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.cb A DEPRESSING SPEECH

	This is to explain why I found President Carter's speech
profoundly depressing, although it was intended to inspire.

	My depression comes from his acceptance of a shortage of energy as
permanent.  His proposals for dealing with the weather emergency
don't bother me; I might not agree with the details if I understood them
better, but obviously an immediate shortage of natural gas has to be met
by re-allocating existing supplies somehow.  What's bad is that
he has no intention of developing a long range program aimed at supplying
abundant energy and no intention of letting anyone else try.

	Perhaps you think he or people he trusts have explored all avenues
for supplying energy, and there is just no way.  Maybe his scientific
advisers have informed him of a law of nature that America can survive
with thermostats at 65 but cannot maintain 75 in the long run.

	That's just not it.  There is not one study that examines potential
resources and even attempts to show that America can survive at
65 degrees and not at 75 degrees (taking this one distinction
as representative of many ways of making us uncomfortable for our
own alleged good).  What the studies tell us is that if we want
to hold our energy growth down to X percent, then we must adapt
conservation measure Y, but no real reason is ever given as to why
we shouuld accept this goal.

	The technological facts are the following;  Oil and natural gas
are bound to get tight, although if the Middle Eastern countries and
others were to sell their oil under trade conditions similar to those
under which American oil was sold when we were the dominant producer,
major increases in costs might be put off for 15 to 30 years but not
much longer.  In 1973 primary energy took about 4 percent of our G.N.P.,
i.e. about 4 percent of American labor went into producing energy or
producing goods sent abroad to buy it from others.  Therefore, if adequate
supplies
are available at up to 5 times the old cost, we can preserve an energy
intensive way of life, although the changed relative prices of energy
and other goods will cause readjustments.
There are two proven major sources of energy for America - coal and
nuclear.  In real dollars, both should stay within a factor of two
of their 1973 costs, because the amount of labor required to produce
them has been driven up less than that amount by all the environmental
restrictions (both the sensible and the stupid) that have been adopted
so far.  Nuclear is a world-wide option, while America is one of the
few countries for which coal is a real possiblitity.  Other possibilities
such as fusion, solar energy and oil shale are somewhat speculative,
especially as regards costs.

	The situation is complicated by the fact that uses of energy
depend on the form in which it comes, and home heating and automobiles
presently use natural gas and oil which are bound to become short.
Home heating is the easier to convert, because even before oil went
up in price, electricity was a reasonable option for heating well
insulated homes and nuclear energy was and remains a competitive way
of producing electricity.  However, using electricity to power cars
requires the invention of light weight batteries, and there is still
no guarantee that nature is so kind as to permit batteries of the
necessary specifications.  Maybe such batteries are possible, and
research aimed at them is important, but no amount of
money will create a law of nature to government specifications.
The best current bets for motor fuel are oil shale and converted
coal, but they will be quite expensive, though it looks like we
can get gasoline for less than Europeans now pay.

	This account of the the technological facts is approximate.
In particular, the relative costs of the various options depend
on information not yet available.  I said the costs shouldn't be
more than double our present costs, but if asked for my best estimate,
I would bet that they will really decline, because both nuclear
energy and coal mining are subject to economies of the learning
curve and invention.

	There is nothing surprising about this technological
situation, and it was approximately predicted by most technological
forecasters even twenty years ago.  The really weird thing is
the psychological situation.  No-one would have predicted twenty
years ago that an American president would make a speech like
Carter's.

	I don't mean to say that Carter is personally anomalous.  He
is a genius as a politician, and politicians are good at picking
up moods, amplifying them, and projecting them back to the country.
Carter has picked up the mood that dominates American emotional
life, even among many people who know better such as technologists.

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John McCarthy
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Computer Science Department
Stanford University
Stanford, California 94305

ARPANET: MCCARTHY@SU-AI
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