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Banned
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Imagine where America might be today....instead of spending (all of it borrowed money...) ten times the amount on foreign petroleum now, compared to what we were spending in 1980, when a new era of cronyism was put into elected office, and set us on the course to the circumstances that we find ourselves in now.
Imagine if we did not increase the US Treasury debt by $1500 billion in the Reagan years, $1900 billion in just 4 years of Bush- 41 administration, and now, an additional $2750 billion, in 59-1/2 months of annual budgets administered by Bush- 43, after the Clinton administration reduced the rate of debt increase to zero, where we might be, from the standpoint of national security, today?
Just as it does today, the driving message from the leadership in 1981 was a message of fear.....fear to promote the idea (an more importantly, the "feeling") that they were the only ones who could "keep us safe", maintain a "strong military", while they "cut costs" that actaully diverted money into the pockets of their wealthiest campaign contributors and into the corporations that also funded their political campaigns, and the energy and defense lobbies that benefited from the transition back to "free market" petroleum, as the sole energy policy, and the buildup of a "Strong defense", because the Russians and the Chinese, and the "Vietnam was a noble cause, and we could have won, but "the left" destroyed our will and blocked the military from receiving the support and financing that was required to "win it"....blah, blah.
The "cost cutting" that tried to eliminate the DOE and domestic social spending ended up, along with the $3400 billion in new debt, from 1981 to 1993, in the pockets of the biggest and most influential campaign contributing and lobby and PAC funding, individuals and corporation. The "evil empire" of the Soviet Union collapsed, as it was destined to do, even if it had to compete with Carter's boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics, after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, and Carter's human rights based, foreign policy initiatives, although "the faithful will never ever accept that, or the reality that Vietnam wasn't "noble", or lost because of "the left", or the idea that the "Reagan Prosperity" came from anything other than the stimulus of gragantuan, unprecedented federal borrowing, to finance the "fear based" military buildup, and the "trickle down" tax cuts, for mostly the richest few, and the corporations. <b>Government of the cronies, by the cronies, and for the cronies.</b> We'll pass that debt to our children, as our legacy. Reagan is dead....and all we've managed to do, so far, is pay the interest on the debt momentum that he set into motion....that took until 1999 to stop....and it's back, and so is the fear driven, military buildup, and the tax cuts for the rich!
The documentaion of, and the fallout from, more cronyism:
Quote:
Science News; 8/4/1979, Vol. 116 Issue 5, p84-84, 1/2p, 1bw
Article
HAYES, Denis
UNITED States. Dept. of Energy
SOLAR Energy Research Institute (Golden, Colo.)
Section: SCIENCE NEWS OF THE WEEK
Solar energy advocates are applauding the appointment of Denis Hayes, last week, as director of the Solar Energy Research Institute in Golden, Colo. Directing $30 million in operating funds and $60 million in contract work, Hayes, at 34, becomes the youngest director of a national laboratory. While a senior researcher at the Worldwatch Institute in Washington, Hayes was among the guiding forces that launched Sun Day -- a national fete to celebrate solar's promise (SN: 5/13/79, p. 309) last year.
Hayes inherits command of an institution already riddled by criticism and hobbled by chaos, in part, that reflects the inevitable organizational growing pains that result when a laboratory expands from a staff of zero to more than 600 in just two years. But it also reflects serious "definitional" problems that the Department of Energy and Congress have yet to resolve. At question is: SERI'S independence in setting research and solar-development directives; its authority or coordination with federally funded regional solar laboratories; and who its director and program managers must answer to at DOE. Next fall, Richard Ottinger (D-N.Y.) plans to investigate how these problems might be re solved in hearings before the House Subcommittee on Energy Development and Applications, which he chairs.
Unlike his predecessor, Paul Rappaport (SN: 4/22/78, p. 255), Hayes enters his post with national visibility and a grassroots following, largely due to his solar advocacy. In the past two years, he has published at least three reports and a book on solar energy. And in addition to spearheading Sun Day, he has served as chairman of the board for two of its spinoffs: Solar Lobby and the Center for Renewable Resources. <b>He has frequently criticized the federal government's funding of solar research and its commitment to financial incentives that would spur solar's chances in the marketplace.
