The MacNeil/Lehrer Report; Weather and Fuel

ROBERT MacNEIL: Good evening. What some are calling the coldest winter of the century extended its grip on the country today. It snowed in many parts of Florida. A woman near Fort Lauderdale was quoted by the AP as saying, "It`s like the world is ending." And millions of Americans east of the Rockies must have been feeling some hints of doomsday. Because it was not only cold and unusually snowy, but the weather threatened to bring normal activity to a standstill. Cities like Dayton, Ohio, have been so threatened by fuel shortages that businesses and shops have closed; and until today, when the temperature went up slightly, the city has been virtually deserted downtown. Shortages of natural gas particularly closed factories and schools in a widening area of the East. Supplies of other fuels were held up on barges locked in frozen rivers. The State of Pennsylvania declared a state of emergency. In a cheap New York hotel two elderly men were found frozen to death because there was no heat. Everywhere power companies were urging people to turn their thermostats down to conserve fuel and avert even more dangerous shortages. Tonight, why has the weather turned so cruel, how long will the freeze continue, and what`s being done to meet the grave shortages of fuel? Jim?

JIM LEHRER: First, let the record reflect, Robin, that it`s cold here in Washington -- very cold. Monday it was two below zero, the coldest it`s been in the history of Washington. Right now it`s a brisk twenty-five degrees, and more important, the forecast for tomorrow is for temperatures in the twenties with snow flurries in the afternoon. Now, the only reason Washington`s weather is worth a special mention, of course, is because of the Presidential inauguration. The cold weather has already caused some pre-inaugural events to be canceled or curtailed, and it`s likely to hold down the inaugural parade crowds tomorrow, among other things. All of this harsh cold has caught people in Washington, as elsewhere, by surprise -- all except for one man. He`s Donald Gilman, a meteorologist who has been with the National Weather Service for eighteen years and is currently chief of its long-range prediction group. You knew all of this was coming, right, Mr. Gilmn?

DONALD GILMAN: well, we had a slight suspicion; we didn`t really know.

LEHRER: When did you have your slight suspicion and what did you do with that suspicion? Did you disseminate the information, or what?

GILMAN: We make winter forecasts every year at the end of November, and we did so this year. We had to make an early one for a Congressional subcommittee at the beginning of November. We had our first hints then because the fall had already turned into the pattern that we have had since.

LEHRER: And then was the information then disseminated within federal agencies and to the general public that we were really having a severe winter caning, in you-all`s opinion?

GILMAN: I think that the winter forecast got quite a lot of publicity, and even the preliminary one got circulated quite widely.

LEHRER: What`s caused this unusually harsh winter?

GILMAN:I would say there`s no simple ultimate explanation for it, but we have had since mid-September a wave pattern in the upper-level westerlies that has brought warm. Pacific air up over Alaska, northwest Canada; when it turns and comes down over North America, brings Arctic air rapidly and frequently with it down into eastern North America.

LEHRER: Okay. How long is it going to last, Mr. Gilman?

GILMAN: Our current forecast, which is about the best that we can do, out into the future, runs from mid-January to mid-February and it says still colder than normal everywhere east of the hundredth meridian and some areas in the Great Basin.

LEHRER: All right, we`ve got some maps that you brought with you that reflect the nation; and this goes, as you say, to the next forecasting period, which is mid-February. Now, in temperatures - obviously it`s fairly self-explanatory, but flesh that out a little bit as to what we`re seeing there.

GILMAN: The whole area in the eastern part of the country that is colored blue is what we call below normal temperature; that means that it has a sixty percent chance of actually being below the long-term normals. It also means that it has about a forty percent chance of being a couple of degrees below normal. Large areas in the West there are not very different from the normal; we don`t have any strong indications for them.

LEHRER: All right. Let`s look at precipitation, because as Robin said and as we all know -- particularly the people in Florida know today -- that a lot of this involves snow, too. Let`s look at the map on precipitation between now and the fifteenth of February. Are we talking about snow or rain, or a mixture, or what?

GILMAN: In the area called "heavy" we`re talking about more precipitation than the long-term median; that`s a number which is exceeded half the time in the long run and not exceeded the other half. And it doesn`t always mean snow, even though the temperature may be quite cold, but it does imply snow lines further south than usual.

LEHRER: What is causing that snow line to be further south than usual? Florida and places like that are catching snow.

GILMAN: We`re getting the cold air coming very far to the south; and the active fronts along which storms can form have been down in Texas and along the Gulf coast, and they have been kept there by the very strong upper- level flow coming down from northwest Canada.

