GRAY AREAS

I am for peace and opposed to child abuse; but I get the feeling that I may not be the only member of humanity who takes this stand. It's the gray areas that need some thought.

So to a more interesting question: the ever increasing oil imports threaten to leave US security and well-being in the hands of volatile sheiks and others over which the US has no control; should the government take measures to forestall the crisis to which this eventually must lead?

The principle is simple: government force only for security, a free market for everything else. But I am very tired of the prin-cipled philosophers who expound the disadvantages of having the government run the post office, just as I am tired of the shoe manufacturers who are for a free market for all but the shoe industry because the US army wears boots and should not be left at the mercy of Taiwan, Hong Kong or anybody else who makes better shoes for less. Where are they all when it comes to apply-ing the principle to something that is not obvious?

There is also the pacifist who is struck on the right cheek and offers his assailant a burst of submachine gun fire, because he believes in the principle all right, but his assailant didn't just strike him on the right cheek, he struck him real hard. . .

So to both points: why is oil different from shoes? First, because if you don't have shoes, you can walk barefoot or on stilts, there are hundreds of materials that shoes can be made from, and hundreds of places where they can be transported from. But for shoes or stilts or even walking barefoot and for the hundreds of materials and for transporting them you always need energy. Second, you can put up a shoe factory in weeks, but energy sources have a lead time of years. Energy, to use a strategic term, is a choke point; shoes are not. That is why shoes can never be a matter of national security and why energy always will be one.

And without meaning to apply that pacifist's criterion, let me say that the threat is ominous. My conclusion is based on many sources, most of which (such as Energy Security: Report to the Pre-sident, [Ate May 87]) I have previously recommended. Right now I am looking at two fundamental, fact- and statistics-filled reports: one by M.P. Mills, Implication of recent trends in industrial elec-trification (Science Concepts, Wash., D.C., paper given at a technical conference, and presumably to be made available by the USCEA, 1776 I St. NW/#400, Washington, DC 20006), the other Commercial nuclear power and the national interest by the Center for Strategic & Intnl. Studies (1800 K St. NW/#400, Washington, DC 20006) under contract to the DoE. Mills' study makes it clear that electrification of US industry is a driving force in energy effi-ciency and industrial productivity. One of his figures, reproduced here, shows that GNP is no longer proportional to total energy con-sumption (as it used to be), but to electric power consumption. Industry is rapidly increasing its electric consumption per unit pro-duced, not at the expense of efficiency, but at the expense of direct fuels: by between 10% and 20% in the plastics and paper in-dustries, 20% to 30% in the chemical and steel industries, and by up to 50% in the automobile, oil and fabric industries. It may be a ludicrous thing to say at the close of the 20^th century, but America is going electric.