Mark Hatfield Quotes
We are ready to kill to keep our automobiles running. We're ready to kill to keep up our materialistic, wasteful economy.... I am sick and tired of 18-year-olds being coerced into bearing the burden of the failures of politicians to face the tough economic choices needed to end our dependency on foreign oil.
Mark Hatfield, Governor of Oregon, U. S. Senator (Republican, OR), 1974
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Bush, as President Jimmy Carter had done before him, called for reduced dependency on foreign oil and increased research in other forms of energy production.
There are those who worry that we will run out of oil. However, as Khosla observes, the more immediate danger is the pollution of the planet’s air supply by burning fossil fuels like oil in large volumes.
Actually, there were several purposes in the legislation creating the Department of Energy, albeit energy independence was one of the primary ones. However, the Department’s activities have been controlled by Congress and the various administrations. Neither of these two branches of our government has been willing to allow and/or require the Energy Department to do what is necessary to obtain energy independence, Each step in that direction is opposed by powerful interests and so this has been gridlocked.
The American public did not accept the need for conservation during Carter’s administration. Carter and many people then thought the major problem was that we were running out of fossil fuels. With shale gas and other techniques there was much more fuel that was suspected. However, the real problem was clean fuel and carbon causing global warming. So wind, solar and other “clean” energy sources have become very inporantant.
Many argue that they are hardly reflected at all. The reason is the governments pay for much of the real cost and spread the cost over its taxpayers. Some costs are not monetary—premature deaths from pollution or corruption in petroeconomic corrupt states. People just suffer.
The “burn” referred to gasoline that is burned in automobiles.
Energy conservation requires chnge and sacrifice in the short term while fracking has few short term difficulties and requires the vast majority of American to do nothing. The extent of medium and long term damages that fracking will cause is yet unknown and is made even more difficult to know by the practice of the oil drilling companies of keeping the chemicals, amounts, and procedures the use for fracking secret.
His assertion that wind energy is less expensive than the fossil fuel alternative is not accurate if one accounts for the costs on the basis of conventional accounting methods. It was at that time more expensive which is why it’s use was limited. However, the existing methods of accounting did not charge the fossil fuels for the environmental degregation that they cause and the cost to society to overcome these or live with them. More important there is no charge to the cost of fossil fuels for the deleterious health effects that their extraction and use cause. Global warming / climate change is not considered at all in the economic analysis.
Mark Odom Hatfield was an American politician and educator from the state of Oregon. A Republican, he served for 30 years as a United States Senator from Oregon, and also as chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee. A native Oregonian, he served in the United States Navy in the Pacific Theater during World War II after graduating from Willamette University. After the war he earned a graduate degree from Stanford University before returning to Oregon and Willamette as a professor.
