THE QUALITY OF LIFE

Rejoice, O Sierra Club! The air is getting cleaner in Michigan. More than 200,000 auto workers have been laid off and will no longer pollute the air commuting to work. Gone is the pollution from the now idle plants; the quality of life is rising. Rejoice, Friends of the Earth! For this is only a beginning. The auto industry uses 60% of the total rubber production, almost half the iron and more than 20% of all steel; so the quality of life is about to rise elsewhere, too. Rejoice, ye nogrowth crusaders! The GNP is falling, and the appetite of the American energy pigs is about to be curbed. Can you hear the country cheering?

We can't, either. A lot of people are discovering that GNP has more in common with the quality of life than they were led to believe by affluent malcontents and demagogues. And energy consumption is related to GNP in a way of which the chic pseudointellectuals are totally ignorant.

Fremont Felix, the internationally renowned energy consultant and director of Phoenix-based Nuclear Dynamics, has published new data on energy use in the world's countries in the 1 December issue of Electrical World. In an analysis of over 200 countries at all levels of industrialization, he finds that ''each level of GNP per capita corresponds to a minimum energy use per capita, below which the level ot GNP per capita could not be sustained." In other words, if a country cuts its energy consumption, it can do so only up to a certain point (by cutting waste); beyond that point its economy will be seriously disrupted.

There is undoubtedly much energy waste in this country; but Felix' various charts placing the world's countries on energy/GNP maps show that the American energy pigs are the world's most efficient energy pigs: In relation to GNP, they use less energy to produce a dollar's worth of goods and services. In electrical energy. the US is not only far ahead of the rest ot the world, but is increasing its lead.

A plot of per capita consumption of electric power versus power consumption per GNP dollar shows the US well below the curve joining the next most efficient users - Norway. Canada, Sweden and France. The two Germanies have roughly the same per capita consumption, but the East German colony ot the Soviet Empire uses near twice as much to produce a dollar of GNP. The USSR's position on the chart brings to mind Lenin's slogan "Communism equals Soviet power plus electrification. " You should take a look at this chart, Comrade Lenin.

The country you founded not only gives its citizens 3 times less electricity than the US, but to make a dollar of GNP, it uses roughly as much as Liberia, and considerably more than Zaire (the Congo).

The Himalayan kingdom of Nepal's per capita power consumption is almost nothing, and so is its consumption per GNP dollar. The two almost nothings place it on the curve of most efficient energy use, though many thousands of kWhrs away from Sweden and Canada. By all the criteria of the no-growth crusaders, then, Nepal has the ideal economy, and we wish they would all emigrate there.