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Russell Train, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, believes that the U.S. can at least start lessening its energy problem right now by reducing waste. "We must shift our thinking from simply finding more energy sources to concerning ourselves with how to use energy more efficiently," he says. With better technology, most appliances can be made to consume less power and throw off less heat. The common light bulb uses only 10% of the electricity it burns, for example, and refrigerators can easily be produced to use 50% less power. More important, there is plenty of room for improvement in methods of generating and transmitting electricity. One remedy is an advanced but until recently neglected system with the awesome name of magnetohydrodynamics. MHD can produce electricity directly from the high-velocity flow of hot, ionized gases, with 60% efficiency instead of the present 35%. Similarly, superconductive, supercold (–320° F.) power lines can cut transmission losses. Though both technologies are costly, they would yield much more power per unit of fuel with less pollution.
The basic problem, though, is the soaring increase in future demand, which must somehow be slowed. Some utilities are already shifting their advertising campaigns from consumption to conservation of electricity. The rate-setting state power commissions might stop favoring large consumers, who claim the traditional discounts for bulk buying. (In Virginia, for example, the average industrial user pays 10 per kw-h for buying in bulk; the residential user pays 20, and the very small user, i.e., the poor, pays 30.) If the price of power must equal its costs, including the costs of environmental cleanup, then it seems reasonable that everyone pay equally.
Simply increasing the price of power could be expected eventually to reduce consumption. But even that straightforward tactic raises a difficult question. Since energy consumption and pollution have long been an element of the nation's prosperity, can we now conserve and clean up only by making life more expensive for everybody, including the poor? "Any effort to find a solution to the power crisis is certain to engage, at the deepest level, the nation's concept of social justice," says Biologist Barry Commoner. "The power crisis, like every other environmental issue, is not an escape from the responsibilities of social justice. It is, rather, a new way of perceiving them."
In response, however, the conservationist argument is that the public hardly benefits from office lights that burn all night, from the sealed glass buildings whose overworked air conditioners heat up the streets, or from the trash heaps that could be recycled into new products. Commoner, for one, estimates that a number of relatively simple changes like improved insulation in private homes, or the use of more steel and less aluminum in new cars, would make it possible to reduce present energy consumption by one-third.
These may seem like sacrifices to those who have become habituated to waste, but they are small sacrifices when, as Maurice Chevalier said of old age, "you consider the alternative."