nomic costs, to the rise and fall of “energy boomtowns” and the devastation of strip mining, to the risks of a nuclear accident and the dangers of environmental contamination. As Sociologist David Sills (8) asserted: Energy is only in a trivial sense a problem for physical scientists and engineers. It would be relatively easy in a technical sense to produce all the energy the world needs. . . . The problem is not to produce energy but to pay for it and to make it widely accessible and to avoid its negative impacts. In short, energy is in large part a problem of social organization, and thus a problem for the social sciences. Virtually every recent effort to increase the domestic supply of energy has proven to be disruptive to the political and social fabric of the nation. Whether it involves constructing an Alaska pipeline, drilling on the continental shelf, opening vast areas of Wyoming, Montana, and North Dakota for strip mining, accelerating the development of processes for converting coal or shale into synthetic fuels, or building more nuclear power plants, the trade-off between energy production and environmental protection entails a conflict among social groups. It invariably pits region against region, central authority against local autonomy, industrial forces against household communities, and it brings increases in standards of living for some while causing economic hardship for others (9, 10, 11). Under these circumstances, the United States is unlikely to return to high rates of energy growth during the 1980s unless there develops a strong consensus favoring an acceleration in both nuclear power and coal development. That would necessitate, as Harman and Carlson (12) have shown, a significant retreat on environmental protection, along with a widespread restoration of public faith in business, government and science, and the passage of sweeping new legislation that would prevent a determined minority from obstructing the “wheels of progress”: Continued high economic and energy growth is neither automatically desirable or feasible. No invisible hand will move us toward high growth. A deliberate social decision is necessary to enact all the new laws we will need to achieve high growth. This fact alone makes low growth both more appealing and more likely (12, p. 102). Energy and economic decisions are subject to political pressures by vested interests and powerful lobbies, but they are also undoubtedly influenced by the social attitudes and values, anxieties and aspirations, beliefs and hopes that develop among the American people as a whole. The changes in public perceptions that have occurred in the economy, energy and environment areas during the decade of the 1970s suggest that we are not likely to see in any consensus that might emerge in the 1980s the combination of attitudes and beliefs that would support costly efforts to develop vast new supplies of energy, whatever their source might be. THE EVOLUTION OF PUBLIC OPINION From the days just after World War II until the early 1970s, continual economic growth, based on the expanding consumption of cheap energy, was a largely unquestioned aspect of the American experience. If the economy faltered, it was thought to be a temporary setback on a path of unending expansion. If energy (or any other resource) threatened to run short, the solution was to be confidently sought in
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