Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
before. h ere was no oi cial energy policy, since this would mean state
involvement in markets.
30
In 1986, Secretary of Energy John S. Herrington concluded in a
New
Yo r k Ti m e s
op-ed that the market-focused energy policy approach of the
administration had succeeded. “If the energy story of the last i ve years tells
us anything,” he wrote, “it is that market-oriented energy policies are the
answer to our nation's energy-security needs.”
31
Many critics would later
argue that this laissez-faire at itude had led to future economic and secu-
rity crises, not thwarted them. But, at least at the time, these opponents
seemed to have lit le to stand on: the country appeared not to suf er from
its hands-of approach to energy.
Environmental advocates spent the decade focused elsewhere. Rather
than i ght over abstract and long-term energy issues, green groups
focused on the most visible challenge at the time: pollution and its dam-
aging ef ects on public health. Ef orts to stem water pollution, halt toxic
waste dumping, and regulate substances that damaged the ozone layer all
began during the 1980s. Government controls on pollution had become
so accepted by the 1988 presidential election that George H. W. Bush
ran an at ack ad against Michael Dukakis charging that the Massachuset s
governor had not done enough to clean up Boston Harbor.
32
When Bush
took oi ce, he appointed William Reilly, then head of the World Wildlife
Fund, to run the Environmental Protection Agency.
h en, on August 2, 1990, Saddam Hussein began marching troops
into Kuwait. By October, with the Iraqi president threatening the oil-
i elds of neighboring Saudi Arabia, crude prices had doubled. h e United
States began to mobilize an international response. Suddenly energy was
back at the center of American life. But the Gulf War, fought between
January 17 and February 28, 1991, ended in a rout for the United States.
Oil prices quickly returned to prior lows and mostly remained there for
the rest of the decade. Lit le happened to U.S. energy strategy. Both sides
in the old energy i ghts of ered warmed-over versions of their previous
platforms—stricter fuel economy rules and alternative fuels on the let ,
new drilling in Alaska on the right—and both largely failed.
33
h e best-
known legacy of the Energy Policy Act of 1992 may have been its man-
date for low-l ush toilets, much to the chagrin of those energy experts
who remember it for introducing renewable energy tax credits.
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