is now flowing some 23 trillion cubic feet per year of gas which has been sold under regulated prices. Permitting the price of the flowing gas to double, as could very well happen under decontrol, obviously would not enlarge present supplies. And there would be no assurance that the extra funds would be invested in gas exploration or even in domestic petroleum exploration at all.

The "energy crisis" could well serve as a smoke-screen for a massive exercise in picking the pocket of the American consumer to the tune of billions of dollars a year. Energy is going to cost much more in the future, but how much more is a multi-billion-dollar issue. Yet I hear few voices in government raised to assert the consumer's concern in this critical area.

Avoiding a shortage is, of course, a key element in protecting the consumer. But there is an alternative to the multi-billion dollar per year price increases to increase domestic production on a crash basis. The alternative is to stop chasing our tail so to speak and look at the two root causes of the problem. One is the skyrocketing growth in demand, and the other is our sad neglect of technology for new sources of cleaner energy.

First of all we need to buy time by demanding more efficiency in the use of energy. Unless we start examining how wastefully this nation is consuming energy and begin to practice conservation and indeed frugality, we are headed for a genuine energy crisis. I can't emphasize that enough. As a nation, our consumption of energy is growing at what mathematicians call an "exponential rate" but our domestic production is leveling off. Therein lies our energy problem.

The U.S. has already turned a corner and become a net importer of energy; today we get more than a quarter of our oil from foreign sources. Imports can serve as a safety valve for the next few years. But it is naive to believe that Americans can continue indefinitely driving big cars to work and overheating glass buildings with fuel from other nations. The rest of the world, too, wants to join the High Energy Civilization. We will soon find that even the Middle Eastern barrel has a bottom. The United States' energy supply and demand figures are very sobering. Our energy demand has grown five times faster than our population over the past hundred years. We usually speak of growth in percentage terms, and it sounds small. But if we continue at the present pace, our consumption of energy will double about every 14 years-yes, double.

There is still plenty of coal in the ground and petroleum off-shore. But large increases in our domestic production of oil means a 50 per cent price increase if we are to believe the industry. And, in addition to higher prices, it means drilling on the Atlantic and Pacific Continental Shelf which raises the specter of ruined beaches and a polluted sea and the reality of industrialization of prime recreation areas. More coal means more strip mining of the arid West and more befouled air. Hence, increased reliance upon either of these domestic energy fuels could make our spaceship earth an even more unhealthy place to live than it has already become and would certainly signal a major retreat for our environmental ethic, which was so long in the achieving.

There are alternatives to this policy of "storming the beaches and stripping the hills." For the next few years oil can be imported at prices lower than existing prices by scrapping the Oil Import Quota system. And we can reduce energy demand growth by abandoning our more wasteful patterns of consumption. These represent a practical, short-term energy strategy, a delaying action, to buy enough time to enable us to develop new sources of energy.

The Oil Import Quota system maintains our oil prices at an artifically high level. Imported oil can be delivered to the East Coast of the U.S. at about $3.50 a barrel, in comparison to domestic oil which is about $4.00 a barrel. If oil could be freely imported we could avoid the fuel shortages we are suffering this winter and save consumers' money. Large industrial users of natural gas could be encouraged to switch to the more abundant resource-foreign oil. The shortage of natural gas for new residential and commercial customers could thus be alleviated. A wiser and more realistic oil import program could be designed to assure continuity of supply. In its essentials, such a program could include: (1) Storage of a sufficient amount of oil in order to eliminate the possibility of international blackmail, and (2) creation of more sensible import policies on the basis of dependability of the source-for example, restrictions on imports from Canada and the Western Hemisphere should be removed.

Energy and foreign policy is a complicated subject, but the notion that trade with other nations is automatically a problem is a false notion. The President has used trade with the Soviet Union to help bury the Cold War. The United States is no weakling that needs to pass up bargains out of a false sense of fear. It is high time that we faced the fact that we are importing oil and bury the dead Quota

system designed to keep oil out. We need to fashion a flexible program tuned to the 1970's. Japan, we should recall, manages to run one of the world's most dynamic economies and it imports over 90 per cent of its energy. The notion that it is bad business for America to import energy if it can save money in doing so simply doesn't make sense.

Imports can provide a safety valve to supplement supplies; but it, of course, makes sense to try to keep imports to a minimum and the best way to do that is to keep energy consumption to a minimum. The nation needs to recognize that we are caught up in a wasteful pattern of energy consumption. For too long we have measured progress by the number of kilowatt hours we consumed and the number of gallons of gasoline burned. But the consumer is interested in getting to work and having a warm house, and he has a great stake in getting the job done with the smallest possible consumption of energy.

