COMMENT ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
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hen our great-grandchildren judge our present society, they will no doubt look upon our energy policy with amazement, dismay, and anger. "For whatever reasons," they will probably say, "our greatgrandparents allowed a few powerful businesspeople and government officials to decide how energy would be generated and distributed, and in the process, mortgaged our future. And from all appearances they were too selfish and complacent to care. Why did they waste our precious reduced carbon? Why did they think they could flirt with global change as if it would have trivial consequences?" From historical records they will be able to scan our legislative hearings, our scientific debates, and our journals and many will wonder: "What were they thinking?" Such will be the condemnation of our society by the people who populate planet Earth in the decades to come. The foolishness of it all is that even now we know that we are mortgaging futures, but there is little evidence that we care. Many of us were around in the 1970s when we tried to respond to what was then called an energy crisis. Lights were dimmed in public buildings, gasoline lines formed at local stations, and energy audits were commonplace. Much good came of that experience, but slowly we have regressed in the absence of forward-thinking leadership. Some countries have continued to press for energy conservation, but in the U.S.A. and much of the rest of the world, energy policy is simply not a high priority. Overall, the entire economy at the end of the 20th century is dominated by a carbon-based energy system. Much of this is the result of the lack of a coherent way to value nonrenewable assets such as petroleum. Free market systems simply do not take sufficiently into account the future value to populations that do not yet exist. Nor do markets place appropriate value on alternative uses that do not have a place in the present market system. Thus, people who might be concerned about future carbon sources cannot affect a free market system, which insists on using those same chemicals for combustion-powered energy sources. Nor can people who are concerned about future environmental impacts of energy generation prevail in a society whose preoccupation with cheap energy is the omnipotent driver, especially when the dominant economic philosophy champions the free market. Many people were amazed when the majority party in the current U.S. Congress proposed a reduction of the tax on gasoline, one of the few economic barriers to energy consumption, and doubly amazed when it appeared that the Clinton administration would trade this tax away for legislation it considered a higher priority. It is apparent that as a free society, we have still not dealt with the dilemma that natural resource conservation and environmental protection present to us. Nor does totalitarianism present a better alternative. All available evidence suggests that nondemocratic states are just as energy wasteful as democratic states and less concerned about environmental protection. The answer, of course, is for a new awakening of people to occur. Let us hope that we can affect this awakening by education and enlightenment and not by another crisis, contrived or real.
0013-936X/96/0930-323AS12.00/0© 1996 American Chemical Society
William H. Glaze Editor VOL. 30, NO. 8, 1996 / ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY/ N E W S * 3 2 3 A
