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Show itself more aware of its tremendous responsibilities respon-sibilities to the nation. Not a single real power shortage has appeared for the reason reas-on that the industry has done wonders in expanding ex-panding production and extending its lines. And now the industry is carrying on a gigantic gi-gantic new building program to meet the increased demand for the future. Despite all the ballyhoo of the public power zealots, private utilities supply 90 percent of all the electricity used in this country. In most of the principal industrial areas, where war production is concentrated, private utilities supply close to 100 percent. It is one of the industries which is making this country a real "arsenal of democracy." POWER FOR DEFENSE In the interest of national defense, it is now time that the government establish a workable electric power policy which is in accord with the needs and problems of today. The first tenet of this policy is simple. There is absolutely no necessity and no excuse ex-cuse for government competition with the private power industry. There is no necessity necessi-ty and no excuse for spending more millions of the taxpayers money on governmental tax-exempt tax-exempt electric projects. There is no necessity necess-ity and no excuse for spending other millions for projects, such as those carried on by the Rual Electrification Adminstration, which duplicate existing facilities, and waste tremendous tre-mendous quanities of scarce materials and tens of thousands of man-hours of labor. So far as existing, complete government power projects are concerned, they should be operated on a non-political basis, and in full, equitable cooperation with the private utilities utili-ties in the regions involved. It is to the credit cred-it of the private electric industry that, despite des-pite shameless political persecution, it has cooperated with the government projects whenever it could. In the Pacific Northwest, for example, the private utilities have distributed distri-buted great blocks of power generated at the government's Bonneville Dam and passed pass-ed every saving on to the consumer. Those who use this emergency as a cloak to further socialize the electric industry, indus-try, must be stopped. No industry has shown I We are not hearing any more loose talk about oil shortages. The late fiasco on the Eastern Seaboard, when someone discovered a "shortage" that was afterwards proven almost al-most completely non-existent, confused the prophets of gloom. The truth is that this country leads the world by so wide a margin in oil production that there simply isn't any comparison. It holds a similar position in oil refining capacity. capaci-ty. Equally important, it produces all but a small fraction of the high-grade fuels which are needed for military engines. It is often said that oil won the last war for the Allies. This time oil is even more important, due to the vastly expanded mechanization mech-anization of armies. |
