SWEAT suits instead of flannel pajamas, river canoe trips instead of a vacation in Disneyland — these are some of the changes in lifestyle “every thinking person” should make, according to Shirley Marshall, chairman of Chapel Hill’s new energy conservation task force.

“People,” she explains, “are just going to have to become more practical.”

Public response to the creation of the task force has been disappointing, Ms. Marshall says. So far only one phone call has been received. The group is made up of representatives of the university, the business community, and local government.

“If people in Chapel Hill cared enough,” Ms. Marshall says, “we could get a bus, go to Washington, make ourselves heard. But everyone seems so completely turned off.”

She continues:

“When you have a government which would rather limit gas by raising the price so few can affort it, rather than ration it, you have a government working in an unfair manner.”


AT A RECENT meeting of the emergency task force, Scroggs, a physics professor at UNC, said that although he had systematically turned off the lights in his house whenever he left a room and, after careful measurement, estimated that he had halved his electronic consumption over three months, his electric bill was virtually unchanged.

 

HE explainged that the rate structure is set up so that those who use more electricity pay less.