As we move into an era of scarcity and higher prices the slogan for consumers should be "Save energy. Save money." And government should fashion a policy of energy conservation to replace the policies of promotion, protection, and privilege which dominate our present government energy policies.

Twenty years ago-in a time of abundance-it didn't make much difference. Today in the beginning of this transitional period of relative scarcity-it does. At present only about half of the energy content of our fuels finds its way to the consumer. The second law of thermodynamics teaches us that some "waste" is inevitable in the conversion of fuels and the technology for energy consumption. But we need not waste that much. The nation can keep warm, get to work, and keep industry humming with about less energy than is presently consumed.

One major step would be to replace promotional rates with conservation rates. We could revamp the rate structures so that big industrial users bear the brunt of rate increases and are thus encouraged to invest in energy saving. A householder that uses electricity for cooking and lighting can't really cut back. But industry can find ways to save energy if the price goes up. Reports from several major companies already indicate that they could cut their energy consumption from 10 to 15 per cent without increasing the costs of their products. When you consider that industry consumes 40 per cent of our energy, it becomes obvious how such savings could make a significant impact. Another 25 per cent of our energy goes into transportation. Here, too, the opportunities for conservation are massive. For example, it takes four times as much energy to get a person from home to work in an automobile than it does in a bus. Any public policy which encourages the use of mass transit is energy-wise. The American automobile, with less than 10 percent energy fuel-use efficiency, is a prodigious squanderer of energy. To open the Highway Trust Fund for the financing of mass transit systems will certainly help us conserve energy. So too would a tax or a regulation which would encourage us all to drive cars that travelled more miles per gallon. Some 20 per cent of our energy use goes into the heating of our buildings. Experts have already demonstrated that proper insulation would slash the consumption of heating fuel by one-fourth-and there would be a similar savings in the air conditioning loads in the summer.

We have a staggering problem disposing of solid waste in our society. And yet our solid wastes by and large contain a better grade ore than our mines. As a matter of fact, it requires only a small fraction of energy to reclaim metals such as aluminum, iron, lead and others than is required in the production of those same metals from the raw ores: Thus, through recycling, we could conserve energy as well as other finite resources. Unfortunately, there are tax incentives to mine the earth but none to mine the trash.

Perhaps a first and urgent step is to enact a Truth in Energy Law so that consumers could know the energy costs each year when they buy a house, a car, an air conditioner, and other items. Consumers need to start asking questions about the energy bills of the items they buy. Remember that with prices of energy going up-as seems inevitable for the next decade-save energy-save money must be a key to consumer protection.

Energy conservation can buy precious time for the United States. But if we look at world-wide needs and face the fact that most people on earth still live in a perpetual blackout then a technology for world-wide abundance is the only way to avoid a crisis in energy.

Technology for abundance must become a reality if long-term energy needs are to be met, at reasonable prices-both in terms of dollars and the environment. But it will never happen unless the federal government launches a unified, vigorous research and development effort into alternative energy sources with the same sense of urgency that we embarked upon the Apollo Program. Today, research

and development expenditures constitute only about one percent of the $75 billion annual revenues of the energy sector. Much of the industry has a vested interest in the technology of scarcity and so, if the opposite is to be attained, the federal government must take the lead.

The magnitude of our research and development neglect was most vividly underscored by the recent landmark report of the Electric Utilities Industry R&D Goals Task Force. The program they set forth for electric power ALONE would cost an average of $1.1 billion per year over the next three decades which, to quote the industry report, is "approximately double the current level of combined expenditures of government, manufacturers and utilities."

In addition to nuclear fission and fusion, a number of technical options are achievable if we make the commitment in federal funding and if the government provides the leadership, preferably through one agency responsible for R&D. By 1985, with an Apollo kind of thrust, we could develop the following clean energy sources:

The commercial use of solar energy for direct heating and cooling of homes in many parts of the nation and perhaps some form of central station solar energy; A commercial shale oil industry producing upwards of one million barrels per day and capable of expansion;

Commercial gasification of coal to supplement natural gas as a fuel;

Large scale gas turbine-steam turbine combined cycles for electric power generation with a minimum of pollution;

A commercial fuel cell for total energy installations that would be more efficient than existing means of energy conversion;

Commercial geothermal energy in significant quantities in the West;

A fluidized bed boiler to burn coal in a power plant without emitting the sulphur and other pollutants into the air.

There are other possibilities as well; this list is by no means exhaustive. The significant thing is that of these seven options, only one is being funded at more than $10 million per year and it is the coal gasification program which gets only $25 million per year from the government and $10 million from industry. All the others are being funded to the tune of $1 to $3 million.

