Business: That New Energy Buzz Book

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Those assumptions are highly questionable. At present, broadly defined solar provides less than 6% of the nation's energy needs; some other studies anticipate that solar could supply no more than 10% by the year 2000.

The conservation chapter, written by Yergin, is more persuasive though somewhat extravagant. He argues that with only minor adjustments in life-style and no decline in economic growth, Americans could consume 30% to 40% less energy than they do today. In the book's best passages, Yergin cites illustrations ranging from Dow Chemical's 40% reduction in energy use to Colgate-Palmolive's 18% cutback to show that many companies have continued to expand while saving energy. The examples are impressive. Nonetheless, there is a critical point at which sizable reductions in energy could provoke a tailspin in U.S. industrial expansion.

Yergin also points out that buildings and residences, which now use 38% of the nation's energy, could be made much more fuel-efficient. The need is for intelligent construction codes and relatively simple improvements in insulation. All told, the Harvard team believes that solar and conservation can cover 22% of the nation's energy needs by the late 1980s —and up to 40% by century's end. These are enormously high estimates.

At the other extreme, the Harvard study is gloomy to the point of being defeatist about fossil fuels. Energy Future offers no hope that much new oil can be found in drilled-out America. The authors largely write off as impractical the attempts to recover left-behind oil in old wells. Natural gas, in their view, also has a dim future because proven reserves have been steadily shrinking. Even before Three Mile Island, notes the book, nuclear power was declining. Finally, mining, transportation and pollution problems rule out big increases in coal production.

The book's main flaw is that it gives up too quickly on the existing fuels, while placing too much faith on the unproven performance of solar and conservation. Both of those deserve to be encouraged, but so do existing and future fuels. Oil can be stretched by technological ingenuity, and the potential for developing the nation's shale resources is vast.

The book went to press, of course, before President Carter made his bold proposal for a crash program to produce synthetic fuels from sources as varied as shale, coal, sugar beets and even garbage. Congressmen are increasingly worried that his program may be too costly, too ambitious, too bureaucratic. Yet synfuel is precisely the sort of project, though dismissed by the Harvard experts in advance, that holds tremendous promise. Already, synfuel is being produced economically abroad. For the U.S. to downplay it and put most of its chips on solar and conservation would be a bad bet.