Word: oils
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...anything be done to break the tyranny of the toughest cartel in history, to prevent oil shortages and price gouging? The answer is yes-if. If the U.S. is ready. At last, the jarring events of the past few weeks have probably persuaded Americans that the crisis is real, and that the nation can meet it by making some sacrifices and changes in its lifestyle, by taking some chances and paying some costs. What is needed, of course, is to lessen immediately the country's umbilical dependence on crude oil from the cartel. Slackened demand could loosen the market...
Because nearly 40% of all oil used in the nation goes for gasoline, the first and most important step is to brake gasoline demand. Rationing would seem to be the politically expedient method. A New York Times-CBS News poll in early June found that three out of five Americans would prefer rationing to shortages and skyrocketing prices. Yet any form of rationing would tend to be inequitable and a bureaucratic nightmare. Even during World War II, when the U.S. was united as never before or since, gasoline rationing was marked by corruption, favoritism and loopholes. Today, rationing would...
...largest savings will have to come from a combination of more tax incentives for buying home insulation, wood-burning furnaces and other oil-conserving devices, and much stiffer mandatory conservation rules. A number of innovative companies, including Du Pont, A T & T and General Motors, have reduced their energy use relative to their output by 17% to 30% since the Arab oil embargo of 1973; yet many more firms have gone on giddily wasting energy. Consider the beneficial effects of a 20% surtax on the commercial use of electricity: skyscrapers that are lit up all night long and advertising signs...
...nation will have to make the most of its available alternatives to oil, and to do that it will have to moderate some of its stringent environmental protection laws. The U.S. is the Saudi Arabia of coal, but a maze of regulations retard the mining, transportation and burning of coal, greatly inflating its price...
Many power-generating companies would switch from oil to coal if the U.S. removed the need for expensive scrubbers on plants that use low-sulfur Western coal. The U.S. also has to dig more coal mines (including strip mines), build more and safer nuclear plants, construct more oil refineries, drill more offshore wells, develop more oil shale projects. All of these will require some trade-offs with antipollution laws, and none of the projects can be accomplished if small groups of zealots set out to block them while OPEC's new Midases sit back and applaud...