CHAPTER 2 WHY DEVELOP WESTERN COAL?

• Jurisdiction: United States

Western Coal Development
(Mar 1973)
CHAPTER 2
WHY DEVELOP WESTERN COAL?
John A. Carver, Esq.
Professor of Law University of Denver College of Law

It ought to be agreed than an appropriate measure of the responsibility of both government and the private sector is the assurance of a flow of raw materials sufficient to maintain the strength of the national economy. Strength of an economy has a dynamic aspect—generally a strong economy is a growing economy. Growth can be unhealthy; absence of growth is definitionally unhealthy.

A healthy national economy is requisite for our international integrity. As Admiral Rickover told Mr. Aspinall's Committee a year ago, "history would indicate that any major industrial power, faced with exhaustion of its energy supplies and feeling itself strong enough to win would, I think, risk war to keep its economy functioning." Also at Mr. Aspinall's hearings, the then Assistant Secretary of Defense said it was not strictly military needs, but a healthy national economy which was the objective of Defense policy in order to maintain ourselves in the world today.

It is certain that the President has opted strongly for a thriving economy. By reducing the federal budget, and particularly by cutting back on depression-dampening job and welfare programs, he has highlighted the essentiality of keeping the economy growing.

The position in which we find ourselves today with respect to supplemental supplies—the euphemism we use to describe the energy we don't know where we are going to get—is worsening to the point where some of the most dedicated advocates of the conspiracy theory of resource management are having second thoughts. Imagine Canada imposing export controls on its oil! We devalued

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our dollar because of our negative balance of payments; five billion dollars of that negative balance were on account of oil imports in 1972, up from about three billion in 1971; the fact of devaluation immediately increased this year's still growing negative balance of payments by another ten percent.

In one of the strangest opinions I have ever read, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia has espoused a strict-constructionist viewpoint for reading the Mineral Leasing Act of 1920, and has bucked the controversial Alaska pipeline to the Congress without even considering the real bone of contention, the environmental issue.

One is drawn to coal inexorably. Mining more coal relieves these international...