Are the Right Issues Debated? Speaker Says No

Amy Myers Jaffe, speaking to the All-Convention Luncheon in Dallas, not only presented her synopsis on a looming oil crisis, but warned that geopolitical issues could lead to a déjà vu of the energy crises of 1973 and 1979.

Those crises precipitated frantic lineups at gasoline pumps, panicked the American public and led to the introduction of smaller, more energy efficient vehicles across the nation.

Today, however, the pendulum has swung back, with a large percentage of Americans driving gas thirsty sport utility vehicles.

That's a sign, Myers Jaffe suggested, that the lessons of the oil crises in America have been forgotten during the intervening 30 years. She added, tongue-and-cheek, that a paper she wrote as an eighth grader on the 1970s oil crisis could be dusted off and published today in a learned journal.

In a sobering message, she said that while energy consumptive Americans are a large part of the problem, they nonetheless represent part of the future solution.

"In the United States, we have a tendency to externalize oil problems," she said. "We ought to look in the mirror, because the problem is us."

And she pointed to the serious consequences of not having a national energy policy: "The U.S. Senate is a group of people who can't even pass an energy policy."

Provoking thought and discussion amongst the audience, Myers Jaffe asked: "Do we really want to be in exactly the same place again in 30 years?"

Myers Jaffe is an associate director of Rice University's energy program, and a Wallace Wilson Fellow for energy studies at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University. An expert in Middle East oil geopolitics, she recently contributed to the joint Baker Institute/Council on Foreign Relations task force on the Guiding Principles for the U.S. Post-Conflict Policy in Iraq.