Editorials

...Such savings in these two sectors alone would effectively eliminate the need for all current oil imports before any reactor or synthetic fuel plant presently planned delivered a drop-and at a tenth of the cost...

...This cold winter's red hot heating bills may well force many more Americans than ever before to another sort of bill-comparison: the relative costs of the still dominant "hard path" energy strategy (nuclear plants, domestic oil field development, and synthetic fuels) and the environmentalist's "soft path" course-conservation, technical efficiency improvements, reliance on renewable energy sources like sun, wind, water, and farm and forestry wastes, and a technology scaled to the quality of energy needed for specific tasks so as to minimize the costs of conversion and transmission...

...The unemployment rolls, the underemployed machine shops, would supply labor and the machinery needed...

...are becoming limited...

...depending on the place and task, wind machines, industrial cogeneration, small-scale hydro, solar ponds, .etc., will often do the job much cheaper than oil-gobbling power plants...

...The study documents a trend...

...Department of Housing and Urban Development documents a creeping Californianism across the country...

...Some of the findings: About one in four rental units are located in places which exclude families with children...

...For their part, big labor might recognize that the energy-related industry's promise of jobs is not all it's cracked up to be...

...Amory Lovins estimates that if we insulated housing in even the most elementary way over the next ten years, we'd cut the oil intake,by about 2.5 million barrels a day...

...Reflect on that one for a minute...

...For the average household there that amounted to $ 1300 a year...

...I haven't sat down and compared bills," said one homeowner in the New York Times report of February 5, "because it makes me so sick...

...The higher the rent, the more common are restrictive policies regarding children...

...But now that controls are off and the true costs of the hard path painfully evident, labor and the poor are more likely political allies for soft-path advocates...

...The fastest way to reduce energy costs, say the soft-path advocates, would be a crash program to stop our extravagantly wasteful use of energy for heating and running cars...

...WITH most of the major oil companies already raising their prices twice the level the Reagan administration had foreseen before the president's January 28 "unleashing" decontrol order, Americans have their first taste of supply-sided economics...

...Were we to retire our current gas-guzzler vehicle fleet within the same period, replacing it with more fuel-efficient cars already on the market (like the, Volks wagon Rabbit, or if they'd build one, a comparable Detroit model, that gets 42-45 miles a gallon), we could save 4 million barrels a day...

...much faster than the major news media, with their focus on the big power industry, would suggest...

...Due to largely technical fixes, some forecasters, like the Department of Energy's Solar Energy Research Institute, predicted last year that with a two-thirds growth in GNP by the year 2000 we'd only require 58 quads then...

...Industry, also, has discovered technical fixes to improve efficiency in the use of energy...

...we can't do that...

...Nor do such stories impress advocates of the urban poor, people who must live in leaky rented apartments so long as tenant groups, or landlords, don't get state or federal help to weatherize, set up windmills or solar reflectors...

...Buildings and complexes in predominately white neighborhoods are more likely to have exclusionary policies than those in predominately black neighborhoods...

...It wouldn't be cheap (about $23 million a year), but the dollars, the jobs, and the multiplier effects would end up in Franklin County, not Venezuela...

...They also calculated that at the lowest official forecast of energy needs and prices by the year 2000, the average household would be spending $5300 in today's dollars for fuel...

...Nearly one-fourth of the nation's two-bedroom units are closed to families with one child, a third exclude families with two children and six in ten are unavailable to families with three children...

...The final irony: whereas managers in buildings that do not accept children are most likely to find children a nuisance, the least likely to say there are problems in renting to families with children are managers of buildings who accept children without limitation...

...One thing is clear here: as inflated home costs and and interest rates compel more young families to rent rather than buy their own homes, the choices facing families with children are becoming limited...

...Now a recent national survey, published last July, conducted by the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan for the U.S...

...Capital intensive, the energy industry's portion of the total work force amounts to only three percent, and lately that figure has been declining with each passing year...

...A state and federal program to employ union labor in weatherizing notoriously inefficient commercial buildings might turn some labor unions to the environmentalist camp...

...If true, the argument is enormously appealing...

