It is highly encouraging to see this journal devote the major part of an issue' to the question of energy self-sufficiency. There are, however, a number of disturbing tendencies which seem to be shared by several articles in the issue tendencies which are representative of problems within the Canadian debate over energy policy. First, the high degree of preoccupation with self-sufficiency in oil is distressing. Oil (or, more accurately, portable liquid fuels) represents the area of current 'crisis,' to be sure. A more integrated, coherent approach to energy policy involves asking 'how to meet heterogeneous end-use needs with a minimum of energy (and other resources) supplied in the most effective way for each task' (Lovins, 1979:179) rather than concentrating on primary supply and treating demand as a given. Only D.B. Brooks and R.C. Paehlke make an explicit case for such an approach, which has the twin advantages of (a) superior economic efficiency, and (b) avoidance of an approach to energy policy which amounts to crisis management with repect to successive non-renewable resources. Current natural gas policy is an instance of this crisis-management perspective. A shortterm 'surplus' has led to export commitments which show little awareness of the non-renewable nature of the resource, and which appear to ignore both the lack of knowledge about long-term replacement costs (both economic and non-economic) and the potential role of the resource in Canada's longer-term energy future. Yet we are told there is no alternative to such an export-oriented policy. There clearly is an alternative, but it involves a fairly fundamental change in Canada's approach to energy policy. The recent approvals for the prebuilt southern section of the Alaska Highway natural gas pipeline make this issue an especially critical one, and it would have been nice to see more discussion of it in the context of policies for energy self-sufficiency.