times have I heard that, and yet to date, we have not succeeded in 

 turning that kind of rhetoric into any kind of a dollar and cents 

 commitment. 



Let me talk for a minute just about the federal commitment as long as 

 I have criticized this state. Our federal commitment, and this may be 

 revised upward in the last few months, but my recent figures are that the 

 federal commitment is to the tune of $200 million a year or about $800 a 

 house for low-income families. That's what our energy conservation 

 commitment is. If that is the only commitment that we take, it's going to 

 take another 80 years to weatherize only the low-income housing stock in 

 the United States, not to mention all the other residences. Eight years is 

 how long it will take to weatherize low-income stock, and about 60 percent 

 of the low-income people in this country live in shells. They don't have 

 anything. No storm windows, doors, insulation, nothing. Unfortunately, 

 at that particular rate, with those particular regulations, it's not going to 

 even have a very good result. it's a sloppy result because it takes a 

 little bit more than $800 a house. It should be flexible and go up to 

 $2,000 a house, and at that point you can save approximately 50 percent 

 of the energy that that home consumes, which is about what we're 

 securing today. So I keep asking myself, why don't we hear about a 

 multi-billion dollar conservation program in this country? Have you heard 

 anything like that? I haven't. And why don't we see a proposal for an 

 Energy Mobilization Board that's going to remove all the local and state 

 obstacles for conservation? Why isn't that the kind of mobilization board 

 we have. 



The organization I work for, the National Center for Appropriate 

 Technology in Butte, recently published a poor people's energy plan. And 

 in that plan we proposed to spend $24 billion as a five-year investment to 

 weatherize low-income homes in the country and on completion (that is in 

 1985 if we had the luck of starting now) we would save the equivalent of 

 almost one-half million barrels of oil a day. Now to put that in 

 perspective, we import almost 10 million a day and we'd save about half 

 that if we actually succeeded in the program. Interestingly, the cost of 

 each barrel that we would save off a poor person's home would cost only 

 about one-third of that, which would foot the bill for for a synfuel plant. 

 One-third of the cost and it all stays right in the community. Is that 

 asking too much of the federal government? Twenty-four billion dollars is 

 a lot. You know it's a statistic that I don't quite grasp myself. 

 Twenty-four billion dollars over a five-year period. 



But let's put that in perspective. This past year, after Congress 

 passed decontrol of oil, then a little belatedly they decided to institute a 

 windfall profits tax. It should have been before, but that's how we did 

 it. The House of Representatives made a request for a $277 billion tax, a 

 windfall profits tax, but the United States Senate was $100 billion below 

 that and they went for $177 billion. This is really interesting. Here are 

 these reasonable, intelligent people up there debating this particular issue 

 and the conclusion they arrive upon is $100 billion different in one house 

 than the other. So they did what two-house leglislatures usually do--they 

 found a compromise and they split it half-and-half. They brought it $50 

 billon down from one and $50 billion up from the other. Now some people 



