(8 of 10)
By the same token, the prospective extension of price controls to intrastate gas is a bad mistake; it destroys that gas as a valuable yardstick of what the commodity really is worth in a free market. Since price is the quickest means for conservation, year-by-year increases in gasoline taxes could eventually curtail unnecessary driving and force more use of mass transit. Unfortunately, this is one of the proposals least likely to be in the final program.
2) The auto mileage rules already written into law are unrealistic. Increased auto efficiency is highly desirable. But, if the U.S. auto industry is forced to meet the 1985 standard of 27.5 m.p.g., it will be subjected to debilitating competition from foreign carmakers, who are far more experienced at making small autos, and threaten a loss of jobs. A better idea: to rely on stiff taxes on big cars. In Europe, that approach, plus high gasoline prices, prompts most buyers to choose gas-miserly small cars, while allowing manufacturers to turn out large, flashy autos for motorists who want and can afford them.
3) The program fails to take a position on congressional moves to dismember the big oil companies. Several bills have been introduced in Congress in the past few years either to split the oil giants into separate drilling, refining, transportation and marketing companies, or to force them to get out of other fields of energy such as coal and nuclear power, or both. Carter should pledge to veto any such move. At the very moment when incalculably huge sums are needed to develop new sources of energy, the oil companies alone in U.S. industry have the muscle—money, know-how and organization—to do the job. And their own survival is at stake: unless they expand into new sources of energy, they will die with the depletion of the world's oil and gas reserves. But as long as they face a serious threat of breakup, they will not make the investments required. In return for a pledge to stop dismemberment, Carter should extract a promise that the companies will devote a large share of the profits they would reap from price decontrol to exploration and development of solar, nuclear and synthetic fuels.
In addition, though Schlesinger warns against panaceas, the Administration seems to be regarding coal as one. Schlesinger's goal of almost doubling production by 1985 is admirable, but whether it is feasible is open to question. Crucial and complex problems must be solved first.
To begin with, the vast coal deposits that Schlesinger is talking about are not located in the already developed, deep mines of Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Instead, they are found in thick seams near the surface in Colorado, Montana and Wyoming, where they are most economically recoverable by landscape-scarring strip mining. Some of the coal lies beneath federal land that has been set aside for recreational purposes, and the Sierra Club and other conservationist groups have been making it difficult to open that acreage to coal mining. Other Western environmentalists also are appalled. "It's an effort to New Jerseyize the West," complains Carolyn Johnson, head of the Colorado Open Space Council mining workshop.