CONSERVATION CONVERSATION

Introducing a 50 mph speed limit across the board without substantial exceptions will probably do more good than harm. Yet why not make some exceptions to eliminate some of the harm? Slowing down truck freight may, in the long run, waste more energy than it saves, and if bus passengers have to spend additional hours on long distance trips, they will be tempted to go back to their gas guzzling automobiles. The 55 mph limit for trucks and buses does not go far enough, but apparently requests for a higher speed limit were rebuffed on the grounds that it would demoralize car drivers to be overtaken by a bus. It is a fact, however, that a bus uses far less gallons per passenger mile at 70 mph than a car at 50 mph; does that demoralize you?

And there is another way of conserving energy in the trucking industry: Void the bureaucratic (and anti competitive) ICC regulations that often prevent truckers from making trips along the shortest route and force them to return in empty trucks instead of picking up more freight. That freight is often carried by another truck going by a crooked route and returning empty in an orgy of gasoline waste along the interstate highways. The bureaucratic solution: Continue the orgy at 50 mph.

Incidentally, it is true that a car makes less miles per gallon at 70 mph than at 50 mph; but it does not follow that gas mileage keeps increasing with lower speed. Cars have a certain speed at which their gas mileage is maximum; for most American cars, this is around 40 mph. lwhe slow crawler is not only wasting his own gas, but also that of the cars behind him; at 15 mph he may be wasting as much as at 70 mph.

The extension of summer time through the winter makes sense. The additional energy used in the dark morning hours is more than offset by the savings in the light evening hours. This has been confirmed by the British, who used the method in World War II (they also put on an extra hour in the summer in "Double British Summer Time"). The Soviets, the world's leading authority on chronic shortages in a permanently botched economy, have been using summer time throughout the year since 1937.

Should the brunt of the energy shortage hit industry or the consumer? Industry, of course, scream the rabble rousers, who are always quick with shortsighted popular solutions. But the consumer will be hit doubly if industry is hit first. Typical examples are here already: The drilling of new oil wells is seriously and widely delayed because of an acute shortage of steel drill bits and casings. The coal industry, too, is seriously hampered by a steel and fuel shortage. And in Texas, an oil well had to be shut down when its operator could not get any diesel oil to run the pump. How ridiculous can the political demagogues get?

A lot more ridiculous. For these Soviet type shortages, they have a Soviet type solution: a vast bureaucracy to administer rationing. The obvious solution is to let the law of supply and demand work until the price of gasoline finds its natural level (which should still be well below the $1 up that Europeans have been paying per gallon). That would hurt the poor, say the demagogues, who have just discovered that what troubles the poor is a lack of nioney. In fact, of course, rationing will create a black market that will hit the poor even more; whereas a free market will encourage exploration and energy research, eventually bringing down prices to a level that the poor can afford (where else but America do the poor have cars?). Rationing will not prevent the price of gas rising anyway; and taxes are likely to be used for further wars on poverty that cure nobody's poverty except that of its administrators.

If the price of gas and other fuels is allowed to rise to its natural level, we predict that all Americans will suddenly become highly patriotic where energy conservation is concerned. And who will conserve gasoline in the trucking industry more efficiently, the profit motive or the ICC?