Well, then, if Jimmy Carter was responsible for Mugabe taking power in Zimbabwe, cite it.
You’re just throwing stuff up against the wall in the hopes that a) no one calls you on it, and b) some of it sticks because you’re not called on it.
Here’s that quote again from the cite you posted:
Your cite says we ‘can’t do’ zero dependence on foreign oil. The researchers in my cite below ran the numbers and put together a plan for how this country can achieve zero dependence on foreign oil, with zero carbon emissions and zero nuclear power to boot!
Here’s a link to a site with photos of GM’s electric car of a decade ago, the EV-1, after being literally squashed.
squashed electric cars
If something similar happened to your cotton-ball car, I’d say it’s an outrage 
My point is, Carter’s ideas about energy were pragmatic and achievable. Something happened to them along the way… every president may have claimed energy independence as a goal, but judging by the results it is hard to take them seriously. Reagan and the Bushes were hardly focused on oil independence, or is that a false assumption?
With regards to the op, I’m saying Carter had (or repeated) a great idea and sounded as serious as can be about implementing it in his ‘crisis of confidence’ speech, among other statements. He didn’t get re-elected though, and the country pursued other priorities. All talk? How much credit can we give to Carter for this effort?
Here is the Weekly Standard’s take on Carter’s backing of Mugabe. Obviously, it’s written from a right-wing perspective, but it does note that certain liberals, such as Bayard Rustin and the WaPo editorial board, disagreed with Carter at the time. Here is a similar piece from the controversial James Kirchick.
Basically, it looks like the Carter people perceived the alternatives to Mugabe as too close to the previous white regime.
An environmental think-tank says we can produce zero-emission energy … stunner. Will you be impressed if I produce a coal-industry think-tank report saying that coal is the way to go?
Everybody would love to have affordable clean energy. Every single administration has spent billions over the last few decades on developing alternative-fuel energy, and so have the energy companies themselves. GE, for example, is massively invested in wind and solar. They have a huge profit motive to make renewables work; but so far, they have not been able to produce energy in the amounts needed and at the price needed to be competitive with fossil fuels or nuclear. That’s just the fact.
We have made a lot of progress, and technological problems may yet be solved (e.g. improved battery capacity would help enormously). And I have no problem with continuing to invest in alternative-fuels research, and Carter (and everyone else) was right to do so. But it would be absurd to pretending that it’d all be possible if we would just try hard enough. We simply do not have the technology yet, any more than we have the ability to power cars with cotton balls.
The EV1 failed because GM couldn’t make anything close to a profit on it; companies exist to make money. Thirty years on, hybrids are all the rage; they are still unprofitable, but we’re getting much closer to them being competitive, and eventually they may become the norm, and I hope they do. I also hope that someday we get all our energy from renewables.
If and when it happens, it will be the work of many hands: Carter’s among them, but by no means the only or the foremost.
I think Carter deserves a lot of credit in this category. However, it took him over one year to get his energy policy passed in Congress–and this is when the Democrats had substantial majorities in both the House and Senate. That fact was one of the first indications of Carter’s ineffectiveness as a leader. Also, the importance of having an energy policy itself faded quickly into the background as a political issue once Reagan got in and, with the exception of a few oil shocks around the time of the first Gulf War, the early part of W’s administration, and during the price hike in 2007-08, largely remained there until Obama. Carter’s defeat in 1980 had so thoroughly covered the issue of energy independence with loser dust that politically it was seen as potential negative. Thus, until 2008, it got very little play among either Republicans or Democrats.
It’s interesting to see where mswas got it from. Thanks for the links.
It’s still nonsense, no matter who’s saying it. The ballyhooed 1979 election left the whites in charge of the police, military, civil service, and judiciary. It assured 4% of the population of at least 28% of the seats in Parliament. It’s interesting that both those opinion pieces gloss over that.
Right, but Muzorewa won the election. Those two articles you linked are the ones that introduced me to the topic, so I am certainly open to the idea that it is a biased position, and will gladly entertain counter-arguments.
It’s interesting that you gloss over Muzorewa’s win. Why was his win illegitimate?
Also, I disagree that Robert Mugabe is superior to white dominated rule. Calling it nonsense is hand-waving it away. It’s your turn to backup your arguments. Why was Muzorewa not qualified for the government of Zimbabwe?
I don’t know… it would really depend on the details in the study. I don’t want to labor the point, but you are backing up your perspective with quote from a guy who simply claims that energy independence can’t be done. I produced a 290 page book detailing why it can be done- I don’t think it is fair to portray this as a pair of equivalent-but-opposite think-tanks canceling each other out. OTOH, I take the research I pointed out as a description of an extreme position (that appears possible) to put Carter’s call for 20% of our power from solar in perspective. It didn’t happen, but he wasn’t just dreaming either. He was also rather pro-coal, more into independence than ‘green’ as I take it.
Can you cite that fact?
I agree that that there is some progress, though right now I think the country gets maybe 2% of its power from all alternative sources combined. Carter wanted to view the energy struggle as ‘the moral equivalent of war’, which would make costs less relevant anyway in the same way the costs of war are treated- as simply necessary. And considering the estimates of the cost of the Iraq war topping $3 trillion, does it seem at least plausible that the country could get better results investing that money in clean energy instead?
And- not everybody wants clean energy, and the people who don’t sometimes seem to have the final word. Here’s an article about Chevron sitting on the patents for electric car batteries, for one example:
Chevron squashes EV battery technology
Why is it absurd to think it is all possible? I’d say we do have the technology, what we don’t have is the infrastructure. For instance, we know how to build a better electric grid, which can go a long way in ‘making it all possible’, but simply haven’t built them. Cotton-ball cars are absurd, but I’m not convinced that EV’s are absurd.
Are you sure that is the reason GM ended the EV-1? According to the story they didn’t allow anyone to buy them at any price, and worked very hard to eliminate the California statute that required a certain percentage of vehicles to be EV’s.
Can you cite that hybrids are unprofitable?
Let me say that I don’t really know what to think about Carter- I was too young to notice. There are an awful lot of bad things said about him, but considering that the forces who are most interested in us not achieving oil independence are the ones who influenced the government for so long (I’m thinking of the Bushes in particular), I wonder what is the fair judgment of Carter and what is more of a partisan smear.
Well we’re well into hijack land here, and I’m not going to have time to get into a lot of reading and looking up of the cites you request – I’d simply encourage you to do a search and look at any of the numerous threads we’ve had on the practical viability of alternative fuels. Or start a new thread or threads if you prefer.
There was far, far more wrong with Carter than his energy policy. His approval ratings, as well as his failure to win a second term only six years after Watergate, speak volumes.
I think promoting alternative energy is a great thing and have no problem whatsoever with his aims in that regard; nontheless I think he was a remarkably inept President, one of the five worst of the 20th century.