Ecologist Calls for Energy Regulation

An expert on the energy crisis, speaking with two other well known scholars, said last night that President Nixon's energy message of yesterday "sidestepped the issue."

Barbara Heller, a member of the Energy Policy Staff of the Environmental Policy Center, said Nixon's message advocated the reduction of demand for oil on a voluntary basis. She said that asking American industry to take steps for self-regulation without any economic incentives or government enforcement is "like asking cigarette companies to do research on cancer."

Heller said that oil consumption could be greatly reduced if efficiencies of appliances, automobile engines, and building insulation were regulated. She said these measures, if instituted correctly, would reduce domestic oil consumption by 7.3 million barrels per day "without at all having to return [the country] to the dark ages."

The United States currently imports between nine and 12 million barrels per day, Heller said.

Morris A. Adelman, professor of Economics at MIT, said that current oil shortages and rising gasoline prices are due to several causes. He said that at the same time that the U.S. ran out of low-cost domestic sources and began importing more oil, an international cartel composed of the governments of oil-producing countries monopolized the supply.

The monopolists, he said, raise their prices regularly and threaten to cut off oil supplies if their demands are not met.

Adelman said he thought the crisis would last at least until 1985. He expressed confidence, however, that decreased demand for imports, as the result of an Alaskan pipeline and evaluation of environmental costs of energy, would end the shortages after that time.

Richard Wilson, professor of Physics, said that the government should begin to finance nuclear and solar energy resource development now, because they will take longer to build than the public realizes. He said he is afraid we will run out of oil before these alternate sources are ready to take over.

The real crisis is not immediate but will come in about 50 years, Wilson said.