Any country that values human rights should condemn any measures taken in that direction.
Unfortunately, the lessons of the 1973, 1979, and 2008 energy crises (energy price spikes), were quickly forgotten once the price of crude oil fell. Aggressive rhetoric notwithstanding, substantive energy policy (goals, research spending, incentives, etc.) reveals almost no conviction whatsoever to reduce oil dependency, even as that dependency entails significant geopolitical and economic risk. The words advocating and professing political commitment to alternative energy or, in today's parlance, "green energy," don't impress me at all. Concrete and sustained action is the criteria by which the nation's energy policy should properly be judged. Unfortunately, once one looks at the policy front, very little has changed. Moreover, little is likely to change in the near-term. If one examines pre-2008 federal budgets and post-2008 federal budgets as proxies for commitment, there has been no dramatic shift on energy policy. There has been no substantial reorientation of spending to suggest a credible commitment to dramatic change, much less any sense of urgency.
In the end, the only thing that has materially changed is that the gap between today's rhetoric and ongoing policy has widened, as rhetoric has shifted even more strongly toward alternative energy while policy has budged very little. To borrow from academic research on "organizational energy," when one combines positive rhetoric with policy inertia, the result is a stance that can reasonably be described as "comfort" or "complacency." IMO, that very well sums up today's energy policy. Worse, there has been enormous continuity in such policy since the very first energy crisis, even as the world has changed markedly and geopolitical vulnerability has increased given the location of remaining proved oil reserves.
As a result, if or when a new energy crises hits, the political response will almost certainly be little different than it was in 2008, almost 35 years after the first great energy price shock: Political leaders will plead for understanding. They will argue that the crisis was unavoidable and assert that there is little that can be done. The great tragedy will be that such a crisis will likely have been avoidable and many more options would have been available to transform what would be a crisis into a manageable situation had policy makers chosen a course aimed at reducing such dependency.