specified region to allow interested persons a reasonable time to testify and sub. mit written and oral statements to the agency or" 15. Section 8. (b), page 13, line 4, to read: "issued. Any person undertaking to construct or modify such bulk power facility prior to the issuance of a license by the agency shall be liable to a penalty in the amount of ten thousand dollars ($10,000) per day, beginning with the commencement of construction or modi. fication, until the issuance of a license." 16. Section 9, page 13, line 6, to read: "Sec. 9. (a) Whenever an electric utility, having obtained" 17. Section 9, page 13, line 21, add subsection: “(b) Any party to a proceeding under this Act aggrieved by a license issued by the agency may obtain a review of such license in the United States Court of Appeals for any circuit in which the licensed facility would be located, in order to insure adequate environmental protection. Until such proceedings have been equitably resolved, the license shall be withdrawn and any declarations of taking shall be suspended. Senator MUSKIE. Thank you very much for your statement and your excellent suggestions for improving the bill. We will study those carefully and closely. Sometimes we get into discussion of broad public questions without concentrating on those details. Your suggestions are very helpful. Just a few questions on this general problem of economic growth. It is implicit in both your statements that you envision a point in the future when economic growth comes to a halt. Mr. MORGAN. Yes. Senator MUSKIE. To do that, I take it, we have to concern ourselves with such things as per capita consumption, and you touched on that, population growth and correcting the injustices of maldistribution of the benefits of the economy at some point before we reach that. We would not want to be at that point and find that there are still people who are hungry or ill-housed or without meaningful employment opportunities, and freeze them into that situation. That is quite a tall order, isn't it? Obviously this bill isn't the vehicle for achieving that. Nevertheless, to the extent it applies, as one of you rightfully says, a continuation of economic growth, to that extent it doesn't come to grips with that ultimate question which confronts us all. To move toward the objective of no economic growth in some point in history, how do we achieve that on a global scale? Mr. MORGAN. Mr. Senator, this is such a frightening problem, worldwide. I certainly have no answer for it. All I know is, as a biologist, the earth's environment is finite, it's only 15,000 feet thick as a practical matter, and you cannot increase anything indefinitely within a finite environment. I think in fact we can with much more sophisticated technological understanding and expertise solve many of the problems. I do not know how we solve the problems of human behavior, I don't know how we solve the problem of poor people trapped in the city and unable to get out, but certainly as a physical matter, certainly as a biological matter, nature is full of examples of uncontrolled population growth where the net result is final disaster. I am convinced man has the intellect to avoid this. How you do this globally, I don't know, I hope it can be done. Senator MUSKIE. Do you think through the use of technology you can stretch out this period prior to the time of no economic growth, or even to avoid it? Mr. MORGAN. I would hesistate to get into a debate with you, sir, on an economic question of whether growth is necessary for a healthy economy. You and I both want a healthy economy. I haven't yet heard an economist argue effectively that growth, per se, is necessary to keep the economy or to keep people happy and well fed. Senator MUSKIE. I think economic growth in the past, at least, has been related to the three imperatives which I listed previously, at the outset. One, population growth by definition, if you have more people you have to feed them and house them. That is going to take economic growth unless we find a way of stabilizing the population absolutely. You need growth in response to increases in material well-being and per capita consumption. That is in part stimulated by advertising, but it is also stimulated by the urge of every individual to improve his lot, so we must find a way to control that. State control? Can you find a way of getting inside the individual to eliminate his urge for material improvement? That is one of the dictates of economic growth. The third one, of course, are the social programs and the charitable instincts of human beings who want to eliminate the unacceptable circumstances under which many people live. Economic growth helps that, not to the extent some people think it might, but this is an objective of economic growth. These three stimuli of economic growth are wholly apart from whatever theories may support the idea that growth is essential to economic growth. These three problems must be dealt with in some way if we are to deal with the ultimate objective