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TODAY Friday 17 October 1997 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site.

 

TODAY IN THE WORLD: The Energy Non-Crisis

According to Matthew Wald of The New York Times, whose article of 11 August I just got around to, for the first time on record cars and trucks going to the junkyard today have better fuel efficiency -- on the average -- than the new ones being sold at the dealer's. We have many more vehicles in the United States today than we had during the Energy Crisis of the mid 1970s, we drive further, and we drive with fewer passengers. And now our vehicles are getting worse gas mileage.

You know why. Oil is cheap. The oil-shortage fears of the mid 1970s collapsed in the face of energetic, intelligent capitalism. Oil prospectors were able to find new fields, drilling engineers were able to remove more oil profitably from fields considered used up, and oil-exporting countries were not able to maintain a cohesive cartel in the face of expanding supply. Environmentalists who predicted shortages and ever-climbing prices have been shown to be wrong, even foolish.

I'm one of them. In 1978, I was a member of something called the New England Energy Congress, a body appointed by the New England congressional delegation to assess the energy situation in the country and its implications for the six-state region. We reviewed all the evidence we could get our hands on, and then chose the most "moderate" of the projections. Oil supplies would rise slightly during the 1980s, we said (we weren't completely stupid), but in the 1990s serious shortages would develop. Gasoline prices, which had plateaued at about $3 per gallon in the 1980s (we're talking 1978 dollars), would increase to about $5 per gallon in the mid-1990s. This ineluctable rise in the price of oil, coupled with a significant research-and-development program for renewable energy, would bestow a competitive advantage on solar, wind, and biomass. By the millennium, the Northeast United States, with luck and good planning by people like us, would enter the Age of Energy Sustainability.

Today the price of a gallon of gas is about 75 cents in 1978 dollars.

I also predicted the passage of a national health care system (1975), the indissoluble nature of my wedding vows (1976), and the "flat impossibility" that Ronald Reagan could ever be elected president (1979).

You may remember that one of the reasons for convening the New England Energy Congress and kindred bodies was the anxiety about the growing proportion of imported oil in the national mix. In 1973, the year of the biggest oil crisis, imports constituted 36% of American oil consumption. Today they're more than 50%, about 10 million barrels a day.

Does it matter? Do our old anxieties about national security look much less serious today? Why?

Maybe it's because each of us has (a little bit at least) internalized the fact that there truly is a global economy. So what if we don't pump the petroleum we use? We'll buy it. So what if Mexicans provide our vegetables, Japanese our televisions, and Italians our business suits? We'll make goods like computers and software and provide services like investing and marketing, and we'll use the proceeds to buy whatever stuff we want.

Seems to work, in the short run at least. Culturally, we can worry about the losses incurred by the shrinkage in the numbers (and talents?) of American vegetable farmers and tailors, but there's no arguing that the international division of labor -- and the enthronement of "competitive advantage" as a basic operating principle -- is associated with an increase in wealth. We may not like the way the wealth is apportioned, but there's certainly more aggregate American purchasing power than ever before.

There are two big old flies in the ointment. Number One is environmental damage, by which I mean local and regional damage from pollution and worldwide damage from perturbations of atmosphere and climate. Number Two is the possibility of war and the attendant requirement to maintain military forces capable of ensuring uninterrupted oil supply. The Gulf War was expensive, and it's a part of our national military doctrine that we should be able to wage such a war (plus another half of a war) at any given time.

For now, the country has money enough to ameliorate the damages from pollution and to keep up a formidable, perhaps unbeatable, expeditionary armed force. We have not figured out how to reconcile being rich with protecting the biosphere, and we may someday regret that we arranged matters so that we had to fight people for our fuel supplies.

 

TODAY ON THE SITE:

Europeans consume less oil per-capita than we Americans (bigger taxes, shorter distances), but the gap is closing slightly in percentage terms. Check into our High Five site on Europe, recently updated by Marianne Ginsburg and Jennifer Mitchell, for more info on European environmental issues and the groups that wrestle with them.

 

Recent "Today" columns:

10/16: Drillbit Diplomacy
10/15: We Love You, Hiroshi Okuda
10/14: Good Deals at Showroom and Pump
10/10: Clinton Waffles!
10/09: Can Therapy Help the Songbirds?
10/08: Girls and Puberty
10/07: Japan The Genial Host
10/06: You Don't Need A Weatherman...
10/03: Cochise County, Arizona
10/02: The Copper Queen

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