The behinder we got: Heckuva job on energy policy, Dick!

It seems much longer ago than eight years that Dick Cheney was scolding his fellow Americans for demanding higher conservation standards and more alternative and sustainable energy sources. Conservation, the vice president imperiously told us, was merely “a sign of personal virtue,” not a basis for a “sound” national policy. Any attempt to curtail the nation’s profligate consumption of finite resources was, he implied, at odds with our national exceptionalism. It was God’s will that we consume more, not less, than other nations, that we build and buy bigger cars, that we widen and increase highways. Public transportation? Expanded train networks? Green buildings? Screw ‘em!

Instead, our policy was “Drill, baby, drill!” This brilliant strategy, reprised for the McCain-Palin campaign, was built upon the sandy foundation of secret meetings in the White House with the CEOs of the oil, gas, coal and timber companies. These czars were part of an “energy task force” that dictated the policy that has now reached a dead end.

As the Washington Post put it at the time, “The list of participants’ names and when they met with administration officials provides a clearer picture of the task force’s priorities and bolsters previous reports that the review leaned heavily on oil and gas companies and on trade groups