Despite the obvious dependence of the nation's material prosperity on an adequate supply of energy, the United States has never had a coherent, long-term strategy forassuring reliable fuel supplies and for developing satisfactory energyproduction, conversion, transmission, and storage technologies.National "policy" governing the management of energy resources,energy pricing, energy facility regulation, and research on new energytechnologies has been capriciously and unsystematically formulated.Successive administrations have generally limited their energy deci-sionmaking to short-term crisis management, have carried out fewcompetent technical appraisals of the critical energy policy issues,and have failed to bring about a national consensus on what needs tobe done to assure the vital energy supplies required by the country.~ The decades of negligence in the formulation of a thoughtful na-~tional energy policy have already had a number of adverse conse~quences and pose future difficulties for the United States. Amon~the many far-reaching problems that have been created are: "7~ A national level of energy use that by excessive, wasteful, and inefficient;~ The consequent impending exhaustion of oil and natural gas;any reasonable standardof scarce domestic supplies~ The consequent dependence on imported fuels, which has now led to a complex of national security problems and damaging balance of payments deficits;XV