LEHRER: And your forecast is, it`s going to stay that way, at least through mid-February.

GILMAN: This is the forecast for general, average conditions. I hope it doesn`t mean every week.

LEHRER: That makes at least two of us, probably several more, too. I`m going to really put you on the spot as a long-range forecaster -- is this a one-shot deal, winter `76-`77, or can we look forward to this kind of thing from now on out?

GILMAN: Well, it sometimes does happen that winters run in bunches; they ran in bunches for the five previous winters -- some similarity among them, easy winters in the East, every one of the last five; and before that for thirteen winters in a row we had either normal winters or cold winters in the East. But there`s no theory that says that next winter must be very like this one, and we couldn`t make that prediction now.

LEHRER: When can you make that prediction?

GILMAN:I think we`ll have our first hints about the way we did this year -- late in the fall next year.

LEHRER: I`ve got a hunch everybody`s going to listen next time around. Thank you, Mr. Gilman. Robin?

MacNEIL: The State of Pennsylvania has been particularly hard hit by the cold weather. Natural gas supplies are critically low . there, many schools and factories have been forced to shut down, and Governor Milton Shapp has declared a state of extreme emergency. Pennsylvania`s Lieutenant Governor, Ernest Kline, who`s in the studio of WITF in Hershey, has been coordinating the state`s emergency energy program. Lieutenant Governor, what`s happening in Pennsylvania to warrant a state of extreme emergency?

ERNEST P. KLINE: We have a serious situation in Pennsylvania, on both a short-term and, we think, a long-term basis. Our primary concern at the moment centers in western Pennsylvania, where most of the homes there and the public buildings are heated by natural gas. And on Monday morning we were advised by the gas companies that they had a very serious pressure problem -- so serious that they felt that they may lose large areas; and if we did have that kind of an outage it may take as much as four to five days to get everybody back on line. Well, it would be impossible for the thousands of persons who live in homes and use public buildings heated by natural gas to wait four or five days, so we felt compelled to take some action by declaring a state of emergency, which makes it possible for our civil defense people -- and since Hurricane Agnes we`ve had a very effective disaster preparedness group -- to make contingency plans, which we`ve done. The long-range plans are even more serious, in my judgment, because they affect not only natural gas; they affect the availability of fuel oil, which is used as the principal source of heat in most of the eastern part of Pennsylvania; and also they could affect coal, which is the prime source of energy for our electrical utilities.

MacNEIL: Governor, have any homes in that western part of the state actually gone without gas yet?

KLINE; We`ve had spotty occasions where, in one of our counties, fifteen homes were without gas. That`s not hard to cope with. And actually, after about twenty-four hours of very serious pleas to the people we managed by yesterday morning to maintain the gas pressure and even to increase it slightly. We don`t have a gas volume problem at the moment, although we will, we think, in a month. Right now it`s a question of maintaining the pressure in the lines. It`s a serious problem in Pennsylvania.

MacNEIL: I see. In addition to taking these precautions, like the ability to mobilize the National Guard, and so on, what else are you as a state government doing about this problem?

KLINE: We`ve been busy, even before the oil embargo, through the Governor`s energy council, laying down contingency plans in an effort to do several things. First of all, we have a very aggressive conservation program; I was interested in the Weather Bureau expert -- no one paid any attention to him, and unfortunately, the American public doesn`t pay much attention to what we say because I guess they think we`re kidding them. We`ve been telling them to conserve for a long, long time. We`ve also moved to go to alternate fuels, which is very important to our industry. So much of Pennsylvania`s industry depends on gas, and we`ve got to find alternatives. Fortunately, we have a great deal of coal in Pennsylvania, so it`s doubly effective in Pennsylvania for us to promote the use of coal; it`s good for us economically, and it provides an alternative fuel source. We`ve tried to lay out some long-range plans that we think eventually will help us solve the problem, but we`ve got a serious short-term problem.

MacNEIL: Right. Can you tell me -- does Pennsylvania think that the federal government, through its agencies, has been doing enough to meet the critical situation this winter?

KLINE: We`ve had a great deal of cooperation from the agencies and those that run it this winter. Our problem with the United States government has been what we think is a real lack of a long-range energy policy in this nation. We`ve been saying for a long time that we have got to begin a long national discussion and develop an energy policy based upon end use. We`ve tried to control energy in this country through price, either by keeping the price down or letting the price go up. Such things as natural gas, petroleum and other commodities which now are in clear exhaustible supply which can be predicted have simply got to be allocated on the basis often use; and I think if we do that on a national basis we`ll take our first giant step to solve the energy crisis in this country.

