Every significant journey has a beginning.
For me, the journey that ultimately led to the founding of FAIR Energy Foundation did not begin in 2018 with the filing of our Petition for Reconsideration of the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Endangerment Finding. It began decades earlier, as a young man experiencing firsthand the consequences of America’s growing dependence on foreign energy.
I had just earned my driver’s license.
Interstate 70 had recently opened, and for a young driver there was no greater feeling than the freedom of the open highway. The speed limit was 70 miles per hour. Gasoline cost a little over 30 cents per gallon. America was strong, optimistic, and growing, and like so many young Americans, I believed the opportunities before us were limitless.
Then, almost overnight, everything changed.
The Arab oil embargo of 1973–1974 brought the Nation to a standstill. Gasoline prices climbed to more than 60 cents per gallon. Service stations began running out of fuel. Long lines of automobiles stretched for what seemed like forever. States instituted odd-even gasoline rationing, allowing motorists to purchase gasoline only on alternating calendar days according to whether the last digit of their license plate was odd or even.
I vividly remember waiting in a line of automobiles that stretched nearly a mile.
It was finally my assigned day to purchase gasoline under the odd-even rationing system. I patiently waited as the line slowly crept forward, only to discover that the service station had exhausted its fuel supply before I reached the pump.
There simply wasn’t any gasoline left.
To many, it was merely an inconvenience. To me, it became a defining moment.
For the first time, I fully understood that decisions made half a world away could profoundly affect the daily lives of ordinary Americans. A nation’s energy supply was not merely an economic issue. It affected our freedom to travel, our economy, our national security, our foreign policy, our manufacturing base, our military readiness, and ultimately our independence as a Nation.
That experience ignited a lifelong passion to understand energy—its history, its economics, its relationship to national security, and its indispensable role in advancing human prosperity.
As I continued my studies, I came to recognize that this lesson extended far beyond the events of 1973.
Throughout modern history, energy has repeatedly shaped the course of nations. Coal fueled the Industrial Revolution. Petroleum transformed transportation, agriculture, manufacturing, and warfare. During the Second World War, oil became an indispensable strategic resource. The American embargo on oil exports to Imperial Japan was one of several major developments preceding the attack on Pearl Harbor, while President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s meeting with King Abdulaziz aboard the USS Quincy underscored the strategic importance of Middle Eastern energy to American foreign policy. In the decades that followed, events from the Suez Crisis to the Persian Gulf conflicts, and from the Strait of Hormuz to the Arab oil embargo, demonstrated again and again that energy security and national security are inseparable.
The lesson became unmistakable.
A nation that cannot reliably produce or secure its own energy can never be completely secure, economically independent, or free to determine its own destiny.
That conviction stayed with me throughout my career. It led me to study science, economics, law, public policy, and history. It eventually inspired the founding of FAIR Energy Foundation and our commitment to advancing abundant, affordable, reliable energy through sound science, honest inquiry, transparency, and free-market principles.
Looking back, I can still picture that nearly mile-long line of automobiles waiting for gasoline that never came.
That lesson, forged while sitting in a nearly mile-long line waiting for gasoline that never came, has guided my work ever since.
It continues to guide FAIR Energy Foundation today.
Dave Wallace – President
FAIR Energy Foundation