Some have questioned whether Hayes's appointment wasn't really a move to "shut him up" by moving him "inside" or to bury him away from the Washington spotlight with an assignment to the hinterlands. But when colleagues posed those questions to Hayes last week, he responded confidently, saying that he would not be "buried" or "bought off."</b> Says Jim Broyles at Solar Lobby, "We can expect fireworks," because "you're not going to see a quiet Denis Hayes."
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Quote:
(AP)
DENVER
Boston Globe (pre-1997 Fulltext). Boston, Mass.: Jun 25, 1981. pg. 1
Denis Hayes, who was to resign his post as director of the Solar Energy Research Institute in a few weeks, has been ordered to leave immediately after denouncing federal energy policies. Hayes, an outspoken supporter of solar energy development, was asked last weekend to resign as part of a move to slash the institute's budget and narrow the focus of its programs. The institute, the nation's leading solar energy research facility, is operated for the Department of Energy on a contract basis.
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Quote:
Science News; 6/27/1981, Vol. 119 Issue 26, p406-406, 1/5p
Article
Resignation
HAYES, Denis
SOLAR Energy Research Institute (Golden, Colo.)
Hayes resigns in 'SERI'-ous shakeup
Section: SCIENCE NEWS OF THE WEEK
One of solar energy's sunniest and most visible advocates is about to be eclipsed, at least in terms of federal influence. Denis Hayes, director of the Solar Energy Research Institute since September 1979, has been asked by the Midwest Research Institute to step down from his post. MRI, which operates the federal facility for the Department of Energy, is said to be seeking someone with more research and laboratory experience since SERI is expected to take on a more laboratory-oriented role in the future.
But rumors and undertones attending the announcement also suggest MRI'S role may be little more than that of a puppet whose strings are pulled from Washington. The Reagan administration is more than rumored to be plotting changes in the laboratory's intended mission and size. Most important, Hayes's ideology -- that solar energy is not only a technology for the future, but also one capable of contributing mightily today -- does not mesh with Ronald Reagan's conservative solar posture. And that ideological conflict is <b>one explanation being offered to explain why DOE attempted, unsuccessfully, to withhold publication of a SERI study (SN: 5/2/81, p. 276) suggesting that stronger commitments to solar energy and to conservation would improve the economy.</b>
SERI has come under fire repeatedly in the past 10 months for not being "effectively integrated into the federal solar program" nor coordinated adequately with activities of regional solar-energy centers. Consistent with that, administration budget carvers have drastically whittled down SERFS proposed funding for the coming fiscal year, and deferred indefinitely plans for a permanent SERI facility until conflicts over its size and mission are resolved.
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Quote:
Hayes, Denis
Op-ed
Publication title: New York Times. (Late Edition (East Coast)). New York, N.Y.: Aug 12, 1981. pg. A.27
Golden, Colo. - For its first three years, the Solar Energy Research Institute carried a blazing sun atop its stationary. A couple of months ago, to cut printing costs, the Department of Energy ordered the sun changed to a dull gray. It was an omen.
There were other, more important signs. <H3>All hiring and subcontracting at the institute was frozen for months while a team from Washington, without one member with technical credentials, conducted a leisurely review of its programs to make sure they conformed to the Reagan philosophy.</H3>
The institute was forbidden to finance unsolicited proposals, thus effectively limiting its subcontracts to those companies large enough to prepare long responses to formal requests for proposals. Lone inventors and small entrepreneurs were frozen out.
Desperately needed laboratory construction was delayed.In 1976, Colorado offered the Federal Government 300 acres of land on the outskirts of Denver to house the institute. The Department of Energy has not yet accepted this gift, much less begun construction. Eventually, key researchers began to give up hope and leave. Those who remain work in jerry-rigged, one-story labs in a neighborhood office complex or commute to nearby industrial labs, machine shops and a prison.