MacNEIL: Thank you, Governor. Let`s go to Washington. Jim?

LEHRER: Robin, several federal agencies here in Washington have a piece of that overall energy pie, but the one that`s particularly on the spot right now is the Federal Power Commission. The FPC regulates the price interstate pipelines may charge for natural gas, and it has been deluged with pleas for help from states running short of natural gas. Last week it opened the way for some emergency supplies by authorizing two pipelines to sell gas at higher prices than the regulated ceiling normally allows. Richard Dunham is Chairman of the FPC. Mr. Dunham, first, why was it necessary to authorize higher prices in those two cases?

RICHARD DUNHAM: We have to deal with the applications before us. We were primarily concerned with the supply situation based on the emergency conditions presented to us. In this case, this particular gas was not available at any other price other than the price stated in the application, and that`s what was considered and that`s was approved by the Commission.

LEHRER: So you felt there was no other alternative. You either let them buy that at a higher price and sell it at a higher price or the gas would not be available?

DUNHAM: In that particular case, the other alternative was even higher- priced alternative fuel, LNG, from another part of the country.

LEHRER: All right; now this case involved two pipelines serving states primarily in the Southeast. What about the potential gas shortages elsewhere, like in Pennsylvania? Lieutenant Governor Kline says he anticipates one within a month in Pennsylvania; what are you doing about those?

DUNHAM: Really, the problem is very extensive throughout, as Mr. Gilman pointed out, caused primarily by the weather situation; but the critical problem is really everywhere east of the Rockies. So Par we`ve identified at least seven pipelines that have potentially very serious problems. We`re dealing on a day-by-day basis with them; in fact, I came from a Commission meeting; we will have one later this afternoon. There are specific applications before us for other measures to try and get extra supplies in.

LEHRER: All right, now,-what kind of measures are available to you?

DUNHAM: I can give you an example of one. The Canadian government -- the National Energy Hoard -- has agreed to supply at a considerable additional supply to us, and we acted on that application and I work with the Canadian...

LEHRER: You did that today -- just earlier today?

DUNHAM: Yesterday, yes; and I`ve been assured today that the gas will start flowing tomorrow.

LEHRER: Mr. Gilman says that sometime in November his Bureau put out a long-range forecast that says that we were going to have a cold winter. Did you get that information at the FPC?

DUNHAM: Yes, we did. There`s number of steps we`ve had planning, in essence, for the very severe conditions for a number of years. We have a priority end use plan for pipelines, we scheduled conferences with the pipelines in August to try and identify what the problem areas are under certain conditions. In November, when it became apparent that the first history in October and then early November was that this seemed to be a colder-than-normal winter coning,-we instituted another procedure where we would have reports on a bi-weekly basis. It has since been updated to almost a daily and hourly basis to keep us apprised of the situation.

LEHRER: Of course, the ultimate question here, Mr. -Dunham, is, as a result of this information that you got -- that we were going to have a colder winter than usual -- were you able, by whatever means, to do anything about it, to make available more natural gas nationally, et cetera?

DUNHAM: There`s two aspects to the problem I think we ought to focus; one is a basic under-supply. Federal Power Commission, through reports and other forms, have discussed the long-term short age, the declining reserves that are available and the declining supplies available to the interstate pipelines. But the problem at the moment is not just supply, it`s capacity. I`ll give you an example: in Alberta, Canada, there are additional supplies of gas available, but what they and we are all working on now is a way to get that gas to the United States -- to see if there is a capacity. In other words, a pipeline can only carry so much gas; that`s where you run into these pressure problems the Governor referred to.

LEHRER: But in a word, you feel that your agency did all it could do to get ready for this winter?

DUNHAM: I believe we`re doing what we can under the law, yes.

LEHRER: Thank you. Robin?

MacNEIL: The efforts of federal agencies, including the FPC, have been criticized by Energy Action, a Washington lobbying and consumers` information organization for energy problems. Its Director and counsel is James Flug. Mr. Flug, in Washington, what`s your position on what the FPC is currently doing?

