Energy conservation still languishing at low tide

Your March 11 article “Watts from the sea” brought back fond memories of when I worked for Los Angeles County’s Energy Office, which was formed after the 1973-74 oil embargo.

While enhancing energy conservation efforts for county departments, our office became a magnet for people with lots of unusual ideas: Install paddles offshore to capture wave energy.

Put bladders on downhill roads so a car would push air to run electrical generators, and then internal springs would pop the bladder back up for the next car.

A nervous young man said that every street address sign should be converted to hexadecimal numbers so computers would use less energy in processing information.

We set up the odd-even gasoline-purchasing plan in March 1974, and Supervisor Kenneth Hahn got the board to use its federal revenue sharing to pay for a 25-cent countywide bus fare. (A real missed opportunity, because the Rapid Transit District couldn’t get geared up to offer this until a month after the immediate gasoline panic abated in April 1974.)

Have things improved during the intervening 33 years? Slowly.

Cliff Caballero

Valley Village