REPLACING GASOLINE

What if the Middle East oil fields go up in smoke because an irresolute president failed to destroy Saddam's weapons arsenals and armor by missile and air power? (Missiles need not be armed with nuclear warheads, high explosives would have done fine for this job.)

It won't be the end of the world. The oil shortage would only temporarily be acute; high prices would spur new oil production and force genuinely alternative energy to be used. ("Alternative" energy sources are not alternative at all: their diluteness rules them out as a substitute. The GM solar car that won the much touted race in Australia is a 2-horsepower, $1 million contraption good only for advertising and breast beating.)

Oil is not needed for generating electric power, at least not for technological reasons. It can be replaced by coal-fired or nuclear power plants. Its use for power generation in the Northeast and California is politically motivated, as witnessed by the Shoreham plant in New York, and by the willingness of California's high-falutin environmentalists to accept coal-fired power provided its emissions stay in Arizona and Mexico, just as in the Northeast they will accept even diabolical nuclear energy as long as only Canadians are exposed to the perceived risk, while the holy environmentalists of Harvard, Yale and Dartmouth participate in the cycle of electricity by consuming it.

As a chemical feedstock for plastics and other products, oil can be replaced by natural gas or by coal-based synthetic processes, though this may be uneconomical or technically difficult; but the quantities needed are comparatively small.

The major problem is gasoline, but even here it is mainly a mat-ter of substituting for vast quantities and arranging for an entirely new distribution net rather than facing any technological impos-sibilities.

First, let's clear the ground of some highly touted substitutes that don't really have much chance.