The greatest frustration, however, was with department's near inability to entertain new ideas. This year, the saving grace would have been a million-dollar Director's Fund earmarked for creative ventures. Par for the course, this fund of seed money has now been brought under the vice-like grip of departmental control and is being halved.
Desk-bound officials in Washington now demand to review everything, but refuse to decide anything. For a laboratory director, it is like communicating with a black hole. Endless streams of decision memos flow into headquarters; nothing comes out. The result in the field is chaos and paralysis.
Finally, for me, it all came to an end. On the morning of the summer solstice, June 23, with the sun as high above the horizon as it ever gets, I was asked for my resignation as the institute's director. Some friends see great symbolism in the timing. Each day now, the sun falls lower; so does Federal support for solar energy.
The institute's budget is being cut in half and its staff reduced by a third, and these blows are only pieces of a larger national pattern. Secretary of Energy James B. Edwards proposed to cut the Federal budget for renewable energy sources from the 1981 fiscal year's $576 million to $193 million for 1982 - a reduction of 67 percent. Another 50 percent cut is rumored to be in the works for the 1983 fiscal year.
The official explanation is that these cuts are merely part of the general effort to trim domestic Federal spending. However, the Edwards energy budget was shaped by blind bias. Even as the country's most promising energy options are being gutted, a herd of technological losers will be getting fat at the public trough.
The increases proposed for the nuclear budget alone represent twice as many dollars as will remain in the budgets for all renewable energy sources. Moreover, President Reagan, who before his election condemned Jimmy Carter's Synthetic Fuels Corporation, has now endorsed it and its $88 billion price tag.
Energy Secretary Edwards opposes continuing the enormously successful and cost-effective solar homebuilders' program because ''it is a demonstration project, and this Administration is not going to distort the marketplace with demonstration projects.'' Yet the Administration is willing to underwrite two oil-shale demonstration projects, each costing 5,000 times as much as the solar project. And the Administration is lobbying Congress hard to let it spend 15,000 times as much on a nuclear demonstration plant, the Clinch River Breeder Reactor.
This approach to budget cutting is poor policy and worse politics. It is poor policy because it is channeling billions in directions that a free market would not send them. A detailed study by the solar institute was suppressed for months by the Department of Energy but was finally made public through the actions of Rep. Richard L. Ottinger, Democrat of New York, and has been commercially published as ''A New Prosperity.'' It demonstrates convincingly that the country's best energy hopes lie with precisely those technologies being attacked by Secretary Edwards.
In a truly free market, investments in conservation and solar alternatives would soon dominate all other energy investments. I would raise no complaint if the budgets for conservation and solar systems were being slashed as part of a comprehensive program to get the Federal Government out of the energy marketplace. But such a program would require the abolition of the $88 billion Synthetic Fuels Corporation. It would require an end to the myriad huge tax benefits still given to the century-old oil industry. If the oil industry cannot thrive today without subsidies, who can? Such a program would require the cancellation of Government involvement in the Clinch
River breeder and the removal of the Federal liability ceiling for nuclear accidents. If the emerging Edwards energy program is bad policy; it may prove to be catastrophic politics. Secretary Edwards maintains that ''a vote for President Reagan was a vote for a nuclear future.'' Yet a Gallup poll taken at exactly the time of the November election found that of seven possible energy choices, solar alternatives ranked number one among adult Americans. Conservation, whose Federal budget Mr. Edwards plans to ''trim'' by more than 75 percent, ranked second. Nuclear power ran dead last.
Few voters, staunch conservatives included, believed that a vote for Ronald Reagan was a vote against solar energy. But unless prosolar Americans, the solid majority, put their senators and representatives on the line over the next few weeks, insisting that solar energy not be discriminated against, this fall will see the Federal solar program quitely eclipsed. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Denis Hayes former director of the Solar Energy Research Institute is working on a book about energy investments.
