March 27, 1981

The Department of Energy has drafted legislation to eliminate or cut back severely nearly all its programs to encourage energy conservation and to develop renewable fuel sources and other alternatives to oil. The Reagan Administration has already begun to chop back these programs through the budgetary process. The proposed law would dismantle most of them and greatly reduce funding levels for the rest.

A Superior Court judge ruled today that the faculty adviser of a high school newspaper must reveal the name of a student who interviewed a drug dealer if the local prosecutor could not obtain the dealer's name in a ''less intrusive'' way. The judge, Philip A. Gruccio, dismissed arguments that the paper - and by extension the adviser and reporter -was covered by First Amendment free-press guarantees as well as by New Jersey's ''shield'' law, which protects news organizations from compulsion to name confidential sources. The judge said that if the Cumberland County Prosecutor could not get the name of the dealer by next Thursday he would order the adviser to name the reporter for a grand jury that day. The judge refused to say whether he would order the adviser to be jailed if he refused to testify.

A conference exploring the contributions of women in music since medieval times is taking place through Sunday at New York University, 35 West Fourth Street. Scheduled during the National Congress on Women in Music are a dozen concerts, panel discussions, workshops and the presentation of more than 80 papers on a vast array of topics. Medieval chants by women, songs of women troubadours, the works of Clara Schumann, jazz, gospel, ragtime and music by American Indian women and living women composers are among the concerns of the congress. Scholars, performers, composers and educators of both sexes, from the United States, Canada and abroad, are taking part. Some performances are at the Washington Square Methodist Church and the Park Avenue Synagogue. Admission is $15 for a day's events. For a concert only, the charge is $5 ($2.50 for the elderly); $2.50 for each nonconcert event. Information: 598-3492 or 598-3493.

''Britain needs a reformed and liberated political system without the pointless conflict, the dogma, the violent lurches of policy and the class antagonisms that the two old parties have fostered.'' - statement issued yesterday by the newly founded Social Democratic Party in Britain. (A1:3.)

Soon after giving birth to her latest offspring, Mrs. Long Ears scuttles off with a muskrat, leaving poor Daddy Long Ears to care for 31 bunnies. Elsewhere, Frannie is so