Myth: It is the federal government’s duty to provide America with “green” sources of power.
Truth: The Constitution has given the federal government specific and limited powers. Nowhere in the Constitution is the government authorized (even implicitly) to regulate energy for any reason.
Likewise, except for the explicit power the federal government has over federal territories, the Constitution states within the 10th Amendment that, as the federal government is not given the power to regulate this, any power to regulate environmental affairs belongs to the states or to the people.
The federal Department of Energy was created in 1977 in response to the oil crisis and charged with developing more domestic energy resources so we would be less dependent on foreign oil. Since then, we have only become more dependent, and the federal government’s policies have done as much to discourage domestic production as to promote it. The Department of Energy itself supplies this graph showing that domestic production has fallen, while imports and consumption have risen.
