Uncle Sam Invents the Energy Crisis
Energy is the great force in economic growth. No energy, no Industrial Revolution. Energy is the grand prize of prosperous nations. In the 1700s, that energy came from wind, water, and wood; in the 1800s from coal; and in the 1900s mostly from oil and natural gas.
England may have begun the Industrial Revolution in the 1700s, but Americans captured it in the 1800s, and then used cheap energy to transform the world. The United States has often been at the forefront in the quest for energy, in part because of its abundant supply and in part because producing energy has attracted many of the greatest entrepreneurs and inventors in the nation’s history.
Relatively free markets were the means to American abundance in energy. Coal, for example, replaced wood as a chief energy source in the early 1800s. Key entrepreneurs like Joseph Scranton mined Pennsylvania coal to heat homes; then he used it to fuel other industries. When he and his Scranton cousins used coal on nearby iron deposits, they made the rails for the majestic Erie Railroad—the first large-scale railroad that was American-made. Even today, American coal reserves are plentiful enough to supply our nation for hundreds of years.1
In the next generation, oil entered the market, first as kerosene to light homes and then as gasoline to power the newly invented automobile. John D. Rockefeller, perhaps the greatest entrepreneur in U.S. history, was the mastermind who discovered how to refine oil so cheaply he could supply light to most American homes for one cent an hour. His Standard Oil Company sold oil to most of America and most of the world in the late 1800s. “Good news for whales,” crowed one newspaper at the triumph of kerosene over whale oil. Rockefeller, meanwhile, became the first billionaire in American history, and oil was his way to touch the world. “We must ever remember,” Rockefeller wrote one of his partners in 1885, “we are refining oil for the poor man and he must have it cheap and good.”
Rockefeller not only was making profits; he was a prophet. Naysayers gloomily noted that oil, as a fossil fuel, was limited. Pennsylvania’s oil reserves were running out. Oil, the critics predicted, would be here today and gone tomorrow. But Rockefeller always had faith in the future of oil. He was the first industrial giant to invest heavily in research and development. He believed that in a free market, man’s ability to find oil would outstrip his use of it for centuries to come. Oil was not just the here-and-now solution for energy needs but the future solution as well.
As Pennsylvania ran out of oil, for example, it was discovered in Ohio. But the Ohio oil was high in sulfur and therefore unusable in household lamps. Rockefeller, when faced with America’s first “energy crisis,” bought the Ohio oil anyway—over loud shrieks from his board of directors at Standard Oil. In the midst of great stress, Rockefeller’s triumph was soon at hand. His research and development team discovered a process that made high-sulfur oil usable in households across America. Standard Oil would continue to refine almost 60 percent of all oil used in the world in the 1890s.2
In his old age, Rockefeller watched so-called energy shortages come and go. In 1901, Texas emerged as the next major source of oil. Oklahoma and California chipped in, too. Then came offshore drilling—all just in time to fuel the gigantic auto industry of the twentieth century. In fact, until 1973, the story of energy in America in the twentieth century is the story of abundance. Before World War II, coal accounted for more than 50 percent of the fuel Americans used. Even so, oil was so plentiful that Texas had to cap wells to keep the price from plummeting. American oil fueled the tanks and jeeps of the Allies in World War II, and after that U.S. reserves in oil continued to outpace use. Middle Eastern oil was a mere backdrop on a world stage dominated by American oil, coal, and natural gas.3
One of the key issues energy producers had to address after World War II was the environment. Extracting coal, oil, and natural gas from the earth often damaged the land; burning these fuels polluted the air. Many of the best entrepreneurs in energy knew this and worked hard to make the industry more friendly to the earth.