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Quote:
ROBERT D. HERSHEY Jr., Special to the New York Times
WASHINGTON, Dec. 17
New York Times. (Late Edition (East Coast)). New York, N.Y.: Dec 18, 1981. pg. D.1
Key members of Congress indicated today that the Administration's plan to abolish the Energy Department stood little better than a 50-50 chance of passage.
The Congressional opposition emerged as the White House said it would seek to transfer nearly 80 percent of the four-year-old Energy Department to the Commerce Department and the rest to the Departments of the Interior, Justice and Agriculture.
House Speaker Thomas P. O'Neill Jr. said at a meeting with reporters that the move was a purely political one and described it as ''a disastrous thing to do.''
The Congressional opposition, which Administration officials acknowledged as substantial, included that of Senator Henry M. Jackson, Democrat of Washington, who has long maintained there should be a separate department for energy to deal with foreign energy officials at the proper level.
''Energy policy has both a national and international importance,'' he said in a statement. ''Abolishing the department - and leaving this nation without a Cabinet-level energy policymaker - will send the wrong signal at the wrong time to our allies and adversaries, particularly to our partners in the International Energy Agency and indeed to the entire world.''
Richard L. Ottinger, a Westchester Democrat who heads the House subcommittee on Energy Conservation and Power, declared that ''the nation's energy policy is simply too important an issue to allow its formulation to be scattered.''
One former Energy Department official said he understood the White House had already conducted an informal poll of the House Energy and Commerce Committee that showed an 18-18 split on the proposal.
The opposition came despite the fact that the Administration plan maintains civilian control over the $6 billion nuclear weapons program that employs 54,000 people. The plan would put the program in a new Commerce Department unit to be known as the Energy Research and Technology Administration. Many had expressed worries that the nuclear weapons program, under civilian control since the 1940's, would wind up either at the Defense Department or the Interior Department.
Under the proposal, the Commerce Department would receive authority over national energy policy, data gathering, emergency preparedness, grants and basic responsibility for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, in addition to defense programs. President Reagan said the plan fulfilled ''my campaign promise to make Government more efficient and reduce the cost of Government to the taxpayers,''
The Interior Department would get leasing programs, oil shale reserves and the administrations supplying hydroelectric power to various parts of the country. It would also operate the petroleum reserve.
The small programs of alcohol fuels assistance would be transferred to the Agriculture Department and the Justice Department would work on enforcement cases remaining from the now-abolished system of price and allocation controls on oil. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, formerly the Federal Power Commission before being merged into the Energy Department in 1977, would return to its former independent status.
The dismantling plan is to be sent to Congress next month and the Administration was said to be preparing its budget for the next fiscal year on the basis of anticipated approval. The Administration has not said how much money would be saved.
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Quote:
Associated Press
WASHINGTON
Boston Globe (pre-1997 Fulltext). Boston, Mass.: Oct 4, 1983. pg. 1
The United States will remain partly dependent on OPEC oil imports for at least 20 years, the Reagan Administration said today.
In unveiling its latest National Energy Policy Plan, it said the nation's vulnerability to another Arab oil embargo "has been reduced markedly" by petroleum reserves and by "minimizing federal control and involvement."
"The record to date of energy markets and the economy demonstrates clearly that economic efficiency does not result from federal intervention and control," said the plan, which was was released by Energy Secretary Donald Hodel.
The plan said oil imports will continue to supply about 12 percent of the nation's energy through the year 2000. It also projects that world oil prices will stabilize at $23 to $30 per barrel this year and next, but might fall if the Iran-Iraq war ends or the rate of world economic recovery slows.
President Ronald Reagan's decision in January 1981 to lift all price controls on oil helped reduce the average price of gasoline from $1.39 a gallon in March 1981 to $1.27 a gallon this summer, despite a 5-cents-per- gallon increase in federal excise taxes, the Administration maintained.
"Similar benefits have not yet been achieved in the case of natural gas, which remains the only primary energy source subject to government price controls," the report said. It blamed federal price ceilings for the increase in natural gas prices despite surplus supplies and falling demand.
