Perhaps with regard to the government’s handling of the energy crisis, the National Science Foundation will be spending upward of a million dollars this year on windmill research. The advantages of harnessing wind as an energy source are that it is free, nonpolluting, and inexhaustible. The problems to be overcome are high construction costs and energy storage to provide a constant power source whether or not the winds are blowing. This constant-power problem may be solved by rigging the windmill with a generator and a bank of storage batteries; or, with advancing technology, using the generator to electrolyze water and using the hydrogen thus obtained to generate constant power with hydrogen fuel cells. Or perhaps the problem could be overcome more simply by mounting the windmills around the Halls of Congress, where the wind never fails.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics, which keeps tabs on inflation in the private sector, has just announced a few price increases of its own. Samples: an annual subscription to Employment and Earnings, which used to be $10.00, will now be $28.10 a year; Occupational Outlook Quarterly will jump from $1.50 to $4.30. Don’t try expressing those increases in percentage terms, or your calculator will blow a transistor. Fortunately, this will not affect the measured cost of living one bit, since such items are conveniently excluded from the consumer price index, which, as it happens, is compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
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