At the end of his lone term in office we had our nation’s first ever National Energy Plan (the National Energy Act was its legislative form), a Department of Energy instead of the more than fifty unrelated government offices previously charged with overseeing national energy policy, a Strategic Petroleum Reserve to help smooth wildly vacillating oil prices caused by our national dependence on foreign oil, and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, whose mandate was to explore and make feasible renewable and small, decentralized power options.
