Last Thursday, after reviewing the destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina on the oil-rich Gulf Coast states, President Bush addressed Americans’ growing concerns over spiraling gasoline costs and tightening supplies in his typical it’s-so-simple-even-you-can-understand-it style: “Don’t buy gas if you don’t need to.”

Bush’s call for Americans to conserve gas is remarkable for two reasons. First, it is a dramatic departure from his own past statements. Bush had never before asked Americans to curb their consumption. On the contrary, Bush told Americans after 9/11 that they could best support their nation’s fight against terrorism by going shopping. Second, Bush made it sound as though conserving gas would be easy and painless. However, if history is any guide, energy conservation will not be nearly as simple as the president made it seem.

Americans never tire of celebrating our history as the triumph of individual freedom, but we are uncomfortable acknowledging the real limits history places on individual choice. We tend to overlook how past government policies shape our present choices. If we want to encourage different outcomes, we first need to create new government policies.

Americans’ reliance on the automobile is a case in point. In the 1940s and 1950s America embarked on a massive social migration from the cities to the suburbs that centered on automobiles. The federal government encouraged and funded this transformation through a variety of programs: the GI Bill of Rights offered millions of veterans the opportunity to buy new suburban homes with no money down and monthly payments stretched over (at the time an unheard of) thirty years; the Interstate Highway Act of 1956 dedicated billions of dollars of public money to building 41,000 miles of interstate highways, so that Americans could get to their suburban homes cheaply and conveniently by car; and government housing policies “protected” the value of new white suburban homes by discriminating against blacks.

As a result of the collective decision to suburbanize America after World War Two, Americans cannot simply stop driving. It is not an option for the millions of Americans who rely on their cars to get to work, to buy food and other necessities for their families, and to take part in social and political activities in their communities. The automobile is more indispensable to Americans today than the horse was to Americans in the nineteenth century as people must now travel greater distances in the course of their everyday lives than they can possibly walk.

President Carter found out the hard way that Americans were wedded to their cars. He made energy conservation one of the main goals of his administration. He believed America faced a desperate energy shortage and that our dependence on foreign oil threatened our national security. He undertook a massive four-year public relations campaign, including wearing a sweater for a nationally televised speech to publicize the need to turn down thermostats, to convince Americans to curb their energy consumption. Despite Carter’s plea that the energy crisis constituted “a moral equivalent to war,” Americans did not significantly reduce their energy use and Carter eventually abandoned his campaign. Carter failed not because, as he said, “too many of us tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption,” but because before any one person can significantly lessen his energy consumption, including driving less, Americans collectively must confront the underlying historical forces driving their consumption.

Bush’s call for Americans to conserve gas probably did not signal a decision to make energy conservation a focal point of his next three years in office. He is an oil man after all and already has a lot on his plate from the war in Iraq to Social Security reform to dealing with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. However, if a future American president does decide to get serious about conserving gas, he will need much more than a clumsy public relations stunt to make it happen. Government policies created our patterns of gas consumption; it will take new government policies to nudge Americans towards choosing an alternative.