2. structure and our national defense. 5. In the light of these demonstrable facts, the actions government is taking or threatening to take are ill-conceived and you should be as concerned as we in the mining industry are. Make no mistake, our problems are your problems. Elaborating on the main theme, the U. S. is faced with an energy crisis that I feel is serious in the extreme. The demand for energy continues to grow and I cannot conceive that the public will accept, except as a last resort, a solution that balances the supply/demand ratio for energy by curtailing seriously the per capita use of energy. But now the demand has shifted from cheap energy to clean energy and this aggravates the problem, changes its dimensions, and increases our reliability on imports. It disqualifies much of the coal in the Mid-West and East because of its higher sulfur content. It makes the supplies of natural gas, even when augmented by synthetics and new sources in Canada and the North Slope, hopelessly inadequate. It forces us to contemplate by 1985 dependency upon imports from a handful of Eastern Hemisphere countries, principally Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, for half our petroleum supplies. This situation prevails even after increasing the power realized from nuclear sources 70-fold. Similar trends will prevail in the hard rock minerals. We already import sizeable quantities of iron ore, nickel, tin, copper, lead, zinc, bauxite, and the other minerals necessary to sustain our industrial base. As the demand for these metals increases, domestic production falls further behind as older deposits are exhausted. Incentives to discover new minerals deposits in the