JAMES PLUG: Basically,. in the case of the FPC, Robin, you have an agency that is required by law to police the natural gas community; and it is made up of people who basically believe that the natural gas industry should not be policed. So they have taken every opportunity to refuse and to delay and to neglect to do what could be done. I think perhaps the most vivid evidence is the fact that on the very day the Weather Bureau`s long-range forecast was issued, November 9 of 1976, in Washington we had in the newspaper here an advertisement from the local gas company pushing the sale of gas dryers; so that they were encouraging the use of more gas at a time when we knew we were going to have tight gas supplies this year. That`s a small symptom of the failure to prepare, the failure to take action, the failure to do what can be done.

MacNEIL: What do you feel about the recent order they made permitting the pipelines that Jim just referred to to buy gas at a higher price from the intrastate pipelines?

PLUG: Of course, as has been said, the so-called shortage that we have now has several components to it. One is the fact that the local distribution companies and the national pipelines have a limited physical capacity, so that when you get a winter like this one, that is a one-in-a-hundred and maybe a one-in-a thousand winter, those pipelines just cannot carry gas beyond a certain level; that`s part of the problem, now. A second part of the problem is that people who have gas and who could sell it to the interstate pipelines, because under the present irrational system they can sell it in intrastate markets at a higher price, choose to do that; so they pull back gas from the interstate market and try to sell it on the intrastate market. And that`s what happened last week; they allowed some intrastate gas -- that is, local gas -- to go across the country at the higher local price.

MacNEIL: Yeah, and what do you think of that decision?

FLUG: It`s a ruse, it`s a fiction. It may be that the very same producers who were not delivering gas to North Carolina through the interstate pipeline were willing to deliver gas to the Houston Pipeline Company -- a local pipeline -- and that gas from the very same field and possibly even the very same well was being delivered to North Carolina at the same price. Now, the third problem, when you talk about undersupply -- and I`m glad the chairman used the undersupply terminology, because it isn`t a shortage, in the sense that there isn`t enough gas out there; it`s that there isn`t enough gas delivered to the using end -- and one of the main reasons is that for the past few years the natural gas producers have expected that all price lids on natural gas would be lifted. Therefore it was in their economic interest -- you don`t have to say there`s anything venal about it, just on a pure arithmetic basis -- it was in their economic interest to keep gas in the ground as long as possible until the price lids were lifted.

MacNEIL: Okay. Just one other question, quickly. We are going to import, we`ve just heard Jim and the chairman say, fifteen billion cubic feet of gas from Canada; that`s going to be at $1.94 per thousand cubic feet, which is quite a bit above the rates in this country. Is that a ruse, too?

FLUG: The fact is that we could be producing gas in this country, additional gas, at a much, much lower rate. The staff of the Federal Power Commission found that gas can be provided at a very ample profit in this country at something around seventy cents a thousand cubic feet, so we`re going to have to pay through the nose for additional gas supplies because we are not getting our own gas.

MacNEIL: Thank you. Jim?

LEHRER: Mr. Dunham, your friend, Mr. Flug, here, has made some serious charges about this overall thing, particularly the fact that this gas is being kept in the ground down there in the gas producing states on the idea that the price will go up; and so it`s a phony shortage, I would think is really what Mr. Plug is saying. Is that true?

DUNHAM: We had two days of hearings on this particular application in the Federal Power Commission last Thursday and Friday; in that, everybody had an opportunity to come before the Commission and to argue whatever side of the question they had. During those two days of hearings it was never represented that there was a ruse or that this was gas from a particular producer that would otherwise go...and back and forth.It was represented in the hearing that this was gas that was unregulated by the Federal Power Commis-` sion -- regulated by the Texas laws -- and that that was available in surplus to them, and they were willing to make it available to the interstate pipelines. They also represented that they had other alternatives to tell that. My point is that we had two days of hearings, there was examination and cross-examination of witnesses, there was discussion, and this case was never made there.

FLUG: If I may, Jim...

LEHRER: Sure.

PLUG: As the chairman well knows, the issues I raised are presently before a United States court of appeals here in Washington in the context of the recent case of the FPC where the price of natural gas was nearly tripled, to $1.42 a thousand cubic feet. All those issues have been raised, although in that case there was not an opportunity for real evidentiary hearing. These issues were not a matter of real importance in the case last week, although it`s interesting that as far as I know, and I`m sure the chairman will correct me if I`m wrong, there was no effort to find out what the real source of this gas was. And the very day that they were having a hearing there appeared in the Wall Street Journal a blind classified ad that said, "g0 million mcf of natural gas available for sale," with a box number. There is all this gas that`s mysteriously available.

LEHRER: Mr. Dunham?

DUNHAM: I think the answer there -- that may well be; I did not write to the box number,. although maybe that`s a possibility...