The technology for abundance is simply in a holding pattern while the coming energy crisis draws nearer. We can R&D our way out of this bind with federal funding of $1.5 to $2.0 billion per year-or about three times the current leveland by pulling together into one new agency a critical mass of technical talent which exists nowhere in the government today outside of the Atomic Energy Commission.

Richard Goodwin has written that in government, structure is policy. I don't go that far, but in energy there is no structure or policy. Today, federal energy policy is as disjointed, ad hoc and directionless as is the organization. In 1952, long before any of us had ever heard about an "energy crisis," the Paley Commission on Natural Resources recommended that the "hydra-heads of energy policy must be reined together." It's even a more urgent necessity now. The formation of a Council for Energy Policy, as part of the White House establishment, would provide a focal point for straightening out the energy policy mess. Such a Council would coordinate and integrate the decisions of the more than sixty government agencies who have their hands in energy policy at one time or another.

I'm still old-fashioned enough to believe that the federal government's prime role in directing national energy policy is to protect the consumer.

But government reacts to the squeaky wheel. Consumers need to enter the fight over a national energy policy. The stakes are enormous. Otherwise, the consumer could turn out to be the forgotten man in the energy crisis who ends up with high bills, shortages, and a polluted environment.

Yet, it need not go that way. I am not an energy doomsdayer. The problems of energy are really part and parcel of a new awakening. More is not always better, and the quality of life can be improved by stressing values more fundamental than becoming a servant of our mechanical servants.

Perhaps John Maynard Keynes, the famous economist, summed it up when he said: "The day is not far off when the Economic Problem will take the back seat where it belongs and that the arena of the heart and head will be occupied, or reoccupied, by our real problems-the problems of life and human relations, of creation and behavior and religion."

Energy is needed to sustain a society that improves the lifestyles of people. But we can avoid a crisis by curbing our appetite and investing in the technology for abundance.

[Whereupon, at 11:45 a.m., the committee was adjourned.]

ADDITIONAL ARTICLES, LETTERS, AND STATEMENTS

Hon. HENRY M. JACKSON,

UNITED STATES SENATE,

COMMITTEE ON COMMERCE Washington, D.C., January 29, 1973.

Chairman, Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs,

U.S. Senate,

Washington, D.C.

DEAR SCOOP: The Commerce Committee will conduct hearings on February 7 and 8, 1972 to consider S. 70 and S. 419, proposals for institutional reform of Federal energy policy making.

It has become abundantly clear that bold leadership in establishing a coherent national energy policy is needed. As your study has revealed, for too long energy problems have been approached on an ad hoc basis in response to one crisis after another. Energy decision making has been narrow and without adequate consideration of the overall impact, As a result, today the nation is faced with shortages of supply, soaring energy prices and unacceptable environmental impacts. It is time to fix responsibility and coordinate federal energy activities. S.70 and S.419 are examples of different approaches toward achieving this end.

I know of your personal interest and that of the members of the National Fuels and Energy Policy Study in this matter. You and other members of the Fuels study are most welcome to join us on February 7 and 8.

Sincerely yours,

WARREN G. MAGNUSON, Chairman.

AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE,

Mr. HANK LIPPEK,
Commerce Committee,
U.S. Senate,

Washington, D.C.

Washington, D.C., January 19, 1973.

DEAR MR. LIPPEK: In view of your interest in U.S. energy policy, we would like to bring the enclosed articles to your attention. We believe these articles, reprinted from Science, provide a comprehensive survey of the options for the energy sources of the future. They briefly assess the status of each option, its technical obstacles, its potential environmental problems, and its economic potential. The survey was designed to relate the key technologies to policy issues. A summary article deals with research priorities.

Among the points raised by the articles:

Five-sixths of the energy used in transportation, two-thirds of the fuel consumed to generate electricity, and nearly one-third of the remaining energyamounting in all to more than 50 percent of the energy consumed in the United States-is discarded as waste heat. (Article 16)

As a method of removing the sulfur from dirty fossil fuels, gasification appears to be superior to the major alternative-removing sulfur dioxide from stack gases. (2)

Within 5 years . . . solar-powered systems for heating and cooling homes could be commercially available at prices competitive with gas or oil furnaces and electric air conditioners. (8)

But fuel cells . . . are the most efficient method of converting fossil fuels to electricity. If natural gas can be used more efficiently in this fashion . . ., there will be greater quantities of oil and coal available for other applications. (13) While conversion of organic wastes to fuels in an ideal way to dispose of the wastes, it is probably not a feasible method of averting an energy crisis. (12)

Ten or fifteen years from now, when natural gas and low-sulfur oil are expected to be in very short supply, combined cycle systems may be the key to clean production of electricity from coal. (2)