OIL: Stepping on the Gas to Meet a Threat

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An air of crisis is spreading across the U.S. as the deepening energy emergency, triggered by the Arab oil embargo, has begun to pinch in small but ominous ways. Leisure activities, from boating trips to night football games, are being canceled; gasoline-short service stations are temporarily shutting down; and commuter-and school-bus schedules are being pared for lack of fuel. For the first time since World War II, there is serious talk of rationing gasoline and home-heating oil. Meanwhile, from Capitol Hill to the tiniest town hall, in board rooms and living rooms, Americans hastened to make up for lost time in meeting what could become the most serious economic threat to face the nation since the Depression.

As usual in an emergency, they reacted with remarkable individuality. Floyd Wallace of Leslie, Mich., claims to have found a way to concoct a gasoline substitute by cooking in a big steel drum ingredients as unlikely as wood, leaves, brush and a soupcon of everyday garbage. In Massachusetts, the Warren Savings Bank whittled electric usage by doing its evening banking by candlelight; the city fathers of Block Island, R.I., put the community back on daylight saving time. Students at Boston's New England School of Art devised a means of keeping their nude model warm when they turned the thermostat down to 65°: they put up a transparent plastic tent that is kept at a toasty 75° by the girl's body heat. Reporting on what he is doing to conserve energy, an eight-year-old Miami boy noted: "I walk to school every day. I don't watch much television. And I try not to take a bath."

In Washington last week the crisis provoked this blizzard of legislation:

1) The Senate and House whizzed through a long-delayed bill, which the President signed, to lay a pipeline across 789 miles of tundra, mountains and rivers between Alaska's North Slope oilfields and the warm-water port of Valdez. The pipe will pump some 2,000,000 bbl. per day—about 11 % of the nation's current needs. Though the line will be constructed on a hurry-up basis at a cost of $4.5 billion, it will still not be in operation until 1977, if then. In taking the action, Congress brushed aside longstanding objections by environmentalists, who argue that the construction will irrevocably rupture the area's ecology.

2) The Commerce committees of both the House and the Senate swiftly approved a bill to put the U.S. on year-round Daylight Saving Time, as President Nixon requested in his emergency message two weeks ago. The measure is expected to get final approval soon after Congress returns from Thanksgiving recess and will probably take effect in early January. Moving the clock ahead one hour is expected to diminish energy use by up to 2%.

3) Congress passed a new mandatory fuel-allocation bill that will require the Office of Petroleum Allocation to distribute fuel to areas and industries most in need, probably in the Northeast and on the West Coast. Existing legislation merely authorized the Administration to allocate fuel, but Nixon has used that power sparingly and reluctantly, and the program has faltered. The new legislation, which the President has said he will sign, includes gasoline and crude oil, both of which are now allocated on a loose voluntary basis.