of no economic growth, if that is dictated by environmental considerations. Mr. MORGAN. I do not think it is necessarily given or demonstrated that expanding economic growth in fact increases the net value of the living experience to the average human being. Certainly if we can somehow or other get into a balanced system, the mere fact that an individual, of course, wants to increase his own personal resources from the time he is 20 to the time he is aged 60, this is simply progress within a system, but it doesn't necessarily mean the system has to be constantly expanding. Senator MUSKIE. To the extent that the individual may think that material things, and the range of them, of course, is limitless, from books to candy and anything in between, to the extent the individual thinks material things are an important part of the satisfactions that he would like to enjoy, to what extent should he be able to pursue them? Mr. MORGAN. I think he should completely. I don't necessarily agree that you have to constantly be expanding the system in order to account for this. After all, people are constantly going out of the system by death and people are constantly coming into it. I don't think that it's given at all that the whole gross national product has to be constantly expanding. Senator MUSKIE. If we are going to have more people, we have not yet stabilized the population, and if each member of society, the percentage at the lower end, and there are more of them than at the top, considers material improvement part of what he needs to get out of unacceptable conditions of poverty, to that extent you are going to have an increase in production. Mr. MORGAN. That is right. Human population increase must be stabilized worldwide or we will have chaos. Senator MUSKIE. And must be stabilized at some level of acceptable standard of living. Must someone have to say that people can improve their lives to this point and no further? Mr. MORGAN. I can't answer your question. With the present world population it can never hope to achieve the standard of living of the people in the United States today. This is a statistical factual thing that can be demonstrated. There simply are not enough resources on earth to do it. It's a frightening political area of how these choices are going to be made, who is in fact going to crank back that standard of living. Are we going to maintain our standard of living at the expense of hundreds of millions of other people? Senator MUSKIE. It is conceivable, given this view of the future, that we all might have to live in a substantially lower standard of living than we now enjoy? Mr. MORGAN. I hope not, but it seems a distinct possibility. I think we can spend a lot more effort trying to solve the problem than we have to date-if we can put people on the moon and keep them alive there, I think we can do an awful lot better job here on earth. For example, the question of the internal combustion automobile engine is a wonderful example of the tremendous leverage operated by our technology against the enivronment. Let me just cite a statistic that you may not have heard, Senator. A chemistry professor at Stanford recently calculated the impact upon the air mass of one automobile engine compared with people. In terms of both its consumption of oxygen and the dilution volume necessary to render its toxic gases harmless to people and to oxidize them and so on, one eight-cylinder automobile engine has the impact on the air mass comparable to somewhere between 5 and 10 million people. Now, put another way, if you divide the air mass over Boston between the population to calculate each person's air mass that belonged to him, if he elected to use it for breathing it would last him about 35 years; if he elected to use it to run his automobile, it lasts him a little bit less than 3 minutes. Now, I think you can do something about the internal combustion automobile engine when enough of the public recognizes that we simply cannot environmentally afford to operate them any more. Senator MUSKIE. All of these questions you ask, I think, are legitimate and appropriate questions we must consider, and I think you perform a service in raising them; but if you are convinced at some finite point in the future that the earth's resources cannot support the number of human beings then in existence, how can we be sure the finite point does not exist at some point in the past? The standard of living ought not to be rolled back to what it was at the time of the revolution or even Christ. Mr. MORGAN. I think that is an exaggeration. Senator MUSKIE. No, it is not an exaggeration, it is a question. Mr. MORGAN. I think in terms of the present way we operate things, in fact, we may already have exceeded the optimum population which we should sustain. I hate to sound so overly dramatic, Senator, but it's been my experience, for example, to talk with the marine biologists at Woods Hole, some of the eminent scientists of the ocean. They point out we have never conducted an experiment like this before, we