Rationing Technology

An indication of the pace of this development is energy usage, since energy is the currency of technological progress. Food, clothing, shelter, transportation, and most of the other necessities and conveniences of life are energy dependent. The Energy Information Administration of the U. S. Department of Energy predicts that world energy demand will rise 54% and electricity demand will rise 75% between 1995 and 2015. By 2015, the developing nations of Asia alone are expected to require more energy than the United States.

Against this backdrop of a need for more energy - energy that at present must be provided primarily by burning coal, oil, and natural gas and by nuclear fission, it is particularly troubling to note the political progress being made by those who call instead for world-wide energy rationing. Proposals under consideration for Kyoto in Decem-ber would roll back energy production by as much as 20% at a time when human needs require increases in production by 50%. The Kyoto treaty would leave the world with about half as much energy as it will require early in the 21st Century.

The more "moderate'' proposals for rollbacks by 5% or 10% in energy usage that President Clinton has now announced are almost as severe because the world needs 50% more energy - not 5%, 10%, or 20% less. Moreover, after mandatory global controls on energy production are in place, they can be gradually expanded to any level.

Although the buzzword of the present is "global warming,'' it is evident that this is just an excuse for rationing. Hydrocarbon fuels have endured three major campaigns - claimed looming shortages requiring rationing, claimed "global cooling'' requiring rationing, and claimed "global warming'' requiring rationing - with most of the same people making these three different claims. Energy opponents, again many of the same people, have also caused the rationing in the United States of nuclear energy. In each case, the science did not support the claims. Each, however, involved an apocalyptic scenario deemed to be so terrible that consideration of moderating facts or waiting for experimental evidence was characterized as irresponsible.

Ancient Aztec rulers and priests were also merchants of disaster scenarios. They taught the Aztec people that, if their altar stones were not kept continuously wet with human blood, the sun would cease to shine - a major environmental disaster. Modern day Aztecans have provided us with many new imagined disasters. Curiously, most of these seem to have only one solution - energy rationing - which also means the rationing of all technology that is energy dependent.

Access to Energy has carried many articles about the nonscience of "global warming.'' Each of these has dealt with one aspect of this subject. These various articles - usually summarized by a graph or chart with the essential elements - are more understandable when they are all considered as a whole. Therefore, this issue of Access to Energy is largely devoted to a summary of the data about this subject.