The party really is over
Years ago I had the pleasure of listening to, and transcribing, tapes of E. F. Schumacher’s 1977 lecture tour in the United States. Schumacher, a life-long economist, was the author of the brilliant book Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. (He was author, also, of an equally brilliant but now nearly unremembered book titled A Guide for the Perplexed.)
This was in Jimmy Carter’s first term, nearly four years before Ronald Reagan came into office vowing - and delivering on his vow - to reverse Carter’s energy policy, which Carter had crafted to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. Reagan destroyed all federal programs involving support of research into solar energy, for instance, although he had no problem with giving plenty of money for the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) on the theory that SDI would help provide security for America. (As if energy independence would not!) Within a couple of years, the oil was flowing again and everybody went back to sleep, because the alternative was too disturbing to think about.
What we needed back then was leadership telling us to make the uncomfortable changes needed. Jimmy Carter, may has name be blessed, had the courage to do that. But Carter’s fate did not encourage other politicians to follow his example. Most Americans preferred to believe it was morning in America.
Well, let’s look at it again. In Schumacher’s 1977 talk, which he called “The Party’s Over,” he pointed out that our politicians were saying that “the Arabs were not behaving themselves.” Schumacher said our energy problems “have nothing to do the Arabs, and something to do with the resources endowment of the earth.”
In other words, we were relying on meeting ever-increasing demand by matching it with ever-increasing production. Simple calculations demonstrated that this was impossible. One calculation he made stuck in my mind. He said that for consumption to continue to increase at its current rate, the oil industry would have to find the equivalent of two new Alaskas every year. “And how many have they found?” he asked in his heavily accented English. “One. One, in 15 years.” On different tapes I heard him give that statement more than once, and it was always followed by a pause as the audience absorbed the fact in silence.
(Bear in mind, Schumacher was chief economist for the National Coal Board of Britain, so he could point out upcoming shortfalls in oil without losing his job. Whether he could have equally safely made the case against coal, I don’t know. Coal isn’t unlimited either. But there’s more coal in the ground than oil, and it isn’t in the Middle East, thank God.)
One other voice from those days sticks in my mind. Remember the Saudi chief oil minister, Sheik Ahmed Zaki Yamani? I well remember his being interviewed one day after OPEC had decided to increase oil production to get us out of some jam or other. He said - and although this is from memory, it is an exact quote - “but if you don’t reduce your dependence on foreign oil, God help you.”
And here we are.