A Somber Anniversary

Just over a year ago, the Arabs started the profitable your-money-or-your-life game. What has changed in the energy field since then? Little for the better, and much for the worse.

Storage facilities are brim-full of oil, and the roadblocks obstructing the Alaska pipeline have been cleared. We are hard pressed to find any other positive result.

None of the causes of the energy crisis have been removed. Government meddling has increased; fuel prices remain controlled; the 1970 Clean Air Act has neither been repealed nor amended; instead, a vote-pleasing, but disastrous strip mining bill is about to be enacted. Domestic oil production continues to decline, and a severe gas shortage is expected this winter. Project Independence is mired in the swamp of bureaucratic planning. Economic disincentives for energy projects have proliferated: Combined with the capital crunch, they have led to the abandonment of significant projects such as oil shale recovery, new uranium enrichment plants, oil refineries, and electric power plants. Typically, plans for New Jersey's offshore nuclear plant, which some months ago we hailed as a milestone, have now been deferred and are in danger of being abandoned altogether.

Worldwide, OPEC's blackmail is driving industrialized countries toward bankruptcy. Italy is on the brink, and Britain not far behind. Starvation threatens the underdeveloped world because it cannot afford the astronomic prices of petroleum-derived fertilizers.

Meanwhile, the OPEC countries will rake in $100 billion in oil revenues this year, a sum which their primitive economies cannot possibly absorb. Last month, a small party of Arab sheiks lost $2.5 million in a single night's gambling at the Monte Carlo Casino. They tipped the hat-check girl $400 and probably did not even have time to laugh at Ford's and Kissinger's strong rhetoric about lowering oll prices or else...

Or else what?

Military action? Out of the question for anvbody acquainted with political realities. Organizing the oil-consuming countries? They are already organized, but a year ago they vied for first place in obsequious groveling at the sheiks' feet; they spat on all their solemn treaties and left Holland without a drop of oil. Wait until the cartel collapses? Lybia has already been cheating on its fellow-extortionists, and Saudi Arabia is chafing at the high oil prices; even so, it could be a long wait. Wear WIN buttons? Ah, yes, the sheiks must be halfcrazed with the terror of them.

There is only one way of driving a monopoly out of business: Supply what it is monopolizing. With 100 billion barrels of oil in the continental shelves, more oil in the oil shale of the mountain states than in all of the Middle East, coal for several centuries and the know-how for liquefying it, America is the one that can supply what the sheiks are monopolizing. Decontrol the price, let politicians and bureaucrats get out of the way, and free enterprise will show how to make the oil cartel crumble. The poor, like everyone else, would benefit from the abundant supply; and energy is what is needed, above all, to keep the environment clean and healthy.

So what are we waiting for? For one thing only: for people to wake up.