EVERY DAY, we hear that oil is scarce and becoming scarcer, that there is a need to find other sources of energy for heat and light and transportation and communication. Strange to relate, all the proposals we hear involve spending money . . . that is, the taxpayers spending money.

I beg to differ. It would seem to be more sensible to stop wasting gasoline - and, of course, diesel. There could be an end to STOP signs and NO TURN ON RED signs. The stop-on-red signals could be redefined to mean go-on-green, and the yellow lights could be made to show in all directions at once. Double yellow lines could be painted properly, so that the center lane[s] can be used in both directions (except on gradients or turns.) And in the long term, there could be an end to building highways where the several lanes are dedicated to traffic in only one direction, instead of the traffic spreading itself out evenly.

Why, we may very well ask, are today's highways so wasteful? The answer should be obvious; because motor vehicle fuel is taxed, governments are eager to see more fuel burned. (The taxes are not used to repair wear and tear on the pavements, which would be the only justification for a fuel tax.) But the governments are, as usual, wrong. The tax fails to perform the basic function of a price, which is to bring supply and demand into balance. Tolls, in contrast, could be varied from hour to hour and day to day, so that there would be a strong incentive to travel when traffic is light.

Certainly tolls also are wasteful: the only way the tolls can be collected without stopping the traffic is by giving the vehicles electronic responders, which means investing more capital in equipment that is used for perhaps only a few seconds each day. But what you see with great regularity is that there are striking differences between county, state, U.S. and Interstate highways; the traffic tends to become more and more congested as the highway becomes more nearly national (federal, if you wish.) And the reason why is blazingly obvious; more often than not, license plates are good on any highway at any time, people get on the Interstate just to go downtown. A reform that would cost little or nothing would be to sell plates that are good only on local and state highways, and/or only at off-peak hours. If there were a severe difference in cost, then we might very well find that when we are driving across the continent, we would not have to slow to a crawl whenever we are in a metropolitan area. Usually I am an extreme federalist - using the word in the opposite sense to that of Alexander Hamilton - but I find myself dreaming of Congress prescribing that red plates would never be allowed on any U. S. highway, white plates would be allowed only outside peak hours, and blue plates would have the universal access ordinary plates have today. (I imagine that drivers who have paid for the expensive plates would hoot disapprovingly at any vehicle which did not have them.)

Taxes and congestion are by no means the only problems. There is an acute, urgent need to abolish the Environmental Protection Agency and all traces thereof. The E.P.A. is regularly, consistently, limiting the choice of fuels available to the operators: it was the doing of the E.P.A. that rendered obsolete literally millions of high-efficiency engines burning leaded gasoline. Similarly, the highly efficient diesel engines of the twentieth century are no longer available, as a result of the E.P.A. demanding cleaner exhausts. But I have never heard of the E.P.A. setting up test stations in Bar Harbor, Maine, Brownsville, Texas, Anchorage, Alaska, and Honolulu, Hawaii, and testing whether the pollution is indeed the same at even those few places.

I would make a guess that, if there is any such thing as pollution, it spreads from West to East, just like the weather. If so, then if Oregon and Nevada find themselves getting polluted, they can sue California - and, of course, California can assert that Oregon and Nevada caused the alleged pollution. Plausibly, there might be some States that would restrict the use of leaded gasoline, or of high-sulfur diesel, but we can be fairly confident that there will be others that do not. And then citizens will be able to settle where they find conditions hospitable.