Minutes - Council - 04/01/1975 - Laserfiche WebLink

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- 3 - Oberstar Zf the President, with his enormous impact on the news media, can- not persuade the people to continue in SE Asia, certainly he can't do it, especially when he doesn't believe in it himself. Mr. Oberstar asked the audience what their ideas and feelings were about gas, w~^ther they were in favor~rationing, allocation or some- thing else. 'Discussion and comments from the audience. 95% of the crude o~used around here comes from Canada. Canada and Venez- uela are cutting back on their imports to this country. We should find some way to control the supply of g~s thru increased taxes, government impo~$s, etc. We are using 16,000,000 barrels a day in this country. Eastern utilities are using oil to generate power. Couldn't the East use coal? Get more nuclear plants undervay. If we are going to set up another bureaucracy for rationing, we have to have what goes alongwith it. We are wasting a lot of energy. get 22 miles per gal. We need Cars next year that will Guest: He would give rationing a very low priority. We should put on import quotas. Congress is going to have to get tough. Cars built in the thirties and forties got better mileage. Guest: Government is dragging its feet on research for other en- ergy sources. They can put a man on the moon but they can't find other energy sources. She thinks an electric car is fantastic. Humphrey said last fall we should spend money on technical know how. Why hasn't something been done? He steered a bill through the Senate. It allowed $1,500,000,000 for solar energy research. Geo-thermal energy has not even been tapped. Oberstar: He has drawn up a bill that will tax gas guzzling cars coming out of Detroit next year. There would be a $400 tax credit to anyone who buys a car that gets better than 20 miles a galo He said some men from Detroit had already been on his doorstep about this bill. Mr. Obstar said there will be hearings on our off shore resources. We have a tremendous ocean pollution. We can do much more to de- velop our oil reserves. U.S. has 50% of the world's reserve of coal. Eastern coal has much higher BTU content than western coal. Eastern coal is high in sulphur content. Our energy reserves are not limitless. We have used as much fossil fuel in the last 40 years as in the past history of the U.S. We have coal enough for the next 500 years. We have enough oil for the next 30 years. Ur- anium deposits will run out. Nuclear produces more plutonium than the uranium it takes to make it. We have 500,000 oil wells in the U.S. Saudia Arabia has 600 oil wells. It costs Arabia 13~ a bar- rel and they sell it for $10.50 a barrel. They have bigger depo- sits and we have to go into little pockets. There are 6 hot spots in the world. These could be converted by a dish arrangement to a space station and then returned to the earth. Cost would be twice the cost of the space program.