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  • Why Today’s Power Crisis?
    Awake!—1972 | August 8
    • Rapid Depletion

      Demands for power have grown faster than anticipated. Fossil fuels have been consumed at a fantastic rate. Each day, on the average, the world takes from the earth about 2,000 million gallons of oil! In 1970 the world figure increased 9.5 percent over the year before. If that rate continued, oil use would more than double in ten years. Western Europe’s oil consumption actually tripled in the last ten years. Regarding the astounding demand for fossil fuels, last October’s Science Digest said:

      “Rapid depletion of the world stock of these vital raw materials becomes grimly dramatic when you realize that as of 1968, half of the oil which man used throughout history he produced during the preceding 12 years. Indeed, most of the world’s consumption of fossil fuels has taken place in the last quarter century.”

      Such a rate of consumption has a snowballing effect, picking up incredible speed. For example, electrical power consumption has been more than doubling every ten years in the United States. This means, as Scientific American, September 1971, observes: “During the next 10 years the U.S. will generate as much electricity as it has generated since the beginning of the electrical era.” The consequences of a doubling rate of consumption every ten years is staggering.

      Although no one knows how much coal, oil and gas are stored in the earth, for the sake of illustration let us assume that 5 percent of the total supply has thus far been consumed. This means that at a rate of doubling consumption every ten years, all of earth’s fossil fuels would be used up in some forty years!

      “Beginning to Run Out”

      The rate at which earth’s fossil fuels are being consumed is frightening to many. Some experts say that their depletion is ‘only a little more than a generation away.’ In a 1969 report to the United States president, the National Academy of Sciences predicted: “It will take only another 50 years or so to use up the great bulk of the world’s initial supply of recoverable petroleum liquids and natural gas.”

  • Why Today’s Power Crisis?
    Awake!—1972 | August 8
    • Yet oil, too, is in short supply in the United States. Already more than a quarter of the country’s oil is imported​—about 164 million gallons every day, on the average. But according to a recent Department of the Interior report, these imports will have to be more than doubled by 1980.

      Dependence on Foreign Oil

      Although oil discoveries have been made in Alaska, the bulk of earth’s known remaining oil resources is in other lands, particularly the Middle East. Thus United States Assistant Secretary of the Interior, Hollis M. Dole, says “this country is going to have to go where the oil is​—Africa and the Mideast—​to make up its fuel deficit.”

      Yet a growing dependence on Middle East oil only accentuates the power crisis, as the New York Times, December 7, 1971, indicated:

      “The State Public Service Commission has asserted that ‘current political realities,’ including ‘continued smoldering of Arab-Israeli conflict,’ have made the state’s electric utilities increasingly vulnerable to interruption of their residual oil fuel supply. Nearly all such oil is imported.”

      Reports the Miami Herald: “Middle East oil is so important that the United States is willing to run the risk of nuclear confrontation to protect it.” Yes, nations today would risk war to get the oil that is necessary to keep industry going, cars moving, television sets operating and lights burning.

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