With American President-Elect Barack Obama‘s team preparing to move into the White House, they’ve made one of their goals to achieve self-sufficiency in energy by eliminating current oil imports from the Middle East and Venezuela within 10 years. With this in mind, ask yourself if this sounds familiar…
…One month following the outbreak of the Yom Kippur Middle East war of October 1973, with the United States deep in the grip of Watergate fever compounded by the anxiety over the Arab oil boycott, former U.S. President Richard M. Nixon appeared on American television to prescribe strong medicine, his antidote for the energy crisis.
Nixon named it “Project Independence.” The challenge facing the United States, he declared, was to regain the strength of self-sufficiency in energy. This was a key to Americans predominance among the nations. “Our ability to meet our own energy needs is directly linked to our continued ability to act decisively and independently at home and abroad in the service of peace, not only for America, bur for all nations in the world.” Calling for “focused leadership” to achieve self-sufficiency by 1980, Nixon likened his challenge to earlier crash programs to develop the atomic bomb and to put a man on the moon. He went on to promise massive public funding for the exploration of American’s remaining energy resources-Alaskan oil and gas, offshore oil reserves, nuclear energy and synthetic fuels from coal and oil shale….
Source: Pratt, Larry, The Tar Sands: Syncrude and the Politics of Oil, Hurtig, Edmonton, Alberta. pp 49 – 50, 1976.
