Waste Not, Want Not--Not!

By MARGARET CARLSON

There is a certain kind of person who thinks a certain other kind of person is a sissy. The first kind thinks it's a birthright to fill up the Silverado, put a cold one in the cupholder, crank up the radio and drive off into the wide open spaces. Mass transit is for pointy-headed Easterners, and every room should be as cool as a meat locker. Don't have enough energy? Drill for it like a crazed dentist. If that doesn't do the trick, let's blast for coal and rebuild Three Mile Island. These are people from out West, where there's land, lots of land under sunny skies above, and no one will be fenced in by $3-a-gal. gas. You may recognize the type. They're in charge now.

There's another sort--let's call him Conservation Wuss. He might hug a tree but not necessarily. Some of his ilk are skinflints, in the Puritan-Calvinist tradition, clipping coupons (for cents off on laundry detergent, not bonds) and using fluorescent light bulbs. Others are poor folks, trying to stretch a buck. They all see the value of heat pumps and buying low-flow shower heads and cars based on how many miles per gallon they get.

There are lots of Conservation Wusses on the crowded, constricted Left Coast, but there are many more everywhere than Cheney, in his about-to-be-released energy plan, acknowledges. He sniffs at conservation as a "sign of personal virtue" and not much more. Yet in Seattle, the first place to make coffee a separate food group, Conservation Wusses have saved the equivalent of a new power plant over two decades. In the late 1970s, instead of merely investing in new plants, Seattle City Light focused on incentives to change consumption patterns and invested in boosting efficiency. While much of California is sweltering, its groceries spoiling, its office buildings dark--and paying dearly for the privilege--Seattle has saved enough juice to power the city for a good year and a half at rock-bottom prices.

Conservation is cool beyond the cappuccino-sipping communities. Much of Big Business is ahead of the Administration. Automakers may lack the single-mindedness that regulation may bring, but they have been making ever more economical cars. Ford and GM are dueling it out over whose emissions are lower and whose suvs will get more mileage. Toyota and Honda are spending billions on hybrid engine cars, while companies like GE and Whirlpool are developing more efficient low-BTU mousetraps, like dishwashers that can be programmed to click on in the middle of the night. A few bones thrown its way, and business would surely do more.

But the Cheney plan looks as if it will slash funds on the conservation side by as much as half while vastly increasing amounts for drilling where the caribou roam and building new refineries and power plants. Only a few decorative items, like turning animal waste into energy, remain. To rationalize building 1,300 new power plants, Cheney cites Energy Department studies showing demand outstripping supply. Yet studies out of the same department suggest that basic conservation measures could cut growth in demand close to half.

A Pacific Northwest National Laboratory study shows how the Federal Government, the largest energy user with 500,000 buildings, could spend $5.2 billion to reduce its energy consumption 20% and recoup the investment in little more than five years. The Energy Department's Lawrence Berkeley lab developed a fluorescent table lamp that matches the output of a 150-W bulb using a quarter of the energy. When Ari Fleisher was asked last week whether the President would be asking citizens to change their lifestyle given that we consume more energy per capita than any other people on the planet, he said, "That's a big no."

Hanging over all is the specter of Jimmy Carter in his sweater lowering the thermostat to 68[degrees]. There were worse fashion statements in the '70s than that Mister Rogers-inspired cardigan, but what ridicule the man took for urging citizens to layer their outerwear! While we remember the Saturday Night Live version of Carter's efforts, polls at the time showed that people responded well. Lots of other problems contributed to the Carter malaise and his subsequent re-election loss. But the image persists of that presidential appeal not being presidential. Just ask Dick Cheney next winter. Real men don't turn down the thermostat.