...The incentives and subsidies, in the form of rapid depreciation and tax reductions, are likely to go into stimulating hard-path production-with no guarantee the profits therefrom won't funnel into foreign subsidiaries in Singapore and Caracas...

...Soft-path technocrats like Amory Lovins, the source of this report, love to tell stories like this-which herald local community-based initiatives, a lack of federal intervention, and free market small entrepreneurship...

...thirty-four percent goes into auto-fuel...

...When the hard-path energy bill is joined to the equally steep price of not ratifying Salt II, that is, to enormously expanded defense spending, the final price may be far more than just economic bankruptcy...

...We supply thirteen percent of our energy needs with electricity, when only eight percent, things like appliances, lights, motors, subways and smelters demand it-and all of these devices could be made more efficient...

...Further, of renters without children, the preference for an exclusionary policy affects only one out of four-and even of those who moved to a complex because of a no-children rule, more than four in five said they would stay put were children to be allowed in...

...The local Chamber of Commerce saw the handwriting on the wall: "impossible...

...If that's to occur, however, the Robert Redfords and Clam Shell Alliances will have to do a lot more to wed their ecological concerns with the economic anxieties of the labor and social justice constituencies...

...Environmentalists have argued all along that if controls were lifted on oil and gas it would dawn on us that the soft path would produce more energy faster and cheaper than investments in strip-mining coal, new oil and gas fields, or synthetic fuels...

...That's heartening news...

...A few years ago in this poorest county in the state, some far-sighted worriers figured out that the county was annually paying out to Venezuela the sum of $23 million for energy...

...In 1978, homeown-ing Americans spent $749 million on insulation, $1,109 billion on storm doors and windows, and guesses are that a like amount was spent in 1979 and 1980...

...No-children policies are typically found in complexes built during the 1970s...

...The ideals here, so close to President Reagan's own, do not charm big labor, which wants permanent union-wage jobs rather than cottage industry...

...That reaction was no doubt widely shared...

...The wave of the future, then, may be something like what's happening in Franklin County, Massachusetts...

...That figure, however, is probably contingent on a cost-conscious national energy policy, no doubt even more directed to conservation and the use of renewable energy sources than Carter's policy was...

...Whereas one out of three units built in the 1970s are located in buildings refusing children, one in six units in complexes built prior to 1975 excluded children at that time...

...Fifty-eight percent of our energy needs go into heat...

...With apocalypse staring them in the face, the county embarked on a program to weatherize buildings, install passive and active solar heat, run cars on methanol from the yield of unused public forests, and supply electricity needs with the county's own wind and small-scale hydro resources...

...About one in five managers of single family detached rental housing will not rent to families with children...

...About two-fifths of our current electricity goes into low temperature heating and cooling-which, observes Lovins, is like frying an egg with a forest fire...

...The question, though, for most Americans who are not employed in the hard-technology energy industry is whether the rest of us can any longer afford the price of maintaining those jobs, or buying the product...

...The study also pointed out some interesting discrepancies between the attitudes of managers and the attitudes of childless renters...

...If one looks at the dramatically declining projections of how much energy we will be needing by the turn of the century, all the signs are that the soft path has actually caught on in the U.S...

...The newer the complex, the more likely it is an exclusionary policy is in effect...

...And the trend is accelerating...

...prefers childless swingers and elders...

...Over one-half of the managers surveyed believe families without children are bothered by neighbors with children, but this proportion is much higher than the proportion of renters living near children who actually complain of being bothered...

...Let the reference point be the 78 quads (a quad is a Quadrillion BTUs) the nation used in 1978...

...With hard-path militants like James G. Watts at Interior and the Energy Departmnent itself slated for disappearance, there is little indication Reagan will encourage, much less subsidize the weatherization or technical improvements which would cut our oil bills drastically...

...And finally, oil obviously isn't the only way to produce electricity...

...A third considerable saving, say the cost-conscious soft-pat hers, would come from unfixing our supply-side gaze from the heroics of tapping dwindling oil reserves and looking at the extravagant misapplication and waste of high-quality energy like electricity...