don't know what the end result will be, but there's already a layer of oil covering the oceans of the planet several molecules thick which, based on the information that they know, is probably affecting the interchange of energy between the sun and the earth which is affecting our climate and atmospheric oxygen, as well as the productivity of the oceans. They know of no way to reverse this. This film of oil is getting larger every year, it has persisted for many, many years. This sounds terribly dramatic. What I'm saying, I guess, is that we've got to begin to get the public to understand that we are in a very serious environmental situation. The United Nations has called a worldwide symposium for 1972 which Secretary General U Thant entitled, "The crisis of the human environment." It is a crisis. I get a little bit tired of coming to meetings like this and hearing speakers, Mr. Tallman, I believe, for example, it was, talking about reconciling the demand to double electrical power every 8 to 10 years without damaging the environment. They are irreconcilable. It's high time we pointed it up and got people to understand it. Senator MUSKIE. The question of deciding when we can come to the end of the road is a difficult one. Gentlemen, thank you very much for your testimony. Did you want to make any additional comments, Mr. Marshall? I noticed as Mr. Morgan and I were engaged in discussion at one point Mr. MARSHALL. I was just trying to express perhaps a thought relating to the measure of our productivity. That our productivity might be based on the actual manpower output rather than Senator MUSKIE. Goods and services. Mr. MARSHALL (continuing). The complete use, complete combustion of our natural resources. We don't have to deplete them. I know I came here with a thousand pieces of paper in deference to the request by Mr. Turner. Perhaps, if everybody had stayed around and listened to my remarks, we wouldn't have had to use up all that wood pulp and silver that the Xerox machine uses up. There are certain surpluses that we have such as that that we can really do without if we think about it a little bit. Senator MUSKIE. On the other hand, we want more people than those in this room to know what has been going on here this morning. I think society has gone through a period of consumption which has had a priority which we will not have again. It may be part of the trauma of the depression in the thirties. I think the generation of young people are going to concern themselves with less material things, which may be a healthy sign for the future. Mr. MORGAN. Very helpful. Senator MUSKIE. I think we might straighten ourselves out to some extent, at least. Whether or not we can see far enough to avoid the kinds of questions that are raised by your testimony, I guess time will tell. Thank you very much. (Whereupon, at 12:15 p.m., the hearing adjourned.) INTERGOVERNMENTAL COORDINATION OF POWER DEVELOPMENT AND ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION ACT MONDAY, AUGUST 3, 1970 U.S. SENATE, SUBCOMMITTEE ON INTERGOVERNMENTAL RELATIONS, The subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 1:40 p.m., in room 3302, New Senate Office Building, Senator Edmund S. Muskie (chairman) presiding. Present: Senator Muskie. Also present: Edwin W. Webber, staff director; Irish McRae, minority counsel; and Lucinda T. Dennis, administrative secretary. Senator MUSKIE. The hearing will be in order. I have a brief opening statement to set the context of this hearing. OPENING STATEMENT OF THE CHAIRMAN Events of last week, affecting millions of Americans, gave notice that we face a crisis that could stop America in its tracks, unless it is met by positive Government action. Electricity is our lifeblood, yet a complete blackout of the New York area appears to have been narrowly averted because Con Edison was able to reduce its voltage, convince its customers to sharply reduce their consumption, and receive emergency transfusions from outside sources and because the temperature went down. There appears to be little doubt why this near disaster occurred. One plant is down for repair and maintenance, another is down because of a mechanical mishap. New plants which were supposed to be on line during this period of peak summer use are not yet in the system. Adequate reserve margins vanished. There were not enough new plants to take up the slack. These factors combined with summer heat and humidity to place an intolerable strain on the system. In my years in Government, I have become accustomed to the recitation of the electric power industry that the industry doubles its size every year to meet demands that double each year. But now the Nation's largest electric utility has warned the public that it should prepare for power rationing and possible blackouts. Living better electrically is fine if you are not caught with your kilowatts down. Today's hearings are not intended to single out one company, nor to label an entire industry, as having avoided its public responsibilities. (589) |