Tommy Denton

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Physicians who have met the exacting standards of preparation and are about to enter medical practice submit to the oath originally prescribed by Hippocrates, the ancient Greek "father of medicine": First, do no harm.

Hippocrates swore that, as part of that oath, he would never induce an abortion. Consequently, his successors through the ages have exercised a certain tolerance for intellectual and moral disagreement about what, in fact, constitutes "harm."

In a similar way, the American energy-consuming public has been called upon to "do no harm" to the procuring of an abundance of all the energy required to power every perceived necessity and all desired whims. At the same time, that public has been admonished not to "harm" the ecosystem by pouring poisons into the environment that sustains the planet's very web of life.

At some point, the old advertising tease that "you can have it all" -- despite its obvious appeal to an alarming segment of the consuming public -- really applies in advanced civilizations only to the lower orders of fiction or to advanced states of delusion.

Except for those manipulative players driven solely by the profit motive and those who so far still refuse to pay attention, most Americans have some awareness of the inherent tension in the nation's energy policy. That strain reveals effects of both indulging a voracious dependence on foreign sources of energy and contributing to the environmental degradation that virtually no serious, reputable scientist disputes.

But as President Bush has warned, Americans are "addicted" to oil, about 60 percent of which is imported from foreign sources not entirely cordial to the aspirations of U.S. consumers. So far, all the frantic searches for salvation from a pending "crisis" have been designed to keep energy consumption at current and even profitably higher levels.

That single-minded approach to solving the problem helps explain some of the legislative jockeying under way to advance the cause of a supply-side energy policy.

Alas, as usually happens in this nation of entrepreneurs and industrial free-marketeers, the overtures from K Street lobbyists have embraced that time-tested American solution to so-called crises: public subsidies. Such special-interest goodies have had fascinating pedigrees, most of them rooted in the creative larceny that inspired the oil-depletion allowance, which further enriched the oil barons before President Jimmy Carter pulled the lucrative plug.

The farmers now are getting theirs through "incentives" to produce ethanol. Concern about "do no harm," though, is now coming into play as economic projections indicate that food prices will escalate for the corn, sugar cane and other feed stocks. Competition for crops to produce either fuel or food is likely to exacerbate poverty in developing countries as demands to power U.S. vehicles will crowd out access to food by the world's poor.

In addition, ethanol refining requires a high volume of natural gas, thus depleting to worrisome levels the available reserves of that once-abundant, relatively clean-burning fuel.

Now comes the coal industry's overture to tap the treasury for billions of dollars to convert coal to liquid fuel. The process has been proven for more than 80 years, invented by German scientists in the 1920s and used to power the Nazi war machine.

Coal is by far the most abundant source of energy in the United States. It's also filthy when burned, although technology is allowing filter of much of the smokestack emissions. Coal-to-liquid, however, has other problems, not least its emission of twice the volume of greenhouse gases as ordinary diesel.

Despite the industry's promises of "capturing" carbon dioxide and storing it underground, according to a study by the Rand Corp., the science, engineering and costs of such a process remain unproved. Besides, a U.S. Energy Department study indicated the investment cost would be $211 billion over 20 years just to replace 10 percent of U.S. gasoline consumption.

Yet, if the public "leveraging" is generous enough, industry officials say they'll get right on the case, although they note they will require assurances of profitability indefinitely to indemnify their "risks."

U.S. energy policy remains almost silent on the most common-sense response to a recognizable harm: aggressively curtailing the harmful behavior.

That's why prudent doctors, from Hippocrates on, offer the sage prescription: An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Denton's column appears in the Sunday edition of The Roanoke Times.