How many times can presidential and congressional candidates run on the same pledge to do something about it before we demand that they really do?

OK. For the sake of discussion, let’s leave all that Republican-Democrat, Left Wing-Right Wing, Conservative-Liberal nonsense out of it for the moment. Let’s just look at the facts.

And the fact is that, ever since the Arab oil embargo of 1973 when those old enough to remember can recall standing in long lines for a few gallons of gasoline, we’ve known that a day of reckoning was inevitable.

In fact, even before that, during the Arab-Israel Six-Day War in 1967, a short-lived oil embargo served notice on the United States that we could be blackmailed by the Arab states anytime they chose to turn off the tap.

Yet under Republican and Democratic administrations — from Lyndon Johnson to Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter to Ronald Reagan, the first George Bush to Bill Clinton, and on to the current George — we have done little but pay lip service to what has obviously been one of the greatest threats to our way of life.

And now in this current presidential campaign, we can expect more pledges to free our nation from its dependence on foreign oil.

All of the plans, however, whether they involve off-shore drilling or the development of alternate fuels and cars that get 100 miles to the gallon will have one thing in common: It will take time – years, in fact – for them to have an effect on the price of gas at the pump or the cost of heating your home.

It may be like crying over spilled milk, or in this case spilled oil, but the fact is that if we had adopted a meaningful long-term energy policy back when we should have those "long-term goals" would have by now been long met.

Say what you will about his presidency – and here come the partisan catcalls – Jimmy Carter had the right idea in 1977. That was 31 years ago.

In a prime time televised speech, Carter called the energy crisis "the greatest challenge our country will face during our lifetimes."

He proposed a 10-part energy program and asserted, "The most important thing about these proposals is that the alternative may be a national catastrophe. Further delay can affect our strength and our power as a nation. It is a problem we will not solve in the next few years, and it is likely to get progressively worse through the rest of this century."

Of course, Carter’s call for "an effective and comprehensive energy policy" was ignored, mainly because the embargo had ended, and American consumers who had briefly flirted with the idea of high-mileage cars happily resumed their love affair with gas-guzzling, high-powered vehicles that can go from zero to 60 faster than anyone but a race car driver really needs to go.

So what happens now? Maybe countries like Saudi Arabia and our own petroleum industry, afraid that we might be serious this time about reducing our dependency on oil, will once again flood the market and temporarily drive the price back down.

Or maybe this time the price will reach the point where we will finally be forced to adopt a meaningful energy policy that will free us from the continuing threat of foreign blackmail.

Consider what happened at the beginning of World War II when Japan cut off our source of natural rubber.

Rubber was vital both to our economy and to the nation’s ability to wage war. In addition to tires, it was estimated that every military plane required one-half ton of rubber, every tank a ton, and each member of the military 32 pounds annually for footwear, clothing and other equipment.

At that time, the technology for the production of synthetic rubber was even less advanced than the technology for alternate fuels is today.

But the U.S. government joined forces with the rubber companies and the petrochemicals industry in a crash program. And within 18 months, the United States was producing 70,000 tons of synthetic rubber a month to replace the supply of natural rubber cut off by the Japanese.

Does anyone doubt that America couldn’t do something similar again? That, if the world’s oil wells all ran dry, we couldn’t develop synthetic fuels and other alternate sources of energy, including efficient batteries to power our vehicles?

Or do you really think we’d just throw in the towel, and go back to using horses and buggies?