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\CENERGY HEARINGS IN SAN FRANCISCO

Dear Colleagues:

\J	The Federal Energy Administration is holding hearings throughout the
country on Project Independence.  A hearing will be held in San Francisco
on October 7 thru 10.  Time has been requested to present a statement
in the name of the \F1Stanford Faculty ad hoc Energy Group\F0.
We have in mind a statement based on the following considerations:

	1. In the long term, the U.S. and the world have good prospects for
energy.  Nuclear and solar energy can each 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 large coerced changes in life style unless we
develop substantial new sources of energy.

	5. The large \F1per capita\F0 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 small multiple of present \F1per capita\F0 usage, i.e. the
exponential growth in demand will level off all by itself without
government action, just as the nineteenth century
exponential growth of American beef consumption leveled
off before each of us 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, 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 - with nuclear even cheaper than coal.
This will involve substantial costs for the replacement or conversion
of existing oil and gas burning power plants.

		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 or gas made from coal should make possible setting target dates
for this, but it will take longer than replacement of these fuels
for central station power.

		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.
However, it can be achieved in several ways without losing the advantages
of present vehicles, and the research should be pushed.

	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 for thousands
of years at costs close to  present costs.  This is even more true of
the rest of the  world.  Fusion or  solar energy may eventually  look
better, but this is not at all certain.

	 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 its success.

		d. Research on solar power should be pushed for those
applications like space heating for which it may soon be cost-effective,
and any promising approaches to economical central station solar power
should be followed up.

		e. Research in exotic sources of energy, e.g. geothermal,
wind, tide, and oceanic temperature difference should be supported
whenever an objective investigations shows a reasonable chance of
cost-effectiveness.  Unfortunately, at present, there is a certain
tendency for people to ride hobbies, and uneconomical "demonstration
projects" should be avoided unless there is a plausible path to
cost-effectiveness.

	 f. Substantial economies in the use  of energy are possible.
They can  be divided into pure economies  that cost only research and
initiative in  introduction,  and  economies  that  involve  reducing
people's options. The former are unreservedly welcome, but the latter
may  be required as to meet a temporary  situation.  There is no need
for the latter in the long run, since the long term cost of energy in
human labor should not be much larger than present costs and may well
be lower.

	11. The correct  compromise between energy  and environmental
considerations should  be one that does not  involve a retreat either
from the present levels of air and water quality or from  the present
standard  of  living  including  the  personal  freedom  provided  by
automobiles.  The technical possibilities exist for improving both.

	12. \F2If the price of OPEC oil can be brought back into some
reasonable relation to  costs, no crash programs should be necessary.
Otherwise, an effort comparable to those made during World War II may
be  necessary.  That  experience  shows   that  our  normal  rate  of
engineering development  can be greatly increased in an emergency. In
this case, energy independence by 1980 may well  be possible. Whether
such an effort is needed should be determined as soon as possible.\F0

	13. The solution is not simply a matter of freeing prices
from control and letting the laws of economics operate.  American
industry is not used to making investments of the size that may be
required in undeveloped technology.

	14. At present the Federal Energy  Administration seems to be
floundering  on   what  policy  to  adopt.     The  position  of  the
Environmental  Protection  Agency,  seems  to  be  typified   by  the
following  statement by  its director  Russell Train  taken from  his
article in the June 7 issue of \F1Science:

	"We can  and should seize  upon the energy  crisis as  a good
excuse  and  a great  opportunity  for making  some  very fundamental
changes that we ought  to be making anyway  for other reasons. I  see
disturbing  signs, however,  that  we are  responding  to the  energy
crisis on  the basis of the same old ideas and attitudes that brought
us to our present pass in the first place.  All we have to do, we are
told, is  suspend pollution controls and  environmental standards and
then pull out all the stops in an orgy of exploration, extraction and
production that will give us enough energy to let us resume once more
our wasteful ways of growing and living."\F0

	The article has many off-hand ideas of how our way of life should
be changed unconnected with any idea that it is necessary to obtain
the consent of the governed for the changes.  To put it briefly, however,
that part of the government essentially opposed to solving the energy
problem.

	Mr. Sawhill, the FEA administrator, has recently proposed
that disincentives to the use of automobiles be developed in order to
save petroleum for central station use.  This seems to be the wrong way
to go.

	In general, the officials in charge of energy policy do not
have a clear picture of our options, and their compromises seem to
be based on the day-to-day fluctuations in political strength of the
various viewpoints rather than on a stable compromise position on
how energy, environmental, and economic considerations should be
compromised in the long run.

	Therefore, scientists and engineers cannot be confident
that scientific and engineering work aimed at developing methods of
getting more energy will be properly used.  We must also express our
opinions about the feasibility and desirability of solving the problems.

	The presentation  to FEA would  include a  written statement,
perhaps  an  improvement  of  this  one,  oral participation  in  the
hearings by one  or more Stanford  people, and  a press release.  The
form  and content  of the  presentation  are open  to discussion  and
compromise.  We would  probably \F2not\F0  want to include  the above
speculations  about  the  state  of  the  political  process  in  the
statement itself; they are included  here only to show that action is
called for.

	If you are interested in taking part in such a presentation to the
San Francisco energy hearing, please come to a meeting at xxx.