John D. Rockefeller was probably the first, and the most effective, environmentalist in early U.S. history. When Rockefeller entered the oil business after the Civil War, oil drilling was destroying the environment of northwest Pennsylvania. Those who struck oil often wasted more than they used. Thousands of barrels of oil poured into Oil Creek, not into tanks. Local creek bottoms were often flooded with runaway oil; the Allegheny River smelled and glistened with it for many miles toward Pittsburgh. Gushers of wasted oil were bad enough; sometimes a careless smoker would turn a spouting well into a killing inferno. Other wasters torpedoed holes with nitroglycerine, sometimes losing the oil and their lives.4
Right from the start, Rockefeller believed that the path to success was to cut waste and produce the best product at the lowest price. Sam Andrews, his early partner at Standard Oil, worked on getting more kerosene per barrel of crude. Both men searched for uses for the by-products from oil, which were often dumped into rivers or left on the ground. They used the gasoline for fuel, some of the tars for paving, and shipped the naphtha to gas plants. They also sold lubricating oil, Vaseline, and paraffin for making candles. Rockefeller and his chemists in research and development discovered three hundred oil by-products, ranging from paint and varnish to dozens of lubricating oils and even anesthetics. “We saw the vast possibilities of the oil industry,” Rockefeller said, “stood at the center of it, and brought our knowledge and imagination and business experience to bear in a dozen, in twenty, in thirty directions.”5
With Rockefeller using all that was in a barrel of oil, the landscape from Titusville to Cleveland was cleaner at last. To talented entrepreneurs, waste is an abhorrent loss of raw materials. Rockefeller, for example, spent an entire day trying to seal cans of his Standard oil with thirty-nine drops of solder instead of the usual forty (he succeeded). In a similar manner, Herbert Dow took Michigan brine that others threw away and used it to make valuable bromine and challenge the Germans. The Wright brothers wanted the lightest, most economical materials to build the fastest planes they could fly. James J. Hill built his Great Northern Railway straighter and with a flatter grade than any other transcontinental.
Even though the world demand for energy skyrocketed after World War II, the U.S. supply of coal, natural gas, and oil was still abundant. From 1948 to 1972, the U.S. use of oil tripled, from 5.8 million barrels a day to 16.4 million barrels. The nations of Western Europe, and Japan, too, saw even greater proportional increases. As plentiful oil became steadily cheaper to produce, it began to replace dirtier coal as the fuel of choice in homes around the world. Where coal was mined, it marred the landscape; where coal was burned, it polluted the air. In fact, during the 1950s and 1960s, oil or natural gas replaced coal as the fuel of choice in many countries. More than ever, consumers could not only afford energy, they could afford the cleaner options. Britain and France largely converted from coal to oil by 1960; American utilities companies, led by Consolidated Edison in New York, began the switch in the late 1960s. Abundance had provided competition, discounts, and choices for fuel.6
Given the abundance of energy, the so-called energy crisis of the 1970s shocked many Americans. If we had a four-hundred-year supply of coal, if we had oil so abundant that drillers had to slow down their production, if we had a booming natural gas industry in the Southwest, and if we had nuclear energy in reserve, why was there an energy crisis? Why were oil prices spiking from less than $4 per barrel in 1973 to $32 per barrel eight years later? Why were we importing half of our oil from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC)?
The answer is that government intervention in energy stifled production. The oil, the natural gas, and the coal were still plentiful, but an onslaught of federal laws killed the incentives to extract and sell them. These laws, most of them new, fell into two categories: laws on the environment, and laws that fixed the prices of energy. In the first category, coal, as we have seen, declined because of environmental restrictions. Nuclear energy was also restricted.
The oil industry was, to some extent, also held hostage by environmentalists. Oil can be depleted and must be replaced by drillers who explore for new reserves. Discovering and then drilling for new oil almost came to a standstill after Richard Nixon became president in 1969. In that year, interventionists used government to halt drilling in California’s Santa Barbara Channel, after an oil spill stirred up understandable complaints. In Alaska, the largest oil fields in North American history were discovered at Prudhoe Bay, but environmentalists blocked drilling there even though no safety standards had been violated. Interventionists also used government to block the building of nine refineries along the east coast, and then imposed emissions standards on cars that added “an estimated 300,000 barrels a day to U.S. oil demand.”7 As historian Allen Matusow noted, “the Alaskan caribou got a reprieve, but energy supplies tightened and dependence on foreign oil grew.”8
The second problem was price-fixing. Price controls on oil became part of Nixon’s presidency, destroying incentives for entrepreneurs to explore and drill for oil. The energy crisis became a national problem in 1973, but Nixon laid its foundation in 1971 through “the stupidities of price controls.”9 He believed that inflation was an obstacle to his reelection campaign in 1972, so he instituted price controls the year before, hoping that stable prices would please voters. Price-fixing, however, changes incentives. When the president, for example, fixed the price of home heating oil, refiners had no incentive to search for and supply the increased demand for oil. Why take the risk when the reward was so small? By the winter of 1972–73, with the supplies of heating oil almost exhausted, many Americans wore heavy sweaters in their cold houses. Some states imposed their own controls to limit the use of heating oil, and the city of Denver shut its schools for a few days because it didn’t have the fuel to keep students warm. Finally, in January 1973, with Nixon safely reelected, new regulations took effect that allowed heating oil prices to rise by 8 percent.
