August 26, 1970
Page 30098
THE CRISIS OF A POWER SHORTAGE
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, in recent weeks the Subcommittee on Intergovernmental Relations has heard testimony on legislation concerned with the need for adequate, dependable electric power. The crisis of a power shortage in the New York area highlighted the problem very dramatically. Of equal significance, however, is the fact that the power problem was joined by a severe air pollution condition – one which held for several days. The combination of air pollution and electric power reduction now threatens to become a commonplace item in our lives. The question is whether we will establish appropriate national policies intended to recognize problems when they occur and to offer remedies, or whether we will continue to drift along and try to muddle our way through to their solution.
An editorial by the noted journalist Edward P. Morgan realistically raises points concerning air pollution and power facilities and the need for national planning effort to avoid the one and promote the other.
I ask unanimous consent that Mr. Morgan's comments be printed in the RECORD.
There being no objection, the comments were ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
STATEMENT BY EDWARD P. MORGAN
This is Edward P. Morgan in Washington with the Shape of One Man's Opinion. A look at a four-letter word after this word. (60)
For generations, one of the most obscene terms in the American lexicon has been a four-letter word spelled p-1-a-n, plan. If cleanliness was next to godliness, planning was a sin, the very thought of which produced goose-bumps on the rugged physiognomy of American private enterprise because it raised the specter of creeping socialism.
It is hard to think of an area in which this bogey was raised more threateningly than in the field of electrical power. In the New Deal days, private utilities had periodic seizures of apoplexy over the creation of the rural electrification administration, bringing light and power to farmers, extension of service to whom was not considered "profitable" enough to private firms.
The power lobby fought tooth and nail the conception and construction of TVA, Hoover, Grand Coulee, Bonneville and other giant multipurpose dams. Even today, private utilities still propagandize against public power and co-op systems, writing off such advertising costs as "business expense," thus enjoying tax deductions – all of which is another way of saying that rate payers and taxpayers helped finance the power companies' propaganda campaign against their "public" competitors.
Furthermore, private utilities have systematically bucked the application of a national power policy and a system of regional grids whereby power could be pooled and routed, in emergencies, to regions suffering shortages caused by overloads or technical difficulties. True, consumer demand for power has increased staggeringly and paradoxically companies have been seriously stymied by public opposition to their projection of nuclear power plants and other expansions.
But here again wise advance planning could have done much to clear such obstacles.
Now, to nobody's surprise, a day of reckoning has arrived, New York City is struggling with a brownout and facing a repeat of the northeast's massive power blackout of a few years ago.
Ironically, New York's Consolidated Edison has kept its juice flowing by purchasing extra power from as far away as Canada and, of all subversive instrumentalities, the Tennessee Valley Authority.
Nature has compounded the emergency with an eye-burning smog in wilting weather. But is nature the real villain? Who planned the traffic jam exhausts and other contributors to the smog by pollution belching from industrial chimneys – even those of Con. Edison itself?
I'll be back with a footnote. First this.
The weather readily conspires with urban non-planners to make city life miserable elsewhere. Washington is on the edge of an air pollution alert. This town's principal product is politics, which produces its own pollution but a more palpable kind emerges from garbage dumps, traffic jams and uncoordinated suburban growth.