That fantastic machine, the US trillion-dollar economy and America's unprecedented living standard have largely been built on energy extracted from oil, gas and coal. These "fossil fuels" heat our homes, cook our food, run our factories, mills and railroads. They gave us the auto age and the space age. For decades we have been led to believe that supplies of these fuels would last almost indefinitely at low cost. Working on that assumption, national policy since World War II has discouraged imports of foreign oil so that production of our own "unlimited" reserves would not be stifled. In the 30 years we were locked into that policy, our population burgeoned by some 60 million and each American increased his energy intake by three times. It is now clear that our assumptions were wrong. We have been on an energy binge, and the hangover could be protracted and painful.
First, a few statistics: Americans, six percent of the people on this planet, last year consumed 40 percent of all energy used.
• Since 1950, when we led the world in energy consumption, we have tripled (our) electrical demands.
• By 1970, our production of gas and oil began to peak out, so that now we are using more gas than we find and more oil than we refine.
• If energy demand were to level off today, the story would be alarming enough; but every study and projection tells of an even more frightening future. This year we'll have to find new energy for the 11,000,000 gas burning autos Detroit will produce and the 2,500,000 new homes constructed. Moreover there are the undeveloped countries with their rising expectations, the exploding Common Market, the inventive Japanese, the Chinese looking for new trade relationships, and the development-minded Russians—all of whom will be looking for more gas, oil and coal, and some of it from the same markets we will seek to tap.
And when they compete with us it will be with fire in their eyes because they know that much of the world's precious oil reserve is spent moving big American cars, sometimes three to a family, currently accounting for 48 percent of the world's autos and 55 percent of all the gas consumed; that the British and Germans are getting along with approximately half as much per capita, and their standards of living aren't so bad; and that the lion's share of the additional energy demanded by Americans will be for uses others view as outrageous luxuries like air conditioning, for which 210 million Americans consume as much energy as 800 million Chinese use for every purpose! One additional bit of bad news is that most of the world's remaining known petroleum reserves lie in the nations of the Mideast whose current demeanor toward the United States is less friendly than to many of our major energy competitors.