The American public is to blame more than the auto industry for gas-guzzling cars that can cost $100 to fill up, said Jay Hakes, the head of the Energy Information Administration during the Clinton presidency.

"The American consumers want cars that go from zero to 60 in 0.6 seconds," Hakes said Friday at a talk for the Southface Energy Institute, a nonprofit environmental group.

Cars that get the highest gas mileage are less powerful and generally smaller, he said.

Hakes said American families, from grandparents to grandchildren, should be having conversations about what they want their country to be like in 20 years.

"My son bought a Jeep Wrangler. I just about had a fit. So I didn't have enough of those conversations with him," Hakes said.

He is now the director of the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum in Atlanta. He said if gas prices drop – or if the gas tax is eliminated — it could erase some of the progress made on the energy front.

"If we go back into another era of energy complacency, the implications of that are terrible," Hakes said.

He praised the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 that Congress passed and President Bush signed into law. It requires more biofuel usage and higher gas mileage for cars, at 35 miles per gallon by 2020, and the phase-out of inefficient incandescent light bulbs.

But Hakes criticized Congress for the failure to set a federal standard for renewable energy. The proposal, which failed by one vote in the U.S. Senate, would have required electricity suppliers by 2020 to provide 15 percent of their power from renewable sources such as wind and solar energy. Georgia's two Republican senators, Saxby Chambliss and Johnny Isakson, voted against the proposal.

Hakes, who has written a new book titled "A Declaration of Energy Independence," also spoke in favor of recent lawsuits to stop the building of new coal-fired power plants — the single largest source of man-made greenhouse gases that help lead to global warming. Hakes called litigation a "rather blunt instrument. But now it's the instrument that works. . . Hopefully that will buy some time to go back and build incentives" for conservation and cleaner energy options.

Last week, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Thelma Wyatt Cummings Moore invalidated a state permit for a coal plant in southwest Georgia in a case brought by the Sierra Club and GreenLaw, an Atlanta-based non-profit that litigates environmental cases.