It seems much longer ago than eight years that Dick Cheney was scolding his fellow Americans for demanding higher conservation standards and more alternative and sustainable energy sources.
Conservation, the Vice President imperiously told us, was merely "a sign of personal virtue," not a basis for a "sound" national policy. Any attempt to curtail the nation's profligate consumption of finite resources was, he implied, at odds with our national exceptionalism. It was God's will that we consume more, not less, than other nations, that we build and buy bigger cars, that we widen and increase highways. Public transportation? Expanded train networks? Green buildings? Screw 'em!
Instead, our policy was "Drill, baby, drill!" This brilliant strategy, reprised for the McCain-Palin campaign, was built upon the sandy foundation of secret meetings in the White House with the CEOs of the oil, gas, coal and timber companies. These czars were part of an "energy task force" that dictated the policy that has now reached a dead end.
One member of this secret society, whose names were only released after a 6-year legal battle that, at one point, reached the Supreme Court, was Kenneth Lay. No wonder they wanted to keep their criminal enterprises hidden!
As the Washington Post put it at the time, "The list of participants' names and when they met with administration officials provides a clearer picture of the task force's priorities and bolsters previous reports that the review leaned heavily on oil and gas companies and on trade groups—many of them big contributors to the Bush campaign and the Republican Party." A clearer picture, indeed.
Because of the opposition of a few retrograde Republicans like Cheney, efficiency and environmental oversight were not bases for our energy policy. That failure has now put the U.S. eight years behind the rest of the world. A clearer picture of this can be seen in Yale's Environmental Performance Index (EPI), which grades 149 participating nations on how well they are doing through multi-dimensional statistical indicators that include energy efficiency and sustainability. In 2008—the most recent EPI—the U.S. slipped from 28th to 39th place, passed by Albania, Croatia, Malaysia and Slovenia.
The dean of Yale's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Gus Speth, said, "The EPI's climate change metrics ranking the United States alongside India and China near the bottom of the world's table are a national disgrace."
On a more personal level, I always knew Cheney was lying. I suspected that Americans did, in fact, want an energy policy based on conservation and efficiency. Sure enough, a recent survey by Yale and George Mason universities confirms this. More than half the adults surveyed had already taken steps to make their home more energy-efficient and another 20 percent said they were planning to do the same in the next year.
"A national strategy to conserve energy and invest in energy efficiency will find the American people a willing partner," said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change and lead investigator on the survey. "Americans are ready, willing and able to save energy."
????Saving money, of course, was cited as a reason why people have taken energy-saving actions (insulating attics, setting thermostats, buying hybrids). Just as many people, however, said they were motivated by the desire to reduce global warming and to "act morally."
Here's the real kicker for me, though: Americans are not proud of the fact that we consume more energy than any other nation. Indeed, by more than a 2-to-1 margin, respondents said they believe reducing energy use will improve, not diminish, the quality of their lives. It could be argued, then, that the quality of our national life began to improve the moment Dick Cheney went back to Wyoming for good.
