Amidst the clamor of political rhetoric and the barrage of proposals and counterproposals, the nation's energy problem emerges rather starkly: a precarious combination of needless inefficiency, lagging domestic energy production, and increasingly expensive and unreliable foreign supplies of oil. President Carter's response¹ has been to impose a ceiling on imports of foreign oil and to propose a massive commitment of public funds to develop on a crash basis a new synthetic fuel industry. Derived from coal, "synfuels" represent an alternative energy source which has yet to be shown commercially or technically feasible and which raises the specter of severe environmental impacts. Another essential element of the Administration's latest energy package is the establishment of a new federal panel, the Energy Mobilization Board, that would have largely unchecked powers to waive the careful balance of environmedntal controls that Congress, the federal agencies, and the states have laboiriously created over the last decade.

Scrutiny of the President's plan reveals that it is dependent upon dubious contingencies and is even more threatening to the environment that was first thought, but Congress may nonetheless adopt many of his proposals if in modified form.In focusing on high visibility strategies that promise to have an immediate political impact, however, both the President and Congress may be overlooking an alternative approach that would make additional energy supplies available without huge government expenditures on programs with only a dubious chance of success and of questionable environmental acceptability. Widespread application of conservation techniques and the use of presently available solar energy technologies could significantly reduce excessive consumption of present energy supplies in the short term with minimum disruption of the nation's economy. Furthermore, such immediate action would obviate the need for the potentially autocratic Energy Mobilization Board and would allow the federal government to take the necessary steps toward solving the energy supply/demand imbalance and reforming the siting and approval process for new energy facilities in a deliberate and sensible way.