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C&EN May 5, 1975
Editorial
"Wasting" our resources President Ford has chided Congress repeatedly the past few months for being unable (or unwilling) to come up with valid energy policy proposals. The Administration already had imposed a $1.00-per-barrel import tariff on oil, but agreed to postpone additional planned tariff increases pending Congressional progress in the energy policy arena. Actually, Congress hasn't been that inactive in energy legislation—the Senate did recently pass the Standby Energy Authorities Act of 1975. This unique peak of legislative creativity, however, looks less and less like valid policy, as soon as one starts to read it and review its provisions. It grants the President certain emergency powers in the event of another oil embargo—but only if Congress likes what is done. To this questionably useful Presidential power is attached other provisions that call for the federal government and all the states to develop energy conservation programs—but without any indication as to how it should be done or how the conservation efforts should be directed. In other words, the important issues again have been neatly sidestepped. The House Ways & Means Committee didn't sidestep the issue on federal gasoline taxes, but in this case I wish it had. The committee wants to raise gasoline taxes some 23 cents over the next few years. This tax increase, of course, is designed to slow down or reverse increases in gasoline consumption in the United States and thereby reduce U.S. imports of foreign oil. It will do that, of course, while at the same time making a lot of people angry—and still further increasing the world's present surplus of oil. But if 23 cents is good, wouldn't a dollar be even better? We could eliminate gasoline consumption altogether and solve our problem once and for all. Then we could export the now unneeded Alaskan pipeline oil (at current high price levels, naturally). This would completely eliminate our dependence on foreign oil and provide beautifully positive balances in our export/import trade figures. This might create some problems in the auto and U.S. oil industries, however, but that is another issue that Congress can solve later. The whole energy question appears to be getting further and further bogged down in rhetoric and unworkable solutions. I think we may have even lost sight of what we should be trying to do. Do we really need to artificially destroy the demand for oil? I still think there is more than enough oil, undiscovered or unreported, to handle normal increases in demand over the next few decades. I don't recommend waste, but let's not create an unworkable and unnecessary system of controls over a currently needed and valuable resource. I think the law of supply and demand should still work. We need to export our goods, but somebody also needs to import goods—including oil. We can't be self-sufficient in everything, either. Forty years ago, we were going to run out of coal in a few days. Those pessimistic forecasts failed to allow for alternative solutions. I think our present pessimistic outlook is mired in the same forecasting fallacy. Other alternatives are and will be available. The world's resources are valuable and should be conserved, but they shouldn't be "wasted" by disuse either. Albert F. Plant
C&EN EDITORIALS REPRESENT ONLY THE VIEWS OF THE AUTHOR AND AIM AT INITIATING INTELLIGENT DISCUSSION.
