Brace for the Storm

IN ONE particularly instructive Sesame Street episode, Bert and Ernie find themselves confronted with rain leaking through a hole in the roof. They lament that it is impossible to go out and fix the roof while it's still raining. Thus, they continue to get wet. When the weather finally clears, though, they decide not to bother fixing the roof, reasoning that you don't need a good roof as long as it's not raining.

These two muppets evidently understood better than most the essence of American energy policy under Ronald Reagan and George Bush: twiddle our national thumbs as long as oil is cheap, and then cringe in policy paralysis when the inevitable oil shocks come along.

If nothing else, the crisis in the Persian Gulf has served to remind us that our supply of energy is critically important and chronically unreliable. While everyone is still conscious of the crisis at the gas pump, it's time to re-establish reliable and renewable energy as a top national priority. A few suggestions:

. Understand the real problem. The "energy crisis" confronting us is not Saddam Hussein, or OPEC, or even high gasoline prices. The problem is the natural scarcity of petroleum; we are fast running out of our primary energy source. According to Department of Energy figures, the U.S. has already extracted about 121 billion barrels of the 148 billion accessible with current technology. With improvements in extraction techniques, we can get at an additional 18 to 53 billion barrels. That's it. Even Saudi Arabia, with by far the largest proven reserves in the world, has only 165 billion barrels left.

If the we continue to use oil at the present rate--especially if the rest of the world begins to approach America's prodigious energy consumption--the wells will soon run dry. It's time to get serious about investing in alternative energy resources, especially renewable ones.

. Waste not, want not. Back in the heydey of OPEC, when gasoline lines stretched for miles, everyone got the conservation bug. Between 1977 and 1985, while the number of registered automobiles increased by 20 percent, oil consumption declined by 15 percent. The energy savings directly attributable to the conservation measures of the Carter era amount to more than $150 billion per year. Yet the Reagan administration bowed to pressure from auto manufactures and rolled back fuel economy standards.

. Get America back on the trains. Railroads are by far the most fuel-efficient form of passenger transportation, achieving nearly 10 times the number of passenger-miles per gallon as cars. Yet the U.S. is stuck with the pathetically inadequate and ineffecient Amtrak system, the rolling laughingstock of the industrial world. Despite large subsidies, Amtrak remains hamstrung by union featherbedding, bureaucratic stupidity, and the inability to compete with other modes of transport.

Almost unbelievably, the most-traveled route on the Amtrak system--the Boston-Washington line--is still not fully electrified; all trains must switch locomotives in New Haven, Conn. The U.S. needs a renewed political and financial commitment to making train travel rapid and economical. Developing a new generation of high-speed trains will be awfully expensive (especially building rail lines through the suburban sprawl of the Northeast Corridor), but the energy shortage will require it sooner or later. And the longer we wait, the worse the obstacles become.

. Play hardball with the sheiks. Despite the popular perception that OPEC is no longer capable of enforcing price discipline on its members, a barrel of oil traded at more than twice its free-market price even before Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. With two simple tools--stand-by gasoline rationing authority and the Strategic Petroleum Reserve--the U.S. could use its weight in the world petroleum market to bust OPEC once and for all. By merely threatening to curtail drastically its consumption and flood the world market with cheap oil, the U.S. could force the oil-fattened Gulf kingdoms to play by the rules of the free market and stop gouging the rest of the world.

The result would be a moral victory as well as an economic one; lower oil prices would benefit oil-importing developing nations (that's most of them) and the fledgling democracies of Eastern Europe, while striking a blow to authoritarian Gulf sheikdoms, the Soviet Union, and corrupt banana republics such as Nigeria. After bringing down the price of crude, the U.S. ought to...

. Jack the price back up. After oil prices are restored to their free-market level, the U.S. could painlessly slap a punitive tax on the consumption of oil and use the revenue to pay for conservation measures, alternative energy research and mass transit systems. Even if OPEC remains sound, an additional petroleum tax is not a bad idea, so long as it is accompanied by some sort of a rebate plan for the poor to counteract the regressive nature of such a tax. Already, American consumers pay absurdly low gasoline prices by global standards. Taxing gasoline heavily makes good economic sense, because fossil fuel consumption carries with it heavy, unpaid social costs--notably environmental destruction.

America's "What--me worry?" energy policy led directly to the current jam in the Persian Gulf. As long as we maintain our gluttonous consumption of energy, we can never wean ourselves from dependence on Gulf oil or reduce our vulnerability to capricious despots like Saddam Hussein. The time has come to fix the roof--before the big storm hits.