U.S. energy policy -- to stretch the meaning of the term - is appalling. It has been thrown together piece by piece over the decades to create a system that is dysfunctional, over complex, and internally contradictory. It is a system that victimizes American citizens, cripples the U.S. economy, makes the government a laughingstock, and empowers our enemies worldwide. While it's conceivable that somebody could actually design a policy that would do worse, they'd really have to work at it.

The only group in American that sees energy policy achieving some of their goals are the ones who oversaw its implementation from the beginning: the environmentalist Greens. It's obvious that our energy policy was intended not for the benefit of the public, or industry, or government, but almost solely to fit the agenda and goals of the Green movement, and not even the public agenda and goals, but the core agenda rarely referred to except through euphemism.

The irony here is that it has done next to nothing to fulfill the actual requirements of the environmentalists. Greens, it appears, are the worst judges of their own true needs.

A glance at the record will give us a clear idea as to how we reached this pass. One thing consistently overlooked is that American energy policy is literally the result of a series of accidents. Each of these incidents set off a blizzard of activity intended to "rationalize" the energy industry and its practices, prevent further mishaps, increase government control, and not the least, usher in the new Green Age. Each thrust American energy policy deeper into stagnation.

The first incident occurred at the very infancy of the modern Green movement (which is distinct from the conservation movement, a far older phenomenon, with no more true relationship between the two than between socialists and communists), and played a large part in defining environmentalism, setting its tactics, and establishing it as a political and social force.

Santa Barbara

On January 29, 1969, a blowout occurred at a Union Oil platform six miles off Santa Barbara. The blowout itself was contained, but internal pressure ruptured the pipe, sending 200,000 gallons of crude spewing out in an 800 square-mile slick. Prevailing winds blew the oil directly onto the shore, fouling over 35 miles of coastline. Thousands of birds were threatened along with seals and dolphins.

The public rallied to save the wildlife with some success. Environmentalists rallied alongside them. Within days, an anti-oil activist group, GOO (Get Oil Out) was in operation, calling for boycotts and circulating petitions to end offshore drilling.

Ignored in all the uproar was the fact that Union Oil had been allowed to skimp on heavy-duty protective sheathing by the U.S. Geological Survey. If the piping had been reinforced as called for by standard procedure, the rupture might not have occurred, or might well have been contained. But, the logic of political activism being what it is, with the government having played a crucial role in causing the accident, environmentalists turned to... the government, to prevent them in the future.

The Santa Barbara blowout was critical in transforming environmentalism from a conservationist to an activist movement. It led to the foundation of Earth Day a few months later (an event still celebrated in certain backward communities such as Ann Arbor and Berkeley). The incident also established the Green worldview: industry was the enemy. Oil was not a resource to be utilized under proper safeguards, but a pollutant to be subject to the most stringent controls. Above all, environmentalism was no mere political or social movement, it was a crusade. A crusade to rescue nature and to "save the planet", even if it was at the cost of human civilization. (Or for that matter, human extinction.)

Offshore drilling was a major target. A concerted campaign soon saw the practice all but outlawed within U.S. waters. Less than a decade later, the first "gasoline shortage" occurred in the U.S.

Three Mile Island

Even as cars were lining up for miles at gas stations, a second front opened in the Green crusade. On March 28, 1979, a pumping failure occurred at the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor in south-central Pennsylvania. While the reactor shut down as designed, a relief valve stuck open (legend attributes this to its being put in backwards), allowing coolant water to escape. The ill-designed instrument suite failed to alert the operating crew. All unknown to them, the reactor core began to melt down.

Half the core had melted by the time anyone became aware of it. But the reactor's containment vessel held, and no major breach of radioactivity occurred. All the same, public reaction, nurtured on visions of Hiroshima and stoked by media hysteria (not to mention The China Syndrome, a Jane Fonda anti-nuke drama that had the good fortune to appear almost simultaneously with the accident), amounted to abject panic. A partial evacuation of nearby areas was carried out, amid media speculation that similar action would be required for the entire east coast.

The site was under control before the weekend was out. But the damage to nuclear power had already been done. The nuclear industry joined Big Oil as an enemy of mankind and nature.  The Greens set out to shut down the entire industry, including all operational reactors. Although that effort failed, they did succeed in preventing the construction of any new reactors for a period of thirty years.

By the beginning of the 80s, the U.S. energy industry was paralyzed, the oil industry relegated to an ever-shrinking pool of permitted drilling areas, the nuclear industry effectively moribund. This put the U.S. in an excellent position to meet the depredations of OPEC, the rise of Saddam Hussein and the mullahs of Iran, and the manipulations of our Mideast "allies".  That situation has prevailed ever since.

Chernobyl

The conclusions drawn from Santa Barbara and TMI were further underlined by two later incidents. On April 25, 1986, technicians at the Chernobyl  nuclear plant decided to see what would happen if they shut down all safeguards and ran the reactor at its point of major instability. (This being a Soviet reactor, that point was at its lowest operational level. God forbid if it had been the other way around.) What happened was that the roof blew off, immediately killing several dozen people and irradiating large parts of the Ukraine. Aided by the regime's clumsy attempt at a cover-up, the accident played no small role in the collapse of the USSR.

On March 24, 1989, a captain challenged with alcohol problems allowed the supertanker Exxon Valdez to pile up on a reef in Alaska's Prince William Sound, dumping 11 million gallons of crude oil into the sea. Hysteria peaked at probably the highest level of any such incident. The company's management was threatened with criminal prosecution, and a federal judge hearing the case went so far as to say that the accident was "worse than Hiroshima". All inclinations to adapt more rational energy policies evaporated in the wake of these events.

No reform following failure

An unprejudiced eye will immediately see that the common factor in all these incidents was management failure. Union Oil (a company long vanished into mergers) colluded with government in an effort to cut corners. The nuclear industry -- a combination of government and private enterprise, with the worst aspects of both and the advantages of neither -- insisted on operating on the lowest possible level of execution. (A few months before the TMI breakdown, I met a man who had just accepted a job installing a piping system at the Indian Point reactor. An engineer, I thought. No, he replied -- a plumber. Simply to save a few bucks, the industry was hiring bathroom-and-hot tub plumbers for sensitive work rather than experienced pipe-fitters or engineers. No wonder crucial fittings were going in backwards, upside down, and inside out.)

Chernobyl was merely the ultimate expression of ingrained Soviet incompetence going back to the Revolution. The Exxon Valdez revealed that a critical oil shipping component -- maritime operations -- was completely isolated from any meaningful oversight. (This is in large part due to marine traditions;  ship's captains are as close-mouthed as any surgeon or cop concerning ineptitude in the ranks -- and in large part is still the case. Noel Mostert's Supership, written in the 1970s, remains the standard work on the shortcomings of the tanker industry.)

The appropriate response in these cases (Chernobyl being the exception: the only solution there was to tear the system down and start over) would have been to convene a panel of experts, send out investigators, hold hearings, issue recommendations, and see to it that reforms went into effect. This is what occurs following aircraft disasters, large-scale fires, building collapses, or any other catastrophic incident where suspicion exists that things were not being handled according to best practice. (Consider the investigation following the Challenger disaster, for one example.)

But this is not what occurred in these cases. Not in any meaningful sense. Under the new Green paradigm, oil and nuclear energy were not industries to be reformed, but "evils" to be either contained or destroyed. The Greens could have served a useful purpose by pushing for serious reform in management of critical energy industries. Instead, we got the religious impulse, distorted into sheer apocalypticism, with the environmentalists fighting oil and fissionables (plutonium in particular) as products of dark sin, placed on earth to tempt humankind from the path that Gaia intended.