Let's let Carter speak in his own words, and remember, this is 1977:
World consumption of oil is still going up. If it were possible to keep it rising during the 1970s and 1980s by 5 percent a year as it has in the past, we could use up all the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the end of the next decade.
I know that many of you have suspected that some supplies of oil and gas are being withheld. You may be right, but suspicions about oil companies cannot change the fact that we are running out of petroleum.
All of us have heard about the large oil fields on Alaska's North Slope. In a few years when the North Slope is producing fully, its total output will be just about equal to two years' increase in our nation's energy demand.
Each new inventory of world oil reserves has been more disturbing than the last. World oil production can probably keep going up for another six or eight years. But some time in the 1980s it can't go up much more. Demand will overtake production. We have no choice about that.
Carter loyalists will say, he wasn't wrong, he was just off by 20 years! But the fact is that if we took his prescription we would have crippled our economy throughout the eighties and nineties. How would you feel about giving up 30% of your standard of living to forestall something that didn't start to happen until just about now (if even now).
The situation now is that we have oil, we know where it is, it's cheap oil, but we are not drilling it. Whatever that is, it's not the free flow of oil at market prices, no it's artificially restricted. And even if that restriction translates to a small percentage of the oil price, that percentage is a real number that comes out of the real pockets of real people. Democrats have a choice to make; do they support the working man, or do they support the environmentalists desire to switch out of oil pronto?
Jimmy Carter had at his disposal a proven technology that would have helped reduce the dependance on foreign oil and lower the cost of energy for everyone, but he helped kill the nuclear power industry anyway.
Let's trust the free market. Remove artificial barriers on energy, let the scientists and engineers build us some safe systems and we go with it. The free market will tell us when it's cost effective to switch to solar. The free market will tell the oil industry when their stuff is too expensive and to lower it or we won't buy anymore. The free market will make billionaires out of energy entrepeneurs. The free market will buy electric cars when it makes sense.
(with thanks to Nixguy.com for the text saying exactly what I was thinking).