When the oil companies raised their prices by the permitted 8 percent, they came under fire from the Cost of Living Council, which had been created by the price-control laws. On March 6, 1973, the Cost of Living Council reinstated price controls on the twenty-four largest oil firms, but left the others virtually free to charge what they wanted. The “Big 24” had no incentive to refine oil, or to import it to sell to shivering Americans eager to raise their thermostats.10 The voters may have been cold, but the politicians warmed to the idea of choking the profits of big oil companies. When voters complained about short supplies, the politicians could say they were fighting against the power and profits of large oil companies.
Given the emphasis on the environment, the big winner would appear to be natural gas, which is the cleanest of fuels. But price-fixing in natural gas created shortages in that industry, too. The Federal Power Commission (FPC) was created under FDR to set “fair” prices for natural gas. Roosevelt always searched for the policy that would gain the most votes, and price controls on natural gas did this. If controlled rates kept prices low and supplies plentiful, he could take credit for the good results; if the FPC set prices too low and natural gas producers refused to take the risks to ensure a strong supply, then FDR, or other politicians, could blame the gas companies for selfishness. And there seemed to be no real harm to consumers because, before 1973, plentiful oil and coal were available for alternate use. The FPC set prices of natural gas so low that producers steadily lost money during the 1960s. In the early 1970s, they had to cancel contracts because they had no gas to deliver.11 In the midst of plenty, the United States was in a government-created energy crisis.
The first step to solving the energy shortage of 1973 would have been to repeal the price controls on oil and natural gas. That would have spurred drillers to search for new sources of fuel. Once politicians get the power to control prices, however, it is hard to oust them. President Nixon, for example, worried that if he decontrolled either oil or gas he would be blamed if prices shot up. In the case of shortages, however, he and other politicians had scapegoats. They could castigate the oil companies for shirking on their drilling, or he could blame OPEC for being so greedy. Another point: Using market solutions to fix oil prices appears passive and weak to skeptics in the public arena; slapping price controls on large corporations looks bold and forceful. In a crisis, the political bias is for action, even when it makes the problem worse.
The use of price controls, then, was unsound economically, but the concerns for clean air and water were legitimate. The question on the environment is this: Is a healthful environment and plentiful fuel better achieved by government, which is subject to much political manipulation, or by markets, which have incentives to correct some mistakes? In 1870, as we have seen, the rivers in northwest Pennsylvania were full of oil, and the land was soaked in sludge. No EPA existed in 1870, but the oil region had something better: John D. Rockefeller. As an entrepreneur, he abhorred the waste, and his improvements in refining and his use of by-products forced competitors to use their oil more wisely, or else go out of business. The land, the air, and the water of Pennsylvania proved to be resilient. It did recover. So have areas with oil spills, less frequent now, but sometimes tragic for a year or two. Even coal has become somewhat cleaner by installing scrubbers, which use limestone to diminish the sulfur in the smoke. Entrepreneurs have incentives to improve their products and capture the waste. Politicians have incentives to pass restrictive laws that gain votes but raise the costs of business for corporations, which are then easy targets for blame.
The Nixon presidency, with all of its price controls, was a stunning disaster. Even without the Watergate scandal, Nixon’s energy policy doomed his legacy in the White House. His 1973 energy crisis infuriated Americans who had to wait in long gas lines, turn down their thermostats at home, pay more for food at their stores, and drive more slowly on the highways because speed limits were capped at 55 miles per hour. President Nixon goes down in history as the man who staked his energy policy on his ability to manipulate prices, not on the ability of entrepreneurs to find oil if given the incentives to explore for it.
