SUDDENLY people are listening to him. President Nixon goes on television telling the public that the Energy Crisis has arrived and that we must make sacrifices. People listen and, even more astonishing, obey. Liberals and conservatives, industrialists, ecologists, moralists, Malthusians--all have gone along with Nixon's plea for patriotic frugality. Lights are switched off with a fanatical passion, room temperatures drop, and motorists creep along the highways at 50 miles per hour, or even 45 or 40 among the more patriotic. Energy--that substance that Einstein told us is so abundant that a tiny bit of matter gets multiplied by the speed of light squared in producing it--is accepted as being scarce. Crisis is the new byword, and sacrifice the new spirit.

But why is everybody listening to Nixon? Time after time he has proven himself untrustworthy, and time after time experience has proven that the initial impulse to laugh (or moan, or vomit) upon hearing his speeches is justified. Yet, at the very nadir of his notorious credibility, when all logic would suggest that the man should be ignored, people are not only listening--they are believing and obeying. Could this just be a case where Nixon happens to be right, that one proverbial exception that underlines the rule?

Of course Nixon's basic piece of empirical data is accurate. There is not enough usable energy around to satisfy everybody's current desires. Although no real long-term shortage of energy exists, the energy sources that the world can speedily tap--principally petroleum and its byproducts--are suddenly in short supply.

Nixon would have us believe that the burden of the blame for this lies principally on two sets of shoulders: the Arabs' and our own. As any veteran Nixon-watcher would guess, he is guilty of errors of both omission and commission here. America is in a crisis, he announces gravely: The crazed Arabs, endowed only with anatomical fortuity, have put their thumb astride our jugular. These are not familiar, white-skinned Europeans, polite Belgians or Dutchmen, who will calmly accede to our reasonable requests. These are berobed bedouin upstarts, mustachioed bandit sheiks, out to black-mail Uncle Sam till his back--or at least his foreign policy--is up against the wall.

Forget the fact that Nixon has overseen the systematic denial of Export-Import Bank credits to countries whose domestic policies seemed unseemly to him. Ignore the convulsions in Chile induced by two years of U.S. economic poisoning. Nixon's explanation still rings false. The crisis would be here even if it weren't for the fact that the Arabs had picked up a few ungentlemanly American tricks. Even Nixon's handpicked energy czar, William Simon, says that the Arab embargo is only a convenient focal point, a catalyst that has speeded things up a bit but not changed the basic picture. Or as Frank Ikard, president of the conservative American Petroleum Institute, put it: "We are going to be short of energy for our homes, our industries and our transportation this winter, next winter and the winter after that, no matter what the Arab nations do or do not do about their oil embargo."

And how about Nixon's number two explanation, that America's profligate lifestyle has been virtually burning the energy candle at both ends? Here the man has a potent answer, one that the public can easily accept. While the Arab embargo excuse relies upon the mystique of an inscrutable, hostile foreign force, this second attempted explanation dredges up an enormous untapped American resource: guilt. We are to blame, Nixon explains, painfully pointing the finger at one and all, dimming the lights on the White House Christmas tree, deigning to ride the train down to Key Biscayne for the holidays. And after a decade of guilt-breeding Indochina war, the public eats it up.

IN SOME senses, Nixon is right. Yes, America is by far the largest consumer of energy in the world. With only one-sixteenth of the planet's population, we burn up nearly three-quarters of its total energy. We live amid constant waste and abuse of everything natural, from hills ravaged by stripmining to the meat loaf that every child is scolded for leaving on his plate.

But who is it that does all this wasting? Who burns up all this energy, and how, and why? The answer jibes poorly with Nixon's explanation. By far the majority--more than 70 per cent--of America's energy is consumed by business, not individuals. And industry is the big energy waster, as it is the worst polluter. Ralph Nader, a figure consistently more believable than our president, estimates that vigorous economizing of energy by business would easily yield fuel savings large enough to enable the country to operate during the current fuel shortage just as it has in the past.

Even the greatest sources of waste among consumers can be traced to the businessmen and industrialists whom Nixon so peculiarly fails to mention. Business produced and created demand for "energy-saving devices," like electric tooth-brushes and non-defrosting refrigerators, which use up far more energy than what they replaced. It is silly to think that devices like self-cleaning ovens and push-button car windows are here only because consumers want them. They are manufactured and popularized by businessmen concerned with profit, not with providing the public with what it needs and wants. Imagine, for example, the altruistic motives of the man who figured out how to make a car antenna go up and down electronically.

But does Nixon say anything anywhere about cracking down on waste perpetuated and encouraged by industry? Does he call for smaller cars, or even stickers telling buyers what gas mileage a car gets? Does he preach the virtue of sacrifice to that group that consumes 70 per cent of our energy? Of course not.

He does worse. With a few exceptions, his energy-conserving measures consistently benefit business and the most wealthy individual consumers. On the other side of the coin, his actions uniformly hurt poorer consumers.

NIXON's administration has knocked down measures to protect the environment across the board, from railroading the Alaska pipeline bill through Congress and repealing clean-air standards for vehicle emissions to allowing power plants to burn coal in densely populated areas. He has failed to constrain profiteering by oil companies, who have directly benefitted from the shortage with profits up nearly 100 per cent over a year ago.

If the fuel shortage can be traced to anyone, it is the oil companies. Motivated by a desire for higher prices, they have conscientiously failed to keep petroleum refinery capacity on a level with demand. Even without the Arab embargo, insufficient refining capacity will leave the nation short of gasoline and home heating oil. And not one new refinery is currently under construction in the United States.

Meanwhile, Nixon's government has granted some industries exemptions to the rules he just finished setting down. When the small aircraft business smelled disaster in the proposed fuel allocations for business planes and other private aviation, the industry staged a quick lobbying campaign and the allocations were eased just as quickly.

Obviously, poorer consumers hurt by the rise in gasoline prices don't have the resources to chase down to Washington and do a little are-twisting. The inflated gasoline prices that Nixon has guaranteed by allowing the free market to take advantage of the shortage, and the resultant rise in the prices of all consumer goods, hurt the poor most. And as shortages of all kinds become endemic, the poor are pushed right out of the marketplace, unable to compete with those who can afford the higher prices that small supply and large demand inevitably bring.

Even the seemingly innocent step of closing gasoline stations on Sundays singles out the poor. Short vacations become the exclusive province of those wealthy enough to be able to take off from work during the week.

After five years of Nixon at the nation's helm, none of this should seem surprising. That national policy under his administration should benefit industry and hurt consumers, and bring profit to a small group of the powerful corporate interests, is only logical. Everything ends up being subverted for political ends. Even now, Congress is considering a measure which would end busing to promote racial balance in schools on the grounds that it uses up too much gasoline. Nixon must find the energy crisis almost too good to be true. It even makes people forget about Watergate. If there hadn't been an energy crisis, Richard Nixon probably would have invented one.