WASHINGTON REPORT: Making Oil Safe for Democracy

...Alternative sources of energy are being offered, but some are not easily realizable...

...The United States government refuses to stand up to the Arab countries and the five major oil companies that are American owned...

...The Congress returned this week to resume the confrontation with the Ford Administration over oil...

...This is less than 10 percent of our daily consumption rate...

...Increased gasoline taxes, conservation and other fuel-saving methods would enable us to reduce consumption by that amount and, therefore, call the tune instead of dancing the cartel's jig...

...Of course, the unequal contest between Lilliputian consumers and the Goliath cartel is not the only energy issue, however central, because domestic reserves of petroleum and natural gas appear to have become less abundant than earlier estimates...

...One way to minimize the damage would be for the Congress to undertake one of its too infrequent grand public inquiries...

...This is not now the case...

...Aside from Ford's proposal, the advice being received has not been particularly helpful...

...His position is similar for domestically produced oil, now being decontrolled...

...As Senator Eagleton of Missouri recently exclaimed in the Senate, "the tariff cannot reduce imports...

...There is no petroleum shortage...

...economists have told us that the period of inexpensive energy has passed and we'll have to make do from now on...

...The $2 tariff is translatable into direct consumer costs of more than $6-billion a year...

...There's a lot of coal, but existing environmental controls and the cost of coal-based energy dampen its expectations...

...And, at the same time, the rebate conferred on federal tax-payers earlier this year would be more than offset...

...Petroleum has been withheld from the United States and other industrial nations and, more effectively, a series of price increases imposed for oil imported from the Arab states situated along the Persian Gulf...

...The fact is there is no energy problem strictly speaking...

...First, it had to decide whether to override the President's veto of the Emergency Allocation Act that provides for allocation and price authority...

...and petroleum companies and the automatic oil-producing Arab states have held hands even more tightly in their traditional golden alliance against consuming nations everywhere...

...Ever since Egypt, followed by other Arab states, went to war against Israel two years ago, the vise has tightened...

...Should the President succeed in decontrolling domestic oil produced before 1973-so-called "old oil"-a renewed trend toward resumption of inflation would be reinforced...

...decontrol will provide all the incentive to drill that could possibly be needed...

...Both technical and social matters should be discussed, including whether energy industries should be treated as public utilities in an effort to tether them to the public interest...

...Tar sands and oil shale and solar energy and forest products are possibilities but their potential is not predictable...

...there is no domestic production available to take up the slack (self-sufficiency, even if desirable, is years away...

...There's been little straight talk about the whole matter...

...By a margin of nearly two to one, the Senate has authorized funds for construction of a demonstration breeded...

...Technologists have held up to us their genie lamps of "new energy sources," such as geothermal and solar...

...Whether solar energy, derived from the great beyond, or oil, derived from the bowels of the Earth, their producers should be made accountable-made safe for representative government...

...There is a problem, a political one...

...Just before the recess began, one Congressman from Texas, Bob Eckhardt of Houston, who is not in the oil industry's hip-pocket, told his colleagues in the House chamber that Americans, like Robert E. Lee's defeated soldiery a century ago, should be provided with horses in the coming Spring-not for planting crops but because "we won't be able to afford gasoline...

...Because the supply of uranium is limited, there is put forward as most feasible not a conventional reactor but a "breeding reactor" for the commercial generation of electricity, because it has an ability to "breed" more plutonium than it needs to operate...

...Gerald Ford, the President most ardently believing in the "free-market" of supply and demand (and prices) since William McKinley, has insisted that the way to keep the United States wallowing in oil, as it is accustomed to doing, is to let the price of imported oil rise and rise and rise-a position dubbed "the Persian resolution" by opponents...

...The two major American political parties could then demonstrate that they refuse to go the way of Italian political parties to which one of the "majors," EXXON oil, has just admitted it paid between $46 and $49-million over several years-including $86,000 to the Communist party...

...SISYPHUSase...

...Nuclear energy, as a source of electricity, is the favorite alternative being talked up within the congressional committees and the executive branch agencies...

...Reliable statistics are difficult to obtain, but there are indications we are importing slightly more than one-million barrels of oil daily from Arab countries...

...Then, there'll be an effort to remove a tariff of $2 a barrel on imported oil imposed by the President...

...The tariff will not encourage any more domestic production...

...At best, the efforts to provide the country with adequate supplies -of energy of whatever kind involve Faustian agreements of one kind or other...

...refuses to break up the cartel the two groups maintain which subscribe to a production policy that keeps prices from falling...

...Proponents of removal argue that domestic oil, by the nature of the cartel, would rise, if decontrol succeeds, to any price of imported oil that included such a tariff...

...SISYPHUS...