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C00002 00002	THE ACADEMIC COMMUNITY AND THE NEXT ENERGY CRISIS
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THE ACADEMIC COMMUNITY AND THE NEXT ENERGY CRISIS


	The U.S. is headed for another energy crisis far worse
than the last one.  The reason is that our domestic oil
and natural gas on which we depend for 70% of our energy
are rapidly being exhausted and we are not developing
replacement energy fast enough.  The foreign sources on
which we are increasingly dependent won't last very much
longer either, and the present owners of these sources -
developed by our technology and at our initiative and
even mostly by our labor - have adopted a convenient
ideology that blames us for all the world's troubles
and will rob us ruthlessly the next time opportunity
is combined with an excuse.
What will trigger the crisis cannot be predicted any more
than one can predict what minor ailment will kill off
a person dying of old age.

	The crisis will cause a sudden drastic reduction
in standard of living accompanied by much individual suffering
and social turmoil as each group strives to avoid as much
of the cost as it can.  After order is restored by the
winner of the power struggle, the country will probably
do what it should have been doing since well before 1973,
and the energy problem will be solved but not easily.

	It would be better to solve it now, and it would
have been still better to have started in 1973 at the time
of the first energy crisis and better yet not to have lost
our energy independence in the first place.  Had we started
in 1973, energy independence by 1980 could have been achieved,
and we can still achieve it relatively quickly if we develop
our sources of energy intensively.  The reason we haven't
is social and political.

	There is plenty of blame to go around as the saying goes,
but as a professor, I would like to concentrate on that part of
the blame that can be charged to the academic community -
faculty and students - especially faculty in science and
engineering.

	 Before doing that, let's consider what happened at
the time of the last crisis.

	Two years ago  there was an energy crisis when the Arabs
held up our oil for political reasons and to get more money.
We and the other oil consuming countries, developed and
undeveloped alike, gave in on the money.  The politics was
compromised, because not all the oil producers are Arab,
and because the Arabs sensibly decided not to push their
luck.  We gave in on the prices, because we can after all
afford to pay them, and because we could not unite to
oppose them.  We could not unite to oppose them, because
the left in the world considered opposing the U.S. more
important than the prosperity of their peoples and
because the left in the U.S. considered getting rid of
Nixon and achieving a North 
Vietnamese victory more important
than the price of gasoline or resisting blackmail.
However, at that time it seemed likely that we would
at least embark on some kind of technological program
to achieve energy independence.  For example, the house
voted 361-19 to finally get started on the Alaska
pipeline, but after this start everything else got
bogged down in business and politics as usual.