Carter's energy bill

'Let's face it!' said my wife, 'We simply have an awful climate.' Now, this is an astounding, late confession from a girl, sorry, woman. Girl, is an Americanism for any woman over 50, as in the idiom current at summer parties, 'Let's round up the girls and get going to dinner!'

I repeated some astounding remark from a woman who has been a dedicated, practically a belligerent New Yorker since, I should guess, the time when Peter Stuyvesant was mayor, who cavorted with the boys, and I mean boys, all over town, a couple of decades before the word 'air-conditioning' had ever entered the language, who always said she wouldn't want to live anywhere else on earth, etc. etc. But this new confession was not rung from her. It came quite quietly with a sad inflection, as I'm told all true confessions do, not screamed out in agony after a bout of torture as confessions are always shown in the movies. 

What caused it? Well, superficially, you could say it's because she'd been, during July, in London, so now she's saying, 'The best thing about London is the climate'. A wild remark, if ever there was one. The real reason for this turnabout, I suspect, has everything to do with the coming on of age. For the past month, more, the young people I know around New York say, some time every morning, 'Isn't it awful?' 'It,' of course, being the blanketing heat. But they say it almost as a greeting with a sunny smile. To the young, stifling heat and piercing cold are like wet nappies to a baby. Simply, life. You squawk about it briefly and then somebody makes a funny face or dangles a toy and you're happy again. But, as you get old, the wet nappy is a permanent fact of life. 

When I first covered Washington, in fact for the first 15 years or so, Congress used to work up a head of steam through June and quit before 4 July in order, at all costs, to get out of what the television commentators call 'the nation's capital' and what Thomas Jefferson called 'that Indian swamp in the wilderness'. It does seem at this time of year as bad as Delhi. 

But air-conditioning did one dubious thing to government. It attracted more people to Washington and it made the law-makers want to stay and talk more. In some years, they barely get away for two weeks, but this time they are in recess until September and the last thing they received and voted on was the president's energy bill. The house debated it hotly for a week, kicked out some of Mr Carter's favourite provisions, amended others, added their own and finally passed it by a comfortable margin 244 to 177. Now, I assure you, I'm not going into the details of a bill, which is, if anything, more complicated than the American income tax. It has over a hundred provisions, by which I mean sections, and once you plunge into the thickets of them it's like trying to find your favourite wild flower in the jungles of the Amazon. 

Very briefly, and in the main, I'd like just to mention some of the devices whereby President Carter hopes to pour billions of dollars into the economy to save about three million barrels of oil a day and persuade the public utilities to shift from natural gas, which is dangerously scarce, to coal, which is abundant but uniformly dirty, as the environmentalists have started to lament. Congress absolutely refused to go for an increase in the price of petrol, simply because that is the symbol to the ordinary citizen of a government raid on his pocketbook. So what they're doing is imposing a tax on crude oil that's domestically produced so as to bring the refiners' cost up to the world level, and this increase will then be passed on to the ordinary car driver as, in the next year or two, a seven-cent increase in the price of petrol. So the increase will come at him sideways and nobody can say, 'My Congressman voted to increase the price of petrol'. 

There are two new items which can fairly be said to be President Carter's own ideas and both of them have an old-fashioned, moral touch which I think will appeal to a lot of Americans who've been suspecting – however wrongly – since the Arab boycott that the big boys, the oil companies, have profited from it. One of the new laws is a punishment for bad guys and the other is a reward for good guys. The punishment takes the form of a stiff tax on the purchase price of cars that don't get many miles to the gallon. In fact Congress has set a standard of good behaviour. The 1979 car models are expected to get 15 miles to the gallon. Any car that gets less will have to bear this new tax the day you buy it. By 1985, the manufacturers have been warned, the acceptable standard must be 23 and a half miles to the gallon. The main idea, of course, is to encourage the manufacturers to make, and the people to buy, cars that don't gobble up the fuel. 

These taxes are really something. If, in 1979, your car gets only 12 or 13 miles to the gallon, you'll pay an extra £200 for it and if, in 1985, you're rich enough to buy a big car, and there are such that gets no more than ten miles to the gallon, then the government figures you can also afford to pay an extra £2,270 over the purchase price. 