What is most remarkable? That Nixon’s successors, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, did roughly the same thing—with roughly the same results. All three presidents of the 1970s made similar mistakes because they had the same wrong assumptions. They assumed that the 1970s energy shortage, unlike all those in the past, was permanent, that fossil fuels were nearly exhausted. They assumed that energy had to be imported at high prices, and that American power in the world therefore would likely diminish. They assumed that more government, not greater freedom, was the best way out of the energy crisis. The government, so they assumed, needed to impose measures for conservation of fuel, and government also needed to give subsidies to create fuel from alternate sources.12
When Jimmy Carter defeated Gerald Ford for the White House in 1976, Carter decided to stake much of his presidency on his energy policy. In his third month in office he gave a televised address announcing his major ideas. Above all, Carter stressed, the energy shortage was permanent. It was, he told the country, “the greatest challenge our country will face during our lifetimes,” and “it is likely to get progressively worse.” The president spoke with certainty. “We could,” he told the country, “use up all the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the end of the next decade.” Sure, oil production might go up for a brief period, “but some time in the 1980s it can’t go up much more. Demand will overtake production. We have no choice about that.” Why? Because “we can’t substantially increase our domestic production.” It was fixed, and it was “running out.”13
Doing something about the pending energy collapse was, to Carter, “the moral equivalent of war.” That meant massive government involvement to conserve what remaining energy we had. Carter, through his newly created Department of Energy, proposed tax credits to promote conservation, plans for rationing gas, and new taxes for gas-guzzling cars. In fact, Carter further taxed oil drillers because he didn’t want them to reap gains from jumps in international oil prices. That meant a $13 billion windfall profits tax, and new price controls on oil.14
The gloom of Jimmy Carter’s presidency became self-fulfilling. He said oil was disappearing, and his policies made it do so. U.S. oil production dropped from 11 to 9 million barrels a day during the 1970s while oil imports rose sharply. With prices fixed on oil and natural gas, entrepreneurs had no incentives to take risks exploring and drilling to find new sources. Inflation during the Carter presidency skyrocketed to 14 percent, and middle-class and poor Americans fared poorly. From 1978 to 1981 real income for middle-class families dropped from $32,319 to $30,916. For the bottom one-fifth of American households, income dropped from $9,650 to $8,906 during Carter’s last three years in office.15
In the 1980 presidential election, Ronald Reagan swept to victory over Jimmy Carter with the promise to try something new. “There’s more oil in Alaska than in Saudi Arabia,” he liked to say—let’s go get it! On the day he was inaugurated, President Reagan, through executive order, removed all price controls on oil and natural gas. “With the stroke of a pen,” economist Arthur Laffer observed, “the oil crisis ended.”16 Prices for oil and natural gas plummeted, and Americans were paying for gas at the pump less than half of what they paid under President Carter. Economist Robert Crandall studied prices in the natural gas industry and in four other industries that deregulated in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He found that prices fell by at least 25 percent, and sometimes up to 60 percent, in all five industries. Oil prices fell even more, from almost $32 barrel in 1981 to under $13 per barrel five years later.17 When producers had incentives to take risks, they did so; in oil and natural gas the United States discovered new wells and put this abundance at the disposal of consumers across the country.
The free-market solutions in the oil and natural gas industries worked well under President Reagan, but the “energy crisis” of the 1970s had also spawned more federal subsidies for renewable energy. The number of experts praising the benefits of renewable energy grew during the 1980s, and the term “green energy” took root in American society. Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Carter had supported funding for wind power, solar energy, and ethanol for fuel. Carter in particular talked about the need to create “renewable energy sources” to offset the decline in domestic oil production. In a nationally televised speech in 1979, he said, “I am asking for the most massive peacetime commitment of funds and resources in our nation’s history to develop America’s own alternative sources of fuel—from coal, from oil shale, from plant products for gasohol, from unconventional gas, from the sun.”18
The idea of using subsidies to create energy was new. In the past, energy crises always had market solutions. In the 1800s, as we have seen, coal replaced wood as fuel. In the late 1800s and into the 1900s, oil and natural gas began edging out coal. In the same way, kerosene, a by-product of oil, replaced whale oil in the 1870s for lighting homes. Three decades later, cheaper and cleaner electricity replaced kerosene as an illuminant.
The larger point is that sources of energy and lighting had always been market driven. They were major capital investments—among the largest in the country—and entrepreneurs, willing to take risks for the possibility of profits, drilled for oil, and then tried to refine it competitively to capture the huge demand for energy and lighting. Also entering the competition was electricity. Thomas Edison performed hundreds of experiments and invested millions of dollars to develop electricity as a major source of energy. Markets led the way in supplying the energy that powered America and the world.19
Long before Jimmy Carter, entrepreneurs had tried to process farm crops into fuel for cars. Ethanol, for example, is corn that has been ground up and soaked until it ferments into alcohol. Then it can be distilled to make it even stronger. Henry Ford, when building the Model T, made its gas engines usable for either gasoline or ethanol because he didn’t know which one would ultimately be more competitive. Ford loved agriculture and tried to promote ethanol, but he and others discovered that corn was too expensive to grow, harvest, and then convert to fuel.20 Gasoline was thus the market choice—until the energy crisis.
In the 1970s, President Carter embraced the argument that green energy, with strong federal support, would be the effective long-run alternative to oil, natural gas, and coal. New “renewable” sources—using the sun, wind, and corn—would, with government subsidies, be competitive with oil and would be safer for the environment as well. In the 1970s, the RFC was defunct, and so Congress relied on other federal agencies, such as the Environmental Protection Agency, and on acts of Congress to help promote green energy companies. Some of these green energy ideas may yet work out, but most have already failed.21
The biggest winner of federal subsidies has been ethanol. Under market conditions, as Henry Ford proved, ethanol is inferior to gasoline. Ethanol is relatively expensive to produce, and it takes 1.4 gallons of ethanol to take a car as far as one gallon of gas. On the environmental side, ethanol is better than gas on carbon dioxide emissions, but not as efficient with hydrocarbon emissions. In fact, ethanol needed a special exemption to escape the terms of the Clean Air Act. Before 1973, hardly any corn was converted to ethanol.22
With federal subsidies come political entrepreneurs, and green energy has produced the most ambitious political entrepreneur in American history: Dwayne Andreas, president of Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) in the 1970s. Andreas has spent much of his life lobbying senators and presidents to create the federal subsidies for his businesses in ethanol and other products.
Born in Minnesota in 1918, Andreas dropped out of college to work at the family business, Honeymead Products Company, processing soybeans into a variety of products.23 During World War II, he secured a draft deferment and helped produce fifty thousand bushels of soybeans daily for the war effort. The profits he made from government subsidies and the price controls helped fix his mind on the money to be made from special government favors. He sold his share in Honeymead after the war and became an officer for Cargill, also a major soybean producer; later he became president of Archer Daniels Midland (ADM).24
During the 1950s, the opportunities for political entrepreneurship in America were limited, but Andreas exploited them when he could. For a start he collected politicians. His first was Thomas Dewey, the Republican governor of New York, and both men did favors for each other. Dewey, as governor, had soybeans used in the baked bread in prisons throughout New York; and Andreas got Dewey lucrative jobs, such as general counsel for the National Soybean Processors Association.25 In politics, Andreas found politicians in both parties could help him, and he attached himself early to Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota. Humphrey, not a wealthy man, was impressed with large campaign contributions from Andreas and, in turn, Andreas appreciated Humphrey’s efforts to get more soybeans and processed food included in the new Food for Peace program, a federal effort to promote peace through farm exports.
During the 1960s, Andreas gave large gifts to both Humphrey and Richard Nixon, even when they ran against each other for president. Once elected, Nixon tried to help Andreas with wheat exports to China and by including soy products in school lunches. Andreas, in turn, gave generously to Nixon, but often secretly because he had had to pay fines in the past for illegal contributions. During the 1972 presidential campaign, for example, Andreas came to the West Wing of the White House, and gave a large folder of hundred-dollar bills—one thousand in all—to Nixon’s reelection campaign.26
The big returns to Andreas came during the energy crisis when he helped persuade President Carter to give large subsidies to the ethanol industry. Archer Daniels Midland became the largest ethanol producer in the nation, and President Carter steered much of the federal aid for ethanol in Andreas’s direction. He made federal aid for ethanol an explicit part of his administration.
