Vernon Ehlers: “it is a pleasure to rise again to address a topic of immediate and great importance to our Nation. I will be joined this…”

“it is a pleasure to rise again to address a topic of immediate and great importance to our Nation. I will be joined this evening in this discussion by my fellow scientist, the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Bartlett). He is in the life sciences primarily, although he has done work in the physical sciences. I am a physicist by training, a nuclear physicist to be more precise, and we hope to give a scientific perspective on the issue of energy. There are a number of topics I wish to discuss relating to this, but let me first say that as scientists we have a unique perspective on energy, because we have had to deal with it in both a theoretical and a pragmatic way. As a result of this, and our scientific training and analysis, and graphing, we developed a perspective which I believe is accurate, but which is not widely held, except by a few far-seeing energy companies and energy analysts. And I would also like to mention, if I may, that we covered much of this material last week, and I apologize to my colleagues for repeating it, but I have received a lot of questions and comments regarding the comments we made, and I felt in order to review it appropriately we would have to cover all of the material, but in a somewhat more cursory fashion. In addition, this evening we are going to add another dimension to the topic, and that is to discuss its relevance for national and economic security.…”