848 HISTORY OF THE COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY 



He held endless hearings on these provisions to hear the environmental, com- 

 munitv and budgetary problems with these provisions. He supported the numerous 

 protections we added. * * He has acted with the utmost of good faith and with 

 infinite patience. The House is weary ol dispute on this issue, and it would be a 

 substantial imposition, having had these many protections adopted, to put our 

 colleagues through this fight again. 



In a further colloquy with Teague, Ottinger sent up a flag of truce 

 which was gracefully accepted. 



The old fight over loan guarantees was overshadowed by the more 

 serious battle over the Clinch River Breeder Reactor (see next chapter.) 

 The legislation including the loan guarantee authority was signed by 

 the President in February 1978. On April 3, 1979, the General Ac- 

 counting Office confirmed the fact, in a letter to Senator Henry M. 

 Jackson (Democrat of Washington), that up to that time the loan 

 guarantee authority had not been used for synthetic fuels. In addition, 

 the optimism for the use of loan guarantees to enable municipalities 

 to launch biomass demonstration programs was not borne out, as 

 they were not used for this purpose either. On a very limited scale, 

 the loan guarantees were used in connection with solar and geothermal 

 projects. In 1979, there was a revival of interest in synthetic fuels in 

 connection with the Defense Production Act, as well as sweeping 

 proposals by the President in a nationwide address on July 15, 1979. 

 Once again, "synfuels fever" swept the Congress. 



OVERSIGHT BY FLOWERS SUBCOMMITTEE 



In addition to its extensive work on the Department of Energy 

 authorizations during 1977 and 1978, the Flowers subcommittee con- 

 ducted a number of successful oversight hearings. The first of these, 

 convened on July 12, 1977, covered the market oriented program plan- 

 ning study being completed by ERDA. The study had been started in 

 January by a 70-member task force, which helped provide an informa- 

 tion base for both the Congress and the administration to assess proper 

 levels of energy research funding. The information and projections 

 presented to the subcommittee concluded that whereas deregulation 

 could significantly increase natural gas supplies, oil deregulation 

 would not have much effect on the amount of primary oil recovery 

 because of the relatively small amounts of undiscovered domestic oil. 



In November 1977, Mrs. Lloyd presided over hearings entitled 

 "New Technologies for Old Fuels." The subcommittee examined the 

 success the Germans had on a small scale in World War II in fueling 

 their war machine with coal-derived fuels. The subcommittee also 

 received testimony on the use of peat and wood as fuels. 



During November 1977 and May 1978, the Flowers subcommittee 

 held oversight hearings on the role of the national laboratories in 



