Biden was already a veteran in the Senate as he watched then-Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter flail about during the 1970s, outlawing crude oil exports, implementing various regimes aimed at price controls, passing a Fuel Use Act that forced the building of hundreds of new heavy-polluting coal-fired power plants across the country because they were sure we were running out of natural gas. On and on, the brain-dead interventionist energy policy choices went. No bad idea seemed too awful for consideration, and it all culminated in 1980 with the passage by a Senate in which Biden held a seat of the Windfall Profit Tax, the single most brain-dead policy choice of them all.