POLICY: The Whirlwind Confronts the Skeptics

In mid-fall, the energy crisis burst upon the U.S. with the emotional impact of a modern-day handwriting on the wall. After a long Belshazzar's feast of energy gluttony, it seemed, Americans were being called to a bitter reckoning. The winter loomed as a grim season of cold bedrooms and chilly classrooms, of painful shortages of oil-related products ranging from phonograph records to penicillin, of cramped inability to travel, of shuttered factories and high unemployment. And that supposedly would be only the start of a new lifestyle of thrift, sharing and self-denial —spiritually cathartic, perhaps, but hardly very comfortable.

Now winter is well under way—and most homes are still warm, virtually all factories are still humming, and the popular mood is swinging mercurially from aggravated alarm to sour skepticism. The nation is being swept by rumors of tankers idling at sea to await higher prices before unloading, of refineries bulging with reserve stocks, of price-gouging from dock to gas pump. Forgetting how much their lives have already changed—who would have dared predict a year ago that 68° thermostat settings and gasless Sundays would so quickly become routine?—many Americans are asking not how the nation has managed to avoid the worst but whether there really is any energy shortage worth worrying about. Growing numbers are voicing suspicion that the whole emergency has been a hoax engineered by the oil companies to squeeze out huge price increases.

That cynicism immensely complicates the job of Washington's latest whirlwind, William E. (for Edward) Simon, chief of the new Federal Energy Office. A bond trader who was unknown outside Wall Street in late 1972, a modestly publicized No. 2 man at the Treasury as recently as last November, the 46-year-old Simon in the past month has become one of the most powerful and visible figures in a Government starved for leadership. Now he is putting his credibility on the line almost daily to declare, in press release after news conference after TV interview, that the shortage is only too real and will not go away even after the Arabs lift their embargo on oil shipments to the U.S.

Overnight Agency. Americans, Simon argues convincingly, are "energy wastrels" who have been increasing their consumption by 4% to 5% a year even though domestic oil production peaked out in 1970 and now supplies only two-thirds of demand. He preaches that the nation must continue and intensify its efforts to save energy and develop other sources of fuel. The only alternative, Simon says, is to have "the American people subjecting themselves to the economic and political blackmail of any foreign nation" that might wish to cut off the supply of the oil it exports or raise its price to outrageous heights. Still, Simon readily concedes: "My hardest job will be to keep up the momentum —to keep the American people awake to the fact that we da have a problem and will continue to have a problem."