.Y. Times (yes hard to believe).
Anyway, while we face $5 per gallon at the pump, and who knows by 2009, Congress continues not to offer solutions, but rhetoric and hyperbole, no wonder their approval rating is in a dive:
