United States Energy Policy: The Translucent Hand and the Art of Muddling Through

The United States has been searching for some years for a viable energy policy. Energy policy became a matter of prominence in the early 1970s, when world oil prices began to climb and OPEC emerged as a front-page phenomenon and a familiar topic on the evening news. This is not to say that there were no substantive energy policy issues that antedated the oil price explosion and the takeover of the world oil market by the producing nations. Indeed, such energy policy problems as natural gas pricing, oil import policy, the tax treatment of income from oil and gas production, public lands and the leasing of the Outer Continental Shelf, and interfuel competition, for example, already had a long history before energy became a fashionable issue. But energy policy had seemed to involve arcane issues that were often submerged in a general perception that world oil supplies were available in unlim- ited quantities at bargain-basement prices forever...