Dear Colleagues:

	The Federal Energy Administration is holding hearings throughout the
country on Project Independence.  A hearing will be held in San Francisco
on October 6 and 7.  We would like to form an ad hoc group to present a
statement based on the following considerations:

	1. In the long term, the U.S. and the world have good prospects for
energy.  Both nuclear and solar energy can provide enough energy so that
the limitations on the population the earth can support will come from
something else.

	2. The United States has serious short term problems stemming
from the impending exhaustion of petroleum resources and profiteering
by the petroleum exporting countries.  Other countries, especially
the underdeveloped countries, have even more serious and more immediate
problems coming from the same source.

	3. The moral basis for the U.S. continuing to use so large a
fraction of the world's energy is problematical unless we can contrive
to obtain the energy from within our own borders.  Our ability to obtain
it from abroad at reasonable prices is also problematical.

	4. While substantial economies in the use of energy are possible
purely by eliminating waste and without changing the options available
to people in the society, the possible economies are not large enough
to preclude the need for either large coerced changes in life style or the
development of substantial new sources of energy.

	5. The large per capita use of energy in America has made
possible a substantial part of our individual freedom and prosperity
and is worth preserving.

	6. While the demand for energy has been growing at a high
rate, the demand in support of presently known uses will saturate
at a reasonable multiple of present per capitat usage, i.e. the
exponential growth in demand will level off all by itself without
government action, just as the exponential growth of beef consumption
in the United States observed in the late nineteenth century leveled
off long before each American had to eat a cow a day.

	7. \F2The original goal of Project Independence, i.e. for the
United States to be self-sufficient in energy, should can be
achieved at acceptable social and environmental cost, and it should
be achieved.\F0

	8. It should be achieved by meeting predicted demands rather
than by setting a fixed rate of energy growth as a target to be
met by allocation.

	9. Within the overall goal, certain subgoals should be set
with target dates.  These might include:

		a. The elimination of the use of petroleum and natural
gas for the production of central station electric power.  Both nuclear
and coal burning plants are already more than cost competitive for
this purpose when costs are allocated properly.

		b. The elimination of the use of natural gas and
natural petroleum for space heating.  Some combination of solar
heating, electric resistance heating, heat pumps, and synthetic
petroleum made from coal should make possible setting target dates
for this.

		c. Eliminating use of natural petroleum for vehicles
is a longer term task, and its accomplishment will be eased by
the time obtained by achieving the first two.

	10. Research and development required for all potentially cost
effective sources of energy should be funded.  This should include
parallel approaches to important problems.  These sources of energy
include

		a. Increased exploration for petroleum and natural gas
and the development of secondary recovery techniques.  It should be
clearly understood that this only buys us time.  We should try to
reduce our use of foreign petroleum faster than we are forced to, because
other countries cannot reduce their dependence on it as fast as we
can.  In other words, we should stop outbidding the underdeveloped
countries for petroleum as soon as possible.

		b. The present breeder reactor projects should be completed
and alternate breeder approaches also investigated.  The improvement of
non-breeder reactors should be continued.
Although nuclear energy has problems of safety and safeguards, these
problems are solvable at acceptable cost and risk, and nuclear fission
energy provides the only guaranteed way of meeting our energy requirements
at costs close to present costs for hundreds of years.  This is even more
true of the rest of the world.  Fusion or solar energy may look even better,
but this cannot yet be guaranteed.

		c. The research on fusion should be continued and expanded,
but until engineering feasibility is demonstrated and competitive costs
are estimated, we must have adequate options that do not bet our future on
the success of fusion.