EDITORIAL
SAVING PLANET EARTH The United States enters the new year with some notable gains having been made in the closing weeks of the old year towards the salvaging of the environment-what's left of it,...
...In our shrinking world, accords of potentially cosmic consequences must be binding on all nations-which means, ideally, that all nations should be party to negotiations towards policy...
...There must be a global one embracing all nations of the world, in the same way that there should be-but isn't-an all-embracing international nuclear-arms policy...
...If the attempt to control nuclear weapons has taught political leaders anything, it should be that it is not enough for superpowers like the United States and the USSR to reach their bilateral accords-not when nuclear capacity is within the technology of probably a score of other nations, with several already having achieved strike power...
...The point of all this is that it is not enough for the United States to have a constructive energy/conservation policy...
...at the same time, positive results of such a conference would doubtlessly not be immediately discernible, just as they have not been so far as the population conference is concerned...
...The Environmental Protection Agency has "tentatively" decided that the supersonic jet airplane is too noisy for Washington and New York airports, and the House has followed up that opinion with a six-month ban on all supersonic jetline landings in the country...
...Such a conference could have the vital effect of dignifying the energy and conservation questions in a manner that neither is now...
...The White House is not enthusing over the restrictions placed on the supersonic plane...
...All of which is to say that it is past time for some nation or nations, maybe the United Nations itself, to take the lead in the formulation of an enlightened energy/ conservation policy that will guarantee for the benefit of all the wisest and fairest uses of what nature and the earth have left to offer...
...As these effects accumulate, we will all pay the price...
...SAVING PLANET EARTH The United States enters the new year with some notable gains having been made in the closing weeks of the old year towards the salvaging of the environment-what's left of it, that is...
...Precious natural resources continue to be gobbled up at unconscionable rates...
...Ford will use what is perhaps the most important section of the Energy Act: that granting authority to institute gasoline rationing and other conservation measures...
...The Russian supersonic plane, for instance, is operational, and the British-French Concorde will be on regular runs any day now...
...A similar conference on energy, the environment and conservation would have its own sets of conflicts no less difficult...
...Ozone depletion will occur, whatever the remoteness of the runs, with worldwide effects on the amount of solar energy reaching the earth, as well as on the molecular structures that normally shield the earth from cancer-producing solar ultraviolet rays...
...Nevertheless, the idea is not to be dismissed...
...the consumption of energy leaps ahead so as to double every eleven years...
...The Stockholm conference, admittedly, was not so impressive by way of results as it was in concept, partially because it got bogged down in conflicting moral and nationalistic considerations...
...From every humane vantage point, it is intolerable that dollars, greed, established living patterns, mere technological know-how and narrow political considerations should be the prime determinants in what of air, land and sea is exploited, at what rate, how and to whose advantage...
...As things are headed now, this century's legacy to the next promises to be a heavily poisoned atmosphere and a largely exhausted earth...
...At the same time, President Ford has signed into law the comprehensive Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975, with features far more significant than most of what was suggested by the prolonged media focus on the roll-back of crude-oil prices...
...pollution ever increases, doubling every fourteen years...
...Likewise, short of some last-hour emergency, it is doubtful that Mr...
...But unfortunately such does not appear to be the case...
...And-who knows?-maybe out of this will come sensitivities that will make the twenty-first century just a little more livable for people of that day...
...Neither development-congratulatory though one may be about both- is reason however for complacency...
...The threats of the one are not so incomparable to those of the other that the challenges of the two are not to be equated...
...One would like to think that last month's developments signaled a turnabout in environmental values, and that a new concern is aborning...
...Meanwhile, the rest of the developed world plays its games of Russian roulette with the environment, with stakes that overleap national boundaries...
...If one of the great perils of these planes is a cooling of the earth because of the exhaust they will spew in the windless upper-atmosphere, then it makes no difference whether their destinations are Washington and New York-or Soviet Kazakhstan and the Persian Gulf island of Bahrain on the far side of the world...
...As with arms, so with energy/conservation: the stakes are so vast and the chances of upsetting fragile balances so increasingly widespread among nations that it is foolhardy (not to say presumptuous) for one or two nations, or even a handful, to attempt to program among themselves what is best for the world at large...
...Ford's preoccupation remains control of energy prices, when, of course, it should be on control of consumption...
...In order is an international conference of the scope of that held a few years ago in Stockholm on world population...
Vol. 103 • January 1976 • No. 2
