water resources, constitute in effect the “condemnation” of whole states to become “energy colonies” of the rest of the nation, and could lead to the destruction of the agricultural base of the American west. A massive synfuels program would require an invasion of state, local, and private rights unprecedented in scope and intensity in our national history. Even an extrapolated growth of conventional means of energy exploration and exploitation would have similar if lesser effects. But the soft energy path raises problems as well. In the area of production, some if not all of the means of energy generation, such as photovoltaic cells, will probably be centrally produced and distributed, as large corporations inevitably enter an increasingly profitable market. A large factory producing photovoltaic cells for solar power is still a factory, with its own system of internal compulsions. In the realms of energy consumption the amount of consumer choice — “freedom to” — involved in the soft energy path while substantial will certainly not be unlimited. Energy generated by windmills or solar collectors may be produced on a large scale and distributed by utility systems not unlike — indeed identical with — present ones. Already some firms such as Southern California Edison are moving in that direction. This can also be true of energy produced by “cogeneration” from the use of what are now waste products as well. Geothermal energy can become a virtual monopoly if particular corporations or interests succeed in controlling enough of the land from which it can be produced. Recent press reports have revealed that the fabulously wealthy Hunt family of Texas have been engaged in trying to dominate leasing of federal lands available for geothermal exploration (30). Nonconventional energy sources may have to be standardized for particular communities, and once the community has exercised its autonomy in choosing a particular source, individual consumers may have less choice than they do at present, when they are at least in most localities able to choose among electricity, gas, or coal. In addition, not everyone wants a windmill on his or her horizon or huge solar collectors spread across the desert. Conservation measures — a major factor in most soft energy scenarios — can also easily and sometimes necessarily involve “regimentation,” loss of both “freedom from” and “freedom to” — as in communities where housing ordinances specify street widths to conserve energy by minimizing the energy needed for heating in the winter and air conditioning in the summer, or dictating how houses must be sited on lots for similar purposes, as in Davis, California. Encouragement of some soft energy sources and of conservation as well, will involve subsidies with their corollary of compulsion just as will crash programs for nuclear power or synfuels. Two major political differences will probably separate a soft energy path from a hard one. Because of the variety of soft ways to produce energy and their close relationship to local physical environmental conditions, even if regimentation and compulsion should exist at the local level, it need not do so at the regional or national. Individuals could conceivably move away from a windmill community to live in a solar-panel one more easily than the average American could move away from all nuclear power plants. There would almost certainly be less centrally mandated and locally resented environmental degradation than would be involved in crash programs for coal mining in the Rockies or offshore drilling along prized California beaches for instance. One benefit which allegedly results from soft energy paths is a greater “freedom to” as far as the consumer is concerned. One can, it is alleged or implied, tinker with one's own solar panels or home generators in a way one cannot do with the power or pipelines which bring electricity or gas to one's home today or with the kitchen stoves or oil burners which deliver energy. Visions are sometimes set forth of a
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