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	Your March 18 editorial reasons from the current oil crisis to the
need for smaller cars, citing such gurus as Governor Brown, the Office of
Technology Assessment, Emma Rothschild and Secretary Schlesinger.  The
trouble is that your gloomy picture provides no prospect of even keeping
smaller cars operating for very long, because you neglect to discuss new
fuel production technologies.  Presumably this would put the lovers of
smallness for its own sake in difficulty, because if a new technology can
fuel the small cars, maybe it can be stretched to fuel large cars as well.

	The trouble with the Office of Technology Assessment is that
"to the victors go the spoils".  Senator Kennedy controls the Office
and by golly its conclusions agree with the predilections of the
Senator's ecological friends.  Once one knows that Russell Peterson
is head of the office, replacing Emilio Daddario, one knows which way
the results of the objective studies will run.

	The possible new technologies for automobile fuel have been
known since before the 1973 energy crisis.  However, there are fewer
development projects today than there were at that time.  When the
oil embargo was announced, Congress voted for the Alaska pipeline
369-14, and President Nixon announced Project Independence to free
us from foreign imports by 1980.  Had we gone ahead with Project
Independence, we would be nearly there by now.

	However, as Nixon's appointee Russell Train put it early
in 1974,
%2"We can and should seize upon the energy crisis as a good excuse and
great opportunity for making some very fundamental changes that we
should be making anyhow for other reasons."%1, (%2Science%1, 7 June 1974),
and a year-long study under John Sawhill took all the steam out
of Project Independence.

	Oil shale has petered out in a maze of invented environmental
hazards.  Oil from coal is being studied to death, except that
nuclear assisted hydrogenation of coal that can get 2.5 times as
much oil from a given amount of coal may not even be mentioned.
The tar sands of Canada are ignored.  The use of liquid hydrogen
to power cars, which would also solve the problem of putting
carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, is being studied only in Japan.

	Truly our betters are taking the view expressed by Paul Ehrlich
that %2"...Giving society cheap, abundant energy ... would be the
equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun." (An Ecologist's
Perspective on Nuclear Power%1, May 1975 issue of Federation of American
Scientists Public Issue Report).

	South Africa, which has no oil and is losing the possibility
of importing it, responded to the Iranian crisis by enlarging its coal
conversion project to the extent that it will meet its main gasoline
needs by the early 1980s.  But then its government and its newspapers
aren't out to use the crisis to reform the tastes of the citizens.