MORE PERSPECTIVE ON WORLD ENERGY RELATIONSHIPS

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If the boundary between two competing power centers is located appropriate to the energy sources available to the defense, and both sides understand their strength, then large war may be prevented. If, however, there are shifts in relative energy and the boundary is not shifted, a situation is set up where the system with lesser energy can be defeated and driven well back from its former position. The U.S. is now in that role relative to its position in the 1940's, since it has 1/3 or less of the world's energy expenditure, whereas it used to have half.

There is a great danger that the U.S. might attempt to exert military action in the eastern Mediterranean, as it once did in Eisenhower times, with inadequate power to do so as compared to Russia and other countries with greater energy proximity and greater energy resources. If the U.S. is induced into wars that it hardly has the energy to support while other nations with oil reserves do not become so much involved, the relative energy position of the U.S. will deteriorate until it becomes so energetically weak that it cannot handle its own hemispheric defense. For world stability, energy differentials need to be evened out and the richer sources used first so that balance of energy resources is maintained.

As oil-producing countries and associates get full industrial technology, which they can readily buy as their relative richness so exceeds that of existing technological countries, their total military and economic power will grow into a new colossus. If there is a large difference in actual energy post of getting energy between the U.S. and the producers of richer oils, the latter can determine which countries will have economic edge by sale at slightly lower prices. There is no way the U.S. can organize the non-oil-producers into a counterpower with inferior energy sources. There might be enough storage of high-energy capability in the industrial countries to try for an oil conquest if they were quick about it, but they are probably blocked by the greater Soviet energy and equivalent power at that distance. It would probably mean World War III. The U.S. alone could not do it. The European countries can get their needs by joining the Arab block.

3. Energy cost of some activity must include all its inputs.

A bad error is being made in much public forum discussion and in many economics papers that attempt to determine the energy use of a given process. The error arises in calculating the energy use of an activity as only that directly observed to be used by the activity, while ignoring the energy that makes possible all the other goods and services that go into that activity. For example, the energy utilization in transportation is not just the fuels used by the cars, but is also the energy spent all through the economy subsidizing the making of the cars, the roads, and the maintenance. One way of estimating the energy spent in support of such a complicated activity is to obtain the money cost and convert to the average energy expenditure per dollar as calculated from the total economy, such as a figure of 17,000 kilocalories to the dollar.

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