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CASE FOR CONSERVATION. Simply because the U.S. uses so much energy, it can also save a lot. But conservation is often very expensive, especially when large plants must be converted to different fuels or "retrofitted" with more efficient equipment. There also are limits beyond which conservation would become a debilitating brake on the nation's economic activity.
Reviewing his company's conservation attempts, J. Robert Ferguson Jr., executive vice president of U.S. Steel, conceded that Big Steel in the past had used then cheap energy in order to conserve scarce capital funds. "The result is that we've had to go back and re-examine what we've been doing."
The effort has not been entirely encouraging. It is possible, explained Ferguson, to "retrofit" old steelmaking machinery with modern energy-conserving equipment, but the cost is "horrendous." Said he: "Every buck we spend on conversion for our fuel sources and for environmental control will not be available for new plants, new supplies or new jobs."
Biologist Barry Commoner offered a startling critique and a hotly disputed solution. "The efficiency with which we are using energy and capital is falling drastically," he said; since World War II the U.S. has "displaced labor with energy that runs machines that capital has bought" and done social damage in the process. For example, the petrochemical industry, he charged, produces goods that replace natural products and often have only marginal social,benefit. Plastic for heart valves, he said, is a socially valuable product; swizzle sticks are not.
Commoner regards the conventional kind of conservation as a short-term measure "to see that there are no holes in the bucket carrying energy to industry and homes." For the longer term, he advocates a reorganization of the entire economy to make it both more fuel efficient and responsible: "I think we have to introduce the concept of social governance of the production process; we need to find some way for society to determine directly what to produce and how."
George Shultz, former Secretary of the Treasury who is now president of the Bechtel Corp., challenged from the floor.
Shultz: Why, Mr. Commoner, should we all live by your standard of judgment of the relative value of various products when we have a means that allows us to give everyone a chance to express their judgments by the way they spend their own money in the market? Your concept of social governance would decide what products to produce with our resources by an essentially political process with the decisions made in Washington by politicians and bureaucrats.
Commoner: If the marketplace worked, everyone would have a chance to say whether they wanted swizzle sticks or not. But it hasn't worked. When you buy that cheaper shirt made by petrochemicals, no one puts a tag on it saying this costs employment, pollutes the.air, uses energy in ways that are inefficient. No signals are given about the full-scale long-term social consequence of decisions made by the entrepreneurs.