The Fuel Shortage: A Crisis of Power

Although the vestige of fuel shortage remains, the most critical period is over. Such return to normalcy, it would seem, should elicit genuine relief from the American public. This is not the case. Instead of relief, most Americans have the deep and haunting suspicion that they have been used as pawns, manipulated like putty in the greasy and greedy palms of Big Oil. Anger and impotence are all they can feel.

The U.S. gets its energy from five main sources: petroleum (46 percent); natural gas (32 percent); coal (17 percent); hydropower (4 percent) and nuclear (1 percent). Big Oil dominates each sector. The top 25 oil corporations have 84 percent holdings in oil, 72 percent in gas, 50 percent in coal, 80 percent in atomic and 60 percent in electric. To understand the “energy crisis,” one must understand Big Oil.

Both oil industry and government rhetoric have provided several rationales for the crisis. Their most forceful arguments contain the following three elements: depletion of oil reserves; limited refinery capacity, and the damaging impact of the Arab embargo. Each element lacks cogency.

The only comprehensive statistics available on the depletion of oil reserves come from the industry itself--hardly disinterested observers. There is every reason to believe that their data is grossly underestimated.