Some people have a financial interest to keep the staus quo.
As always, the knee-jerk tendency to blame Bush-Cheney for every problem known to man is based on ignorance or venality, maybe both. Congress never enacted the Bush-Cheney energy policy. Furthermore, Congress has been sitting on its collective hands about energy since at least 1973. Let's see now, during that same period we've had presidents Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, GHW Bush, Clinton and GWB. We've had Dem-controlled Houses for that entire time except for the period between January 1995 and January 2007. In other words, Republicans controlled the House for just 12 of the last 34 years since the 1973 oil shock. They did not control the Senate for the first two years of the GWB administration or the second two years.
The 1973 oil crisis began on October 17, 1973, when the members of Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC, consisting of the Arab members of OPEC plus Egypt and Syria) announced, as a result of the ongoing Yom Kippur War, that they would no longer ship oil to nations that had supported Israel in its conflict with Syria and Egypt (the United States, its allies in Western Europe, and Japan).
[At] The same time, OPEC members agreed to use their leverage over the world price-setting mechanism for oil in order to raise world oil prices...Because of the dependence of the industrialized world on crude oil and the predominant role of OPEC as a global supplier, these price increases were dramatically inflationary to the economies of the targeted countries, while at the same time suppressive of economic activity. The targeted countries responded with a wide variety of new, and mostly permanent, initiatives to contain their further dependency. The United States of America, however, failed to produce any major intitiatives towards reducing its foreign dependency.