FUEL DUEL.(The Talk of the Town)(George W. Bush and the energy crisis)

Last week was another unhappy one for President Bush. His popularity ratings dropped again; news of chaos and civil war flowed unabated out of Iraq; the appointment of the former head of the N.S.A. as the director of the C.I.A. was jeopardized by further reports of domestic wiretapping; and gasoline prices continued to cause distress from coast to coast. And it got worse: the President found his Administration being compared--by his own ostensible supporters--to that of a certain Georgia peanut farmer whose Presidency became a byword for haplessness. "It is no accident," the National Review wrote of a panicky Republican scheme to hand out hundreddollar rebates to angry drivers, "that the proposal closely mirrors a Jimmy Carter-proposed rebate to try to boost the economy, a pathetic initiative from a pathetic administration." The tone of the article echoed that of the Fox News commentator Tony Snow, who, before being recruited as the new White House press secretary, complained that Bush's energy plans were "filled with stuff that even Jimmy Carter abandoned."

The current energy crisis is not yet as spectacular as the one that bedevilled Carter. The economy is not in recession, and there are no gun-wielding protesters enraged by long gas lines. What's more, because the Bush family has for years had close ties to the House of Saud--despite its financial support of Wahhabi clerics who preach jihad--relations with at least one major oil producer are more civil than they were then. A few weeks ago, His Excellency Ali al-Naimi, the Saudi petroleum minister, participated in an energy forum in Washington, and sounded much like any platitudinous American statesman. "We are at the crossroads on the path to our energy future," he said, and must "avoid repeating the costly mistakes of the past." He even made a joke about conserving energy by turning down the air-conditioning in the building: "It's freezing."

One thing that the two energy crises have in common is that both were preceded by upheavals in the Middle East--in Carter's case the Iranian revolution, in Bush's the war in Iraq. But in many ways the challenges that the United States faces now are more daunting than those of the nineteen-seventies. Iran's current anti-American leader, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has waved aside American (and European) efforts to halt his nuclear program, noting, "Ultimately, they need us more than we need them." We now compete for oil with voracious energy consumers like China and India. And, as hurricane season approaches (and as the connection between more violent storms and global warming seems to grow increasingly evident), refineries continue to struggle with the disruptions from Katrina.

Even sentimental Democrats today tend to think of the Jimmy Carter of the seventies as a hand-wringing Milquetoast, more rabbit than killer. He and Congress, though, took on the energy emergency with a vigor that seems unimaginable these days. They deregulated oil and gas prices, created the Department of Energy, and got utilities to increase their use of natural gas and coal. They also allocated hefty sums for solar and other alternative-energy sources and pursued President Ford's policy of higher fuel-economy standards for new cars. By the time Carter left office, the consumption of foreign oil had fallen by nearly two million barrels a day, to seven million barrels. Predictably, as oil prices dropped, so did the urge to conserve. Ronald Reagan revoked environmental policies and ripped Carter's solar panels off the White House roof, and Americans learned to love big cars again. We now import about thirteen million barrels of foreign oil a day, an increase of eighty-five per cent.

In the State of the Union address, and again in a speech in April, Bush deplored America's "addiction to oil," rightly describing it as "a matter of national security." He also asked Americans to buy more hybrid and ...