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C00002 00002	AN ENERGY CRISIS IS COMING
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AN ENERGY CRISIS IS COMING


	"An energy crisis is coming!"

	"What  another?   Didn't  we just  get  done with  an  energy
crisis?"

	"No,  that  wasn't an  energy crisis.    It was  just  a mild
inconvenience decorated with a lot of talk."

	"Well then, what is a real energy crisis?"

	In a real energy crisis,

	1. There won't be  enough natural gas  to heat even half  the
houses in  California that depend  on it.   People will have  to live
several families  to a house in order to keep warm.  The situation will
be much worse in the cold parts of the country.

	2. There  won't be  enough gasoline  for people  to drive  to
work.  Many  people will have to live in  dormitories near their work
and come home on weekends.

	3. Stanford  students will  be drafted  to work  in the  coal
mines.  Well, one  can dream, can't one?  Actually  they'll find some
defect in  the government that will permit them  to oppose it in good
conscience, and someone else will have to dig the coal.  The Stanford
students will operate the rationing bureaucracy.

	4. In the crash program to  build 500 nuclear reactors in two
years, risks will be taken like those taken in World War II, and some
serious accidents will be accepted as unavoidable.

	The crisis will be  triggered by and blamed on  some external
event that interrupts our external supplies and forces an increase in
demand, but its cause  will be our  present (1973-1976) inability  to
get going on increasing our energy supplies.

	The basic  technological fact  to which  we are not  adapting
ourselves is that we  have used up most of the oil and natural gas in
the country  and  it's  all downhill  from  now on  in  these  energy
sources.

	The  basic economic  consequence of  this technological  fact
that we  are also refusing to recognize is that energy is bound to be
much more expensive now.  There is nothing on  the horizon that beats
having natural gas  flow under its own pressure out  of a hole in the
ground.

	Neither of these facts  is a cause for  alarm in itself.   We
Our great grandfathers adapted without much fuss to the exhaustion of
firewood (all a man had to do was to go out in the woods and chop all
he wanted) as a major source of  energy.  The U.S. has coal for  many
generations, and nuclear  energy can even compete with  coal, oil and
natural gas in cost.  Besides, only five percent of our GNP goes into
energy, and  doubling it  or quadrupling  it still  wouldn't hurt  us
much.

	Our problem is two-fold.

	First, our populist politicians  think that the first of them
to admit that  gasoline has to  go to $1.50  per gallon as  it is  in
Europe will  lose his  political shirt.   The  reason isn't that  the
public  can't afford it; the  Europeans, who are poorer  than we are,
afford it.  (Admittedly,  gasoline is enough  of an expense for  some
people that  they will have  to change  their way of  life somewhat).
The  main reason  is that the  oil companies  will make  money if the
price is allowed to go  up.  No doubt they will, but  the alternative
of  expropriating them  and having  the government  run  the industry
should be postponed until the countries that have already tried it  -
the socialist countries -  do well enough economically so  they don't
need Berlin walls  and 25 mile military zones around their borders to
prevent people from escaping.

	Second, the  anti-technological  movement  has  succeeded  in
paralysing  almost every  effort to  get  new energy  sources in  the
amounts required to avoid a real crisis.  Here's the score:

	1.   Our last chance of any  substantial new finds of oil and
gas are offshore, but that has been stalled for three years now.

	2. A fast expansion of coal production requires strip mining.
Synthetic oil  and gas is stifled, because  Congress is determined to
hold down the price of oil and gas as long as possible, and synthetic
oil and gas are necessarily more expensive than oil and gas that flow
out of a hole in the ground.

	3. The same is true of shale oil.  It is a foolish investment
at present prices.

	4. California is about  to pass the anti-nuclear  initiative.
This initiative  has already made  it impossible to plan  new nuclear
plants   in  California  and  many  other   states,  because  of  the
uncertainty it  has  cause  about whether  they  will be  allowed  to
operate.    If it  passes,  it  will take  years  for  the courts  to
determine what it means, and no investment will be safe until then.

	In fact, the  utilities' present plans  only provide for  the
growth in present applications of electricity and are much too small,
because  they don't take into  account the exhaustion  of the natural
gas used for heating.   Meeting this need requires either coal  smoke
or  nuclear  plants  much  larger  than  those  now  being  built  to
synthesize  hydrogen or some  other fuel.  Neither  the utilities nor
anyone else  is putting  any money into  this; every  segment of  the
energy industry  has enough trouble defending  its present activities
from the Yahoos.

	Let us  document the  politicians'  fear of  the Yahoos.    I
recently attended  a Commonwealth Club  luncheon in San  Francisco at
which  Senator Tunney was the  speaker and his topic  was energy.  He
bemoaned the failure of Congress  to act significantly on energy  and
blamed  the   overlapping  jurisdictions  of   different  committees.
However, he  himself gave a showed himself personally to be paralysed
in  the  matter   of  energy.     First,  he  went  through   various
alternatives,  and  recommended nothing  although  in  response to  a
question, he hoped that a process  for getting energy from oil  shale
without mining  it might  be made  to work.   He  said nothing  about
nuclear energy, but  when he was challengedd to state his position on
the anti-nuclear initiative.   Then he said  that he planned to  vote
against it but that everyone should  vote his conscience.  (He didn't
explain  how the question  of whether  nuclear energy was  safe was a
matter of conscience rather than a matter of fact).

	However, Senator Tunney  had one proposal  - to break up  the
oil companies into littler ones.   He had a theory that if there were
more oil companies, the  Oil Cartel would not  have been able to  use
them to raise prices, but he didn't explain  why oil was an exception
to the  general laws of economics in which  it takes a monopsonist to
beat a monopolist.  He was not ready to try to enforce competition on
the Oil Cartel.  While Tunney doesn't seem very bright, he appeared a
little ashamed  of his proposal and didn't seriously maintain that it
would do any particular good.  It merely eases gives an appearance of
action in  a situation wherein he  can do nothing in the  face of the
populist Yahoos on the  one hand and  the environmentalist Yahoos  on
the other.

	Exhibit B is our local Congressman, Paul McCloskey.  He makes
a big show of criticizing Congress for inactivity in the energy area,
but all he can do is hold forums on rather trivial measures of
coervation.  Conservation is fine in so far as it means eliminating
plain waste and provided it is a temporary measure accompanied by
plans to correct the shortage, but to speak only of conservation
when we are approaching inability to heat our homes is either
imbecility or cowardice.

	It appears to be the latter.  McCloskey won his political
start as an eco-vandal with his assault on the power line to
the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, and doesn't want to be
outflanked in a basically Democratic district by someone more eco
than he is.