PLUG: I`m surprised that you`re not looking at where that gas is coming from.

DUNHAM: But the point is, the gas supplies we`re talking about is on-shore, within a particular state, and somebody who drills for gas in a new well that is not otherwise dedicated to the interstate market has free choice whether to sell that locally at whatever price that he can get under state regulations, or to sell to the interstate market at a price no higher than $1.42.

LEHRER: Everybody, I think, would concede that is kind of a crazy system, is it not?

DUNHAM: I think we`ve all recognized that the economy causes all kinds of problems.

PLUG: I think that`s one thing we all agree on; we just differ on what ought to happen. We think the intrastate price ought to be brought under control so you don`t have that kind of...

LEHRER: And the other side believes it should be...

PLUG: They`d like no controls at all.

LEHRER:...the interstate should be raised to the intrastate

because the producers feel that`s closer to cost...

PLUG: They`d like it raised to the OPEC price.

LEHRER: Okay. Robin?

M&CNEIL: I was wondering what all you gentlemen think that -let`s start with you, Governor Kline, in Hershey -- what do you think the Carter administration should be doing about this? There has been stories to the effect that when Mr. Schlesinger takes over as the sort of energy czar that he`s going to move rapidly to do something. You talked about the need for a long-range energy plan. What do you think the Carter administration could, practically, do in a short time?

KLINE: I think you saw in the discussion earlier an example of what happens in Washington; you get one side and the other side talking about things that really aren`t relevant to the case. They are down there arguing about prices, and who has the gas and who doesn`t have the gas. I`ll tell you something -- we don`t have it in Pennsylvania, and. I`ve said all along and we`ve been saying in Pennsylvania now for well over four years, that we`ve got to have a rational energy policy based upon end use. People are -in Louisiana and Texas...

MacNEIL: I hate to interrupt you. Several of you have used that expression, "based on end use;" please, what does that mean?

KLINE: Let me tell you what that means. It means that people in Texas and Louisiana are wasting natural gas heating boilers, when you really shouldn`t use that very valuable fuel to do that. You can heat boilers much more cheaply with coal and other things. We need natural gas in many of our production processes, not only in Pennsylvania but throughout the United States. I think there has to be a national discussion. We don`t want to take something away from some other state, but there`s got to be a national policy that begins to recognize the fact that what we have in this country is now running in short supply and we`ve got to use it a little more wisely. And I don`t think that can be controlled by price. I tend to agree with what Mr. Flug says about how we go about the intrastate-interstate thing. We don`t want to raise it to the interstate level; we`d rather control the intrastate use, so that everybody gets a fair shake and one state doesn`t have an advantage over another. Of course, that`s to Pennsylvania`s advantage. But we`ve got to decide ... we have end use policies; we control other things: we control the air, we control the water, we control a lot of things as a people. And I think we`ve got to begin to control our energy sources.

MacNEIL: Thank you, Sir. Just in conclusion I`d like to go back to Mr. Gilman, the chief of the long-range prediction service at the National Weather Service. Governor Kline just mentioned controlling everything; it`s reported that President Carter has been talking recently about the need to think more about controlling the weather. Where is the state of the art? Is that a total pipe-dream or is there anything we actually could be doing with the state of technology today about controlling the weather?

GILMAN: There are weather modification experiments on a rather small scale, but we`re talking here about something that affects a whole continent, and there`s no game you can play with that.

MacNEIL: There`s just no way we can go, at the moment, with that sort of thing?

GILMAN: I don`t think so.

MacNEIL: I mean, you can seed clouds for rain, and things like that, but could you actually divert all these fierce winds that have been strangely diverted down this way instead of their usual paths?

GILMAN: If the physical means existed, you`d have to change everybody`s climate simultaneously.

MacNEIL: What do these experiments actually involve at the moment; on what scale are these? Just theoretical, or are people actually trying things?

GILMAN: No, there are cloud-seeding experiments, and fog clearing experiments. They are on the scale of an airplane or two flying around for a few hours. Some of the biggest-scale experiments have been within hurricanes, but hurricanes are not very large meteorologically and they are nothing like the scale and energy content of the big winter changes of pattern that we`re seeing this year.

MacNEIL: I see. So in other words, we can`t do anything about that for a while; we`re really going to have to sort out what we do with our energy with the cold weather. Thank you all very much. Thank you, Lieutenant Governor Rune in Hershey; thank you gentlemen all in Washington, and good night, Jim. Jim Lehrer and I will be back tomorrow night. I`m Robert MacNeil. Good night.