7. Modifications to environmental legislation will not come easily and the battle will be bitter. Everyone at heart is an environmentalist but the fury of the resistance will come from those environmental extremists who are more motivated by hatred of business than true concern for the environment. They will remain unrelenting. To a midget in a crowded elevator the whole world smells differently. Beside the pressure groups there are practical political problems. Senator Muskie who authored the Act needs a graceful way to retreat, and the exit is not readily apparent. He will stall for time by calling for a National Academy of Science study. But others on the Senate Committees are more realistically concerned with the consequences of doing nothing. Hopefully the Chairman will moderate his position and do the right thing. Being right is one way to be President, although recent events would indicate it is certainly not the only way. Without such changes there is no way that coal, our most abundant resource, can play the meaningful role it is expected to play in meeting our future energy needs. Nor is there enough low sulfur fuel available anywhere to meet the demand under present standards without massive imports. Nor can we afford to delay further exploration or development of promising areas off-shore or the North Slope. Concurrent with and a necessary companion for compromises in the environmental field is a quantum jump in research and development and massive federal funding for this purpose. Such an effort is needed to accelerate the development of technology that will in fact permit us to achieve the desirable goals of clean air and clean water. Such an effort is required to improve our techniques for discovery and winning the mineral resources that we need and to utilize them more