Future Supplies of Petroleum
Re “The Coming Oil Crisis--Really,” Opinion, June 7:
Gregg Easterbrook is generally correct in forecasting that oil and natural gas should not be regarded as panaceas to satisfy our energy requirements. As petroleum supplies become scarcer, prices will increase, inescapably allowing more costly forms of energy to enter the marketplace. Easterbrook confronts reality when he addresses supply of and demand for petroleum, but he overlooks the lessons of history when he writes about what we should be doing now to anticipate the inevitable.
President Jimmy Carter inherited the repercussions of the 1973 oil shortage, which was not “phony” in the sense that we did not have enough because we were embargoed by the Arabs. Carter proposed to deal with future energy shortages through a national energy policy requiring discipline. Carter’s efforts were soundly rejected and led directly to his defeat by Ronald Reagan in the election of 1980. Reagan abolished price controls on U.S. oil as one of his first acts as president in 1981.
The ideas that Easterbrook recites to wean us from oil and gas are at least as old as our supply problems of the 1970s. This is not to say that they are not without virtue, as they truly possess idealistic attraction. But as long as oil and its natural gas equivalent are available at $15, plus or minus, a barrel and other energy sources cost much more and are less convenient, “good national policy” to cope with future petroleum shortages 60 years from now is politically unrealistic.
ARTHUR O. SPAULDING
Geologist and Petroleum
Consultant, Ojai
*
* Why haven’t those same economists who can calculate the projected fate of the Social Security system recognized the implications of Craig Hatfield’s indisputable facts on the rate of oil discovery vs. oil production and consumption, as reported by Easterbrook? This should be an issue for the 1998 elections; by 2008 it may be too late to avoid some very serious economic consequences--an inflationary force beyond the control of the Federal Reserve, signaling the beginning of a decline in living standards that will persist for generations.
DONALD J. STIERMAN
Toledo, Ohio
