Let’s Avoid More Energy Hysteria : Why Gamble Our Resources on Hodel’s Apocalyptic Visions?
A decade ago, energy hysteria swept Congress. Out of it came the unlamented Synthetic Fuels Corp., whose scandal-ridden life mercifully ended 18 months ago, before it contributed a drop of economical fuel to the nation. We were also nearly saddled with a monstrosity dubbed the Energy Mobilization Board, which would have had the power, among other things, to allow energy schemes to ignore environmental laws.
Reagan Administration officials are currently trying to whip up a similar hysteria. Interior Secretary Donald P. Hodel is touring the country, preaching that we must open up petroleum reserves that he thinks exist off California, Oregon, Washington, New England and Alaska and beneath the untouched lands of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. If we don’t do so, he says, we’ll once again be at the mercy of foreign suppliers. We will face long and tiresome gasoline lines, and, worse, our national security will be imperiled.
It’s the sort of apocalyptic sermon of which Hodel is fond, but his crystal ball has been notoriously cloudy.
In the mid-1970s, when he ran the Bonneville Power Administration, Hodel pressured dozens of Pacific Northwest utilities large and small to invest in five giant nuclear-power plants or face the prospect of blackouts and brownouts. Now four of the partly completed plants are in mothballs and the utilities are near receivership. Hodel’s vision resulted in the largest bond default in the history of the Republic. No blackouts ensued.
A few years later, as the secretary of energy, Hodel issued a report predicting serious electric-power shortages nationwide if 300 giant new central-station power plants weren’t built by the year 2000. That prediction was based on an estimate that demand for electricity would grow about twice as fast as it has.
What are we to make, then, of Hodel’s most recent predictions?
The secretary points out that American companies are producing 800,000 fewer barrels of oil per day than they were a year ago and that we’re importing a million more barrels a day from abroad. This is true, but the reason, contrary to what Hodel says, is that the world is awash in cheap petroleum. The decline in American production is a result of the economics that the Reagan Administration so stoutly claims to promote. Must the oil industry be shielded from the free market? What is the cost of that protection to consumers and other industries?
Hodel’s more serious claim is that America’s security will be threatened if we don’t extract more domestic hydrocarbons. But his candidates--if they prove out at all--will be very expensive to exploit. How does it ensure our long-term national security to use up America’s last crude-oil reserves, especially at a time when cheap foreign supplies are available? Of what benefit to our national security is it to dot the California coast with oil rigs? How secure will America be when our oil is gone? Might it not be more prudent to leave it, as it were, in the bank until it’s really needed?
There’s an old dilemma about a bathtub that is losing its water: Do you turn up the faucets or put in a cheap rubber stopper?
Hodel’s Interior Department has clearly opted for the former strategy, and has thrown the stoppers away. A rational energy strategy must begin with reducing our dependence on oil, but the Reagan Administration has instead helped to increase the demand for energy. It opposed standards for automobiles, tried to eliminate federal energy-conservation and renewable-energy programs, abolished tax credits for residential energy conservation and supported a bill that would allow the construction of new utility boilers that would use oil.
The Administration case is built more on fear than on fact, and there’s considerable danger that a Congress distracted by the Iran- contra affair will be stampeded into providing long-sought gifts of public resources and tax breaks to the petroleum industry before the guard changes in 1989. It would be a tragedy to risk ruin of our last coastal Arctic wilderness and our precious coastlines all in aid of a policy based on “strength through exhaustion,” a fix that merely delays the inevitable day of reckoning by a year or two, at tremendous environmental cost. The Administration’s proposals help us not a whit in preparing for a post-petroleum economy.
I don’t like gasoline lines any better than anyone else does, nor do I mean to play down the domestic and international problems that will arise as petroleum reserves inevitably dwindle. Even so, the Reagan Administration’s approach to the problem is exactly wrong.
We’ve made great progress in conservation and renewables over the last 15 years, despite the best efforts of the current Administration. We need to return to an energy policy that encourages both and leaves our untouched places as they are. The oil, if any, will be there for the time when we really do need it.
