The National Energy Plan is based on 10 fundamental principles.
1. We can have an effective and comprehensive energy policy only if the Government takes responsibility for it and if the people understand the seriousness of the challenge and are willing to make sacrifices.
2. Healthy economic growth must continue. Only by saving energy can we maintain our standard of living and keep our people working.
3. We must protect the environment. Our energy problems have the same cause as our environmental problems--wasteful use of resources. Conservation helps us solve both at once.
4. We must reduce our vulnerability to potentially devastating embargoes. We can protect ourselves from uncertain supplies by reducing our demand for oil, making the most of our abundant resources such as coal, and developing a strategic petroleum reserve.
5. We must be fair. Our solutions must ask equal sacrifices from every region, every class of people, every interest group. Industry will have to do its part to conserve, just as consumers will. The energy producers deserve fair treatment, but we will not let the energy companies profiteer.
6. The cornerstone of our policy is to reduce demand through conservation. Our emphasis on conservation is a clear difference between this plan and others which merely encouraged crash production efforts. Conservation is the quickest, cheapest, most practical source of energy.
7. Prices should generally reflect the true replacement cost of energy. We are only cheating ourselves if we make energy artificially cheap and use more than we can really afford.
8. Government policies must be predictable and certain. Both consumers and producers need policies they can depend on so they can plan ahead.
9. We must conserve the fuels that are scarcest and make the most of those that are more plentiful. We cannot continue to use oil and gas for 75 percent of our consumption when they make up only 8 percent of our domestic reserves. We need to shift to plentiful coal while taking care to protect the environment, and to apply stricter safety standards to nuclear energy.
10. We must start now to develop the new, unconventional sources of energy we will rely on in the next century.
Hope this helps : )
