"THIRD WAVE TECHNOLOGIES" by: Alvin Toffler

.....In the earsplitting clamor over the energy crisis [of 1973]..., so many plans, proposals, arguments, and counter-arguments have been hurled at us that it is difficult to make sensible choices. Governments are just as confused as the proverbial man in the street.

One way to cut through the murk is to look beyond the individual technologies and policies to the principles underlying them. Once we do, we find that certain proposals are designed to maintain or extend the Second Wave energy base as we have known it, while others rest on new principles. The result is a radical clarification of the entire energy issue.

The Second Wave energy base, we saw earlier, was premised on non-renewability; it drew from highly concentrated, exhaustible deposits; it relied on expensive, heavily centralized technologies; and it was no diversified, resting on a relatively few sources and methods. These were the main features of the energy base in all Second Wave nations throughout the industrial era.

Bearing these in mind, if we now look at the various plans and proposals generated by the oil crisis we can quickly tell which ones are mere extensions of the old and which are forerunners of something fundamentally new. And the basic question becomes not whether oil should sell at forty dollars per barrel or whether a nuclear should rise at Sea-brook or Grohnde. The larger question is whether any energy base designed for industrial society and premised on these Second Wave principles can survive. Once asked in this form, the answer is inescapable.

Through the past half-century, fully two thirds of the entire world's energy supply has come from oil and gas. Most observers today, from the most fanatic conservationists to the deposed Shah of Iran, from solar freaks and Saudi Sheikhs tote button-down, briefcase-carrying experts of many governments, agree that this dependency on fossil fuel cannot continue indefinitely, no matter how many new oilfields are discovered...

.....Whether the end comes in some climatic gurgle or, more likely, in succession of dizzyingly destabilizing shortages, temporary gluts, and deeper shortages, the oil epoch is ending. Iranians know this. Kuwaitis and Nigerians and Venezuelans know it. Saudi Arabians know it--which is why they are racing to build an economy based on something other than oil revenues. Petroleum companies know it-which is why they are scrambling to diversify out of oil...

.....However, the debate, over physical depletion is almost beside the point. For in today's world it is price, not physical supply, that has the most immediate and significant impact. And here, if anything, the facts point even more strongly to the same conclusion.

In a matter of decades energy may once more become abundant and cheap as a result of startling technological breakthroughs or economic swings. But whatever happens, the relative price of oil is likely continue its climb as we are forced to plumb deeper and deeper depths, to explore more remote regions, and to compete among buyers. OPEC aside, an historic turn has taken place over the past five years: despite skyrocketing prices, the actual amount of confirmed, commercially recoverable reserves of crude oil has shrunk, not grown -- reversing a trend that had lasted for decades. Further evidence, if needed, that the petrologic era is screeching to a halt.

Meanwhile, coal, which has supplied most of the remaining third of the world energy total, is in ample supply.  Any massive expansion of coal usage, however, entails the spread of dirty air, a possible hazard to the world's climate (through an increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere); in ravaging of the earth as well. Even if all these were accepted as necessary risks

over the decades to come, coal cannot fit into the tank of the automobile nor carry out many other tasks now performed by oil or gas. Plants to gasify or liquefy coal require staggering amounts of capital and water (much of it needed for agriculture and are so ultimately inefficient and costly that they too must be seen as no more than expensive, diversionary, and highly temporary expedients.

Nuclear technology presents even more formidable problems at its present stage of development. Conventional reactors rely on uranium, yet another exhaustible fuel, and carry safety risks that are extremely costly to overcome--if, indeed, they ever can do. No one has convincingly solved the problems of nuclear waste disposal, and nuclear costs are so high that until now government subsidies have been essential to make atomic power remotely competitive with other sources.