Do any of you remember gas lines? You bet you do. And I distinctly remember back then that politicians promised we’d never get into this kind of situation again. You see, whenever we have a crisis that is what WE want to hear from our elected officials. We want them to promise it will never happen again so we can go back to the way it was before the crisis.

You can toss September 11th into that… “will never happen again” category. That’s the final conclusion we want to her from the ten-member commission interviewing over one-thousand high ranking officials about the mistakes we made not preventing the most heinous attack on America ever. I know you didn’t hear Richard Clarke, and George Tennant, and Colin Powell, and Dr. Rice, and a dozen other witnesses tell you that even if we had known in 1998 and 1999 what we know today that we most likely could not have prevented the September 11th attack. They said it, all right! You didn’t hear it because you don’t want to know there are some things that happen in life that we can’t control or stop or change. It’s one of our greatest human weaknesses, thinking we are in control when in fact we are not.

But let’s get back to this gas thing. We can’t control where the dinosaurs and vegetation died millions of years ago. We can’t get into the heads of the Arab nations that control OPEC. And how do you threaten or muscle OPEC? Are you going to take away their sand? And, oh, it would be easy to think that George Bush or John Kerry can solve the problem. Hey, Bush is the President and Kerry wants to be President and we expect, no we demand, they fix all of our problems. Wake up! This isn’t Christmas and Bush and Kerry aren’t Santa Claus.

Here are the facts as they stand.

Our demand for more energy continues. Without energy sources businesses cannot grow and expand. Fossil fuel resources are limited. Energy is subject to the rules of supply and demand. In the absence of limitless energy resources the price of that energy will continue to increase. Americans lack the fortitude to discipline themselves in their consumption of anything, including energy resources. We don’t want to give up our cars.

I don’t know about you but I’m getting darn sick and tired of having the oil producing nations in the drivers seat. You are only as strong as your weakest link and energy is our weak link, getting weaker by the day. This nation needs a gusty energy policy that rips us out of the dinosaur past, fossil fuels, into a new energy future. We need to stop dinking around with halfway measures that only put off the inevitable. We need to stop acting like solar and wind and even wave generation are cute high school science fair experiments. We need to start addressing mass transportation issues with greater urgency and propose realistic solutions for getting from point A to point B. We need to figure out how to encourage the best and the brightest science talent in our nation to break the oil mold and reach for the skies. And, we need to financially reward those companies and businesses that are willing to venture into the world of alternative fuels with the expectation of doing what OPEC is doing to use now… controlling the heartbeat of the world by controlling the heartbeat of energy production.

You bet this a wild challenge. This challenge is so far beyond what any of our politicians have proposed because it’s going to require that WE discipline ourselves into becoming energy misers until the new resources are on-line. This isn’t a popular proposal because the transition period is going to hurt. No one man or one company or one party can handle this challenge alone. Americans are going to have to want this kind of change and want it bad.

Now here’s the deja vu of this commentary. I knew a brash college student who made nearly an identical proposal to a mass communications marketing class at Iowa State University and practically got laughed out of the room. That was me, back in 1974. I wasn’t a hippie or had any political viewpoint at the time. It just seemed to make a lot of sense to me.

It has been 30 years… 4 kids… and 27 years of marriage later. I would like to think as a nation we have made great progress in moving away from fossil fuels to alternative energy sources. We have not. Yes, this is a complicated and delicate subject because we don’t want to plunge our economy into a deep dark recession causing massive layoffs and industry panic. Nobody is quite ready to permanently park their cars and thumb it. I’ll leave it to the professional policy makers, Republican or Democrat to flesh this out. Please tell me they will and not try to make some kind of campaign ad out of this. And please tell me that you will demand the same thing, unless you like waiting in line or paying $3.00 for a gallon of gas! OR, waiting another 30 years for some signs of progress!

Al Ruechel, Copyright 2004, All Rights Reserved

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