Conservation is given more emphasis in the new plan than it was in the 1981 plan.
Rep. Richard Ottinger (D-N.Y.), chairman of the House Energy conservation and power subcommittee, called the 25-page plan a "good PR document."
"For the past three years the Administration had done everything within its power to destroy the most cost-effective programs within the Department of Energy, including the department itself," Ottinger said. "Now that they've decimated the programs, they claim the new emphasis is on conservation. Their past actions don't support this claim."
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Quote:
http://www.patagonia.com/web/us/cont...?assetid=2069#
The Politics of Energy
by Denis Hayes
Dwight Eisenhower, elected president in 1952 not long after the issuance of Resources for Freedom, ignored Truman’s solar proposal in favor of his own massive “Atoms for Peace” initiative. Throughout the Eisenhower years, only a fraction of 1 percent of federal energy research funding went to renewable energy sources.
Ronald Reagan, elected president in 1980, before A New Prosperity was issued, actually tried to suppress the Carter administration’s comprehensive, optimistic report. (Representative Richard Ottinger thwarted this censorship by publishing the entire report in the Congressional Record.) In its first few months, the Reagan administration fired most of the staff of the federal Solar Energy Research Institute, slashed funding for renewable energy R& D, and eliminated all programs to commercialize the fruits of past federal solar research. And, just to rub salt in the wounds, Reagan removed the solar panels from the roof of the White House.
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Quote:
http://www.indiancountry.com/content.cfm?id=1096410625
Suagee: Pulling our heads out of the sands of global warming
Posted: March 25, 2005
by: Dean Suagee / Hobbs, Straus, Dean & Walker, LLP
.....Twenty-four years ago, the federal research laboratory known as the Solar Energy Research Institute (predecessor of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory) completed a comprehensive study of the potential energy savings through promoting efficiency in buildings, transportation and industry, and potential contributions of renewable energy sources. That report, published with the title ''A New Prosperity: Building a Sustainable Energy Future'' (often referred to as the SERI Solar/Conservation Study) concluded that ''through efficiency, the U.S. can achieve a full-employment economy and increase worker productivity while reducing national energy consumption by nearly 25 percent'' and that ''20 to 30 percent of this reduced demand could be supplied by renewable sources.''
In March 1981, when the SERI Solar/Conservation Study was finished, the incoming Reagan administration attempted to keep it from seeing the light of day. (At the time, I worked in the central office of the BIA and, having been involved in the Carter administration's Domestic Policy Review of Solar Energy, obtained a copy from a friend at SERI the day before it was embargoed.) The study was subsequently published by a private company featuring an introduction by then-Congressman Richard Ottinger who, as chair of the relevant subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, had requested the study in the first place.
Years before the scientific community reached its current degree of consensus on the reality of global warming, Ottinger drew attention to what he called ''our greatest economic conflict: our economy is hemorrhaging as we devote a larger and larger percentage of our gross national product to the purchase of imported oil, competing for scarce capital needed to rebuild our industrial and economic base.'' Among other things, this shows that the current administration has no claim to originality in its imitation of cartoon ostriches......
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Imagine the difference in the financial toll and the quality of life degradation that took place in California, during the Enron contrived electric power shortages experienced in that state, if Reagan and the Bushes had never occupied the whitehouse?
Brent Bozell, you're doing a heckofa job! Not only are American's ignorant about how the Carter initiatives were undone by intentionally mismanaged energy policy, wrecked by cronyism and transferred into the control of the special interests (Enron and "big oil"), at the expense of the future interests of the American people, posted comments all over these threads, especially on the "Carter thread", over the past few days, Mr. Bozell and his mrc.org have influenced these posters to distrust the news media reporting as "too liberal", and inserted his own propaganda into the info stream that is filtered to these misguided folks, to the point where they believe, distribute, and defend, the mirror opposite of who and what has raped their children's future and secuirty.
<b>WTF ?</b>
Last edited by host; 09-17-2006 at 01:29 PM..
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