prospect is that oil and gas production will clash with other social values, and those constraints will slow the pace at which resources can be discovered and brought to market.

The coal resource is unquestionably very large. Our research suggests that the resource base contains enough coal that can be extracted without increase in real costs to sustain sizable growth in production for many decades. Uranium resources are more limited, if used in the present nuclear reactors. With the breeder reactor, the uranium resource base becomes larger than coal. If oil and gas production peak over the next two decades, a combination of synthetic oil and gas from coal, oil shale, and electricity generated from coal and nuclear sources could provide for growth in energy requirements, if cleaner and cheaper sources are not meanwhile developed.

Not only is the domestic resource base large enough to support historical growth for the rest of this century and beyond, but many of these resources, such as western and midwestern surface minable coal, and onshore Alaskan oil and gas, are low cost resources (in narrow economic terms).

Currently, the high world oil prices set the pace for the high prices of domestic energy sources, particularly the fossil fuels. However, if the United States decided to impose a ceiling on domestic energy prices lower than world oil prices, or if world prices dropped, resumption of historical energy growth would be a distinct possibility. But producing these resources at the pace needed would require a great number of positive governmental actions, and would mean compromising many environmental goals that we have set for ourselves.