Under Carter, for example, Congress passed an act that would “invest” $60 million in guaranteed loans for distillers of ethanol. Then Congress passed the Energy Tax Act, which gave a credit of 5.2 cents per gallon of gas that contained at least 10 percent ethanol. According to reporter Frank Greven, “During the 1978 Persian Gulf oil crisis, he [Andreas] convinced Carter that using ADM’s ethanol as a lead-free octane booster in gasoline would promote energy independence and cleaner air.”27
Andreas also needed Carter’s help with a tariff. Corn ethanol, Andreas discovered, was not only more expensive than gasoline to produce but also more expensive than ethanol made from sugar. Thus, with Carter’s help, the United States slapped a tariff on imported ethanol, especially from Brazil, which protected Andreas but made ethanol more expensive for consumers. And if American corn-based ethanol needs both subsidies and a tariff to survive, will it ever become a fuel of choice instead of a fuel of force? As financial analyst John McMillan emphasized, “There’s no question that ethanol would not exist without federal subsidies.”28
In 1980, Carter tried to use ethanol subsidies to reward supporters and to win votes for his reelection campaign. One month before the election, his secretary of agriculture announced $341 million in federal cash for new loans to build fifteen ethanol plants. According to Bruce Yellen of the Better Government Association, “Two loan guarantees were approved for individuals who had contributed to the Democratic National Committee or the Carter campaign. And 10 of the 15 guarantees went to states that were, at the time, considered critical to the president’s re-election bid.” Yellen added, “These elements suggested that this last-minute rush was politically inspired, and our interviews with agency officials substantiated this point.”29 When President Reagan discovered all the procedures violated in awarding these quick subsidies, he had them rescinded. Despite this setback, Andreas continued to influence policy under Presidents Reagan, Bush, and Clinton. And, perhaps to return so many favors, Andreas bought ex-president Carter’s peanut farm for $1.5 million.30
As with the RFC, questions of corruption quickly followed the subsidies. For example, in 1977 President Carter named David Gartner, who was Senator Humphrey’s chief of staff, to head the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. In the two years before that appointment, however, Andreas had given $72,000 in ADM stock to Gartner’s children. When that revelation came out, Vice President Walter Mondale urged Gartner to resign “on the grounds that the ethical appearances surrounding the matter were such that he could not operate without public questioning of his integrity and the independence of his judgment.” The power of political entrepreneurs had increased since the RFC scandals of 1951—Gartner refused to resign.31
The diversion today of 40 percent of the nation’s corn crop into ethanol also costs consumers with higher prices for corn, which means higher prices for beef, pork, and chicken. As ethanol expert James Bovard has noted, “That fits the historical pattern of farm policy intentionally sacrificing relatively unsubsidized farmers to subsidized farmers and making all farm profits and losses increasingly a question of political pull.”32
Green energy advocates, with bipartisan support, passed major federal laws in 2005 and 2007 that mandated greater use of corn ethanol, and other biofuels, each year until 2022. Under these bills—the Energy Policy Act of 2005 and the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007—even more of the U.S. corn crop is blended into gasoline. The tariff and the tax credit for ethanol were still in place as well, aiding farmers and corporations in the ethanol business. With so much federal loot at stake, more and bigger companies have emerged to capture the large subsidies. A corporation named Poet, for example, has even surpassed ADM as an ethanol producer. After the 2007 law, Poet also snagged an $80 million federal grant to build an ethanol plant in Iowa.33
The ethanol mandates of 2005 and 2007 had strong bipartisan support in Congress. The 2007 bill passed by votes of 86–8 in the Senate and 314–100 in the House. President George W. Bush was perhaps the most enthusiastic cheerleader for ethanol, and strongly encouraged the 2007 bill. In his 2007 State of the Union message, Bush said, “We must continue changing the way America generates electric power, by even greater use of clean coal technology, solar and wind energy, and clean, safe nuclear power.” Then he added, “We need to press on with battery research for plug-in vehicles, and expand the use of clean diesel vehicles and biodiesel fuel.” He insisted on “investing in new methods of producing ethanol,” and urged Congress to set “a mandatory fuels standard to require 35 billion gallons of renewable and alternative fuels in 2017.” Bush patted himself, and his predecessors, on the back for their bipartisan support for green energy: “We have made a lot of progress, thanks to good policies here in Washington and the strong response of the market.”34
Just as Carter supported “investment” in green energy, so did Bush thirty years later. Federal support for green energy was strong and still undiminished by the consistent failure of ethanol to be economical or friendly to the environment. With more funds from government, Congress and the presidents believed the political entrepreneurs would make green energy work so well that the energy crisis—which they had created—would eventually go away.