Environmental Engineering Reference
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resources unless something changed. It would have been tough enough to
cope with a rapidly shit ing energy scene. Doing it amidst such sweeping
change and uncertainty made the task far more dii cult.
h e bat le reached its peak in the 1980 presidential race between
Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. Hans Landsberg, writing for the New
Yo r k Ti m e s less than a month before the election, captured what was
happening. “For the last few years,” he wrote, “this country ostensibly
has debated energy policy but in reality has been engaged in a i erce,
prolonged bout of soul-searching.” Energy was no longer being discussed
on its own merits but was now symbolic: “It can be argued that energy
was tailor-made to become the arena for the clash of opinions that, to be
sure, are related to energy but for which energy is at best a proxy.” 20
Landsberg, then an economist at a think tank named Resources for the
Future, was trying to play the straight man in this debate. But its most
strident participants were nowhere close to being ready to agree with
each other. David Stockman, who would become the budget director
responsible for ushering in Reagan's supply-side revolution (before turn-
ing apostate in the face of staggering budget dei cits), wrote the energy
plank of the Republican platform that year. In his memoir, he spared few
words. h e energy plan, he wrote, was the part of Reagan's platform “that
most clearly manifested an anti-statist breakthrough.” “h e Carter Soviet-
like 'Gosplan,'” he continued, “was then reaching its i nal absurdity”: 21
h e “moral equivalent of war” [a term that Carter had used to describe
the energy crisis] and its at endant issues was really a front for state
control of resources and the economy. . . . h e current glut of oil on the
world market [Stockman was writing in 1986] is eloquent refutation
of how idiotic their position was, but at the time they were prosecuting
their views with a determination bei t ing the smallness of their minds.
h e New Deal had given birth to the statist impulse; during the Great
Society it had gathered momentum; with the “Era of Limits” it had
become an imperative . 22
Reagan himself would put it more pithily: “Our problem isn't a short-
age of fuel,” he explained. “It's a surplus of government.” 23 Sliding
the energy i ght into his broader appeal to the American people, he
 
 
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