692 HISTORY OF THE COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY 



No difficulty was had when the House and Senate conferees worked 

 out the minor differences in the Senate and House-passed bills. Mosher 

 suggested in a House floor speech that "the few adjustments that have 

 been made are more cosmetic than substantive." 



All three pieces of legislation which the subcommittee produced — 

 solar heating and cooling; solar energy research, development and 

 demonstration; and geothermal energy research, development and 

 demonstration were put together while President Nixon was in office, 

 and were eventually signed by President Ford in September and Octo- 

 ber 1974. 



INFLUENCE OF SUBCOMMITTEE ON ENERGY 



In addition to its many other activities already mentioned, the 

 Subcommittee on Energy took the initiative in a number of other 

 areas. On November 20, 1973, a one-day hearing was staged in Los 

 Angeles on "Research and Development and the Energy Crisis." The 

 subcommittee held three days of hearings in May 1974 to probe the 

 status and future of the development and utilization of oil shale re- 

 sources; a report was also published on "Energy from Oil Shale: Tech- 

 nical, Environmental, Economic, Legislative and Policy Aspects of 

 an Undeveloped Energy Source." In 1974, the subcommittee published 

 a report prepared by the Science Policy Research Division on "Energy 

 from United States and Canadian Tar Sands." 



In May 1974 the subcommittee held a one-day hearing to review 

 the status of research in the utilization of wind energy. Later in the 

 same month, the subcommittee broadened its review of solar energy 

 technologies in a one-day hearing on the use of ocean thermal gradients 

 to produce power or useful byproducts — a particular interest of Frey. 

 A one-day hearing in June dealt with bioconversion, and two days 

 in the same month were concentrated on solar photovoltaic energy — 

 the direct conversion of sunlight to electrical energy. Among other 

 studies published by the subcommittee, many with the assistance of the 

 Science Policy Research Division, were "Conservation and Efficient 

 Use of Energy," "Secondary and Tertiary Recovery of Oil," "Federal 

 Energy Legislation," and a voluminous 2,680-page compendium en- 

 titled "Inventory of Energy R. & D.," which was prepared for the 

 Subcommittee on Energy by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory of 

 the Atomic Energy Commission with the support of the National 

 Science Foundation. This publication was an update of the March 1972 

 inventory published by the subcommittee, and McCormack charac- 

 terized it in this way: 



It is probably the most useful document available for answering the question of 

 " What arc we doing now in energy R. & D.?" 



