Remember the Synthetic Fuel Corporation?

I had never heard of it. But thanks to the Heritage Foundation, I found this backgrounder. In 1980 president (big government lacky) Carter formed a federal corporation with an $18B budget to “solve the energy crisis in 5 years”. They had targets to be creating over 2M barrels per day by 1987. But of course government stupidity, partnering with the oil companies and the drastic drop in crude in the 80’s lead to a huge failure. Regan rightly killed it in 1985. While I agree that the government cant commercialize squat, the part about minimum standards to support the free market was right and should be kept.

Another good piece of history on the energy independence topic is Ronald Bailey’s timeline over at Reason.