The roots of our current crisis predate Hurricane Katrina and the Bush administration. Oil-hungry Americans must start conserving energy.
A Times Editorial
Published September 4, 2005
A recent poll found the American public beginning to blame President Bush for high gasoline prices, and that was before Katrina sent them to levels previously seen only in Europe. The fever will subside as damaged refineries and idled pipelines return to service and panic buying ebbs. But no one should expect gasoline to cost as little in the foreseeable future as it did only last month. There are many reasons, most of them more global and enduring than a hurricane, why the era of cheap energy is over.
They are appropriate for debate in the coming election and, yes, some can rightfully be laid at the feet of a president whose scandalous indifference to conservation and climate change tells the energy markets that America, the world's largest consumer of petroleum, intends to do nothing to curb what the Economist, a British paper, calls our "oilcoholism."
This might have been expected of a president who was once an oil man and chose another for his running mate. But in fairness, the roots of the crisis are older than their administration, and the people who share in the blame number in the millions. If you look in the mirror, you might see one.
The oil shocks of the '70s delivered a lesson that was too quickly forgotten and the rising prices of this decade, an inevitable result of supply and demand, were masked by low interest rates that have encouraged Americans to purchase bigger, more powerful automobiles than they need, to live further from work than they should, and to drive when they could walk.
With China in the equation - it's now the second-largest oil consumer - the capacity of the system to produce, refine and distribute petroleum products was in question even before Katrina.
As for the present crisis, there is little that any president could do beyond urging citizens to conserve, conserve, and conserve. Damaged refineries and pipelines are more of a problem than the supply of crude; in retrospect, it was unwise to concentrate so many in a region so vulnerable to hurricanes.
Yet there is one issue that does demand the government's immediate attention: some pump prices that soared so far beyond those in other places as to reek of profiteering. Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue had it right when he called that "akin to looting in a different way." Where greed explains what economics cannot, the perpetrators should be prosecuted relentlessly.
It hardly seems consistent, however, that retailers but not market speculators are vulnerable to prosecution for profiteering from a natural disaster. The possibility of market manipulation cannot be discounted, and calls for a thorough investigation by Congress.
Experience has taught that permanent price controls don't work. Even emergency controls could backfire by diverting oil to continents unaffected by the disaster in question, but a windfall profits tax bears consideration. The proceeds could be applied to disaster relief.
It takes no law or edict, however, to tell Americans what each of us might do to conserve energy. Many steps are small and simple. Do we really have to drive so often, so fast, so far? Is the engine tuned; are the tires properly inflated? Do so many of us need large and powerful SUVs? Is there a bus we could ride? Have we insulated our homes? Can the heat be set lower and the air-conditioning higher? How hard is it to turn off the lights or the TV when we leave a room?
We need also, each of us, to let the president and Congress know that America wants a responsible, comprehensive energy policy.
Many people scoffed when President Jimmy Carter, amid a crisis in 1977, called for energy decisions that would be the "moral equivalent of war." Is anyone laughing now?
