A moralist's energy transition: from security to climate

From a master of high-minded muddle-headedness on energy comes, well, more high-minded muddle-headedness on energy.

Former President Jimmy Carter famously elevated energy policy to "the moral equivalent of war" in a 1977 speech in which he warned, "The energy crisis has not yet overwhelmed us, but it will if we do not act quickly."

Motivated by concern about security after the Arab oil embargo of 1973-74, his rhetoric shivered with the apocalyptic urgency now typical of climate-change activism.

That, the former president apparently can't resist. With nine other recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize, Carter signed a letter, published in a Politico advertisement Apr. 16, trying to shame President Barack Obama and Sec. of State John Kerry into rejecting the Keystone XL pipeline border crossing.

"Your decision on the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline will define your climate legacy," declared the letter, sponsored by the Nobel Women's Initiative, National Resources Defense Council, Environmental Defence, and Sierra Club.

The signatories claimed to have "a moral obligation" to speak out. They cited "hundreds of millions of people whose lives and livelihoods are being threatened and lost as a result of the changing climate and environmental damage caused by our dangerous addiction to oil."

Their hyperbole is grotesque, their judgments cruelly selective. What about 1.3 billion impoverished people now lacking access to electricity, whose prospects would darken further under the energy-cost increases promised by climate activism?

Under Carter, energy policy largely failed. The former president inherited a mess of price and market controls and made things worse.

"We are now running out of gas and oil," he asserted in his 1977 speech, calling for "a transition in the way people use energy."

So he committed the country to "strict conservation" and costly promotion of energy forms other than oil, including coal.

The transition that survived was between objects of contrived panic: from security to climate.

Otherwise, oil and gas haven't run out, alternatives remain too expensive, and the moralizing is no less tiresome.