Well, the reward is given to home owners who insulate their houses against the winter cold and so may expect to use less heating oil, and they could get as much as a £250 credit on the first £1,200 they pay into the federals as income tax. Well, these are the provisions that affect you and me directly. The rest of the bill is taken up with, ooh, innumerable provisions for stopping existing power plants from using natural gas, punitive taxes against industries that use oil and gas to fire boilers, overhauling electricity rates according to how effectively the companies conserve energy, and so on. 

But President Carter, having got most of what he wanted in this bill, he, too, quit Washington and went off to his hometown of Plains, Georgia 'on holiday' the papers said, and he'll be there maybe a week or so, for these days there's no such thing as a summer holiday for the President of the United States. What a happy, long-gone time it was when the August newspapers showed you President Coolidge wading a trout stream, or President Roosevelt hauling in a big marlin from the stern of a friend's yacht. Even if President Carter dares to go out and hunt a rabbit, you can be fairly sure that the news photographers will not be encouraged to shoot it – to film it, that is. 

With all the problems of the world on his desk, the president must be known and seen to be at them all the time and, it has to be said, to the alarm and exhaustion of his hundreds of aides, President Carter fills and apparently enjoys, a regular 18-hour day. 

It's an interesting hangover from the pioneer days that of the last eight presidents, four of them were born on farms – Truman, Eisenhower, Johnson, Carter – and have the farmer's habits. Mr Carter is up at 5.30 and he says he feels it's almost a privilege to have about 30 minutes to himself sitting out on a rocker, on a balcony overlooking Washington, just thinking. But at 6 he's ready for work, at 7 for breakfast, at 7.30 the overnight cables come in and then the bills and the reports from government departments and the speeches to get ready. Not to mention the trips to and fro, the boning-up on what the Prime Minister of Israel has on his mind, and then Mr Sadat of Egypt, and then the President of Mexico and maybe Mr d'Estaing and other bigwigs who'll be on their way to Washington from Chile, Sweden, Canada, Argentina, Somaliland, South Africa, Uruguay, you name it. 

He works through normally until about 7 or 8 and then has a short, austere dinner. Even the formal dinners throw a shock these days into visitors expecting Mrs Kennedy's French chef. A couple I know who were all a-flutter at being asked for dinner at the White House wrote an indignant letter to us after the event, appalled at receiving bean soup, pork and corn pudding and ice cream. No cocktails and no wine either. 

Well, after dinner, there are more papers and bills, and letters by the hundred, and unlike the Carter of the old farming days, he's up till midnight or beyond. The one break he admits is an indulgence, and he conveys it almost as a frivolity, is early in the morning when he doesn't go out on the balcony to his rocker, he sometimes sneaks into his study and spends as long as forty minutes, before breakfast, listening to Mozart. 

Any superior person who's appalled at good corn pudding might care to remember that it's been quite some time since we've had in the White House a president whose musical preference was for Mozart. Not, I should guess, since Thomas Jefferson. Some of the more high-toned types, Woodrow Wilson, for instance, never went to the opera in their lives. Franklin Roosevelt was tone deaf. And there's no evidence of any musical taste at all on the part of Eisenhower or Kennedy or Johnson. But Farmer Carter loves Mozart as Farmer Truman loved Chopin. 

Well, Mr Carter is listening more and enjoying it more on his glorious week-long vacation in the dog days. But don't think he isn't on the ball. Never more than ten seconds from him is an obscure, inconspicuous man who carries in his pocket the code, the code that changes daily, and is hooked in to the sealed code in the computers in the bowels of the earth below Omaha, the headquarters of the strategic air command which holds at the ready never less than a thousand missiles. And that obscure man's code is plugged also into that one single model plane, a model of the air command which is always in the air droning between there and the Baring Strait, just in case the impulse comes through that announces an enemy missile launch. It must be a creepy thing to have to live with. 

Let us hope that once a day the president can forget the hellish possibility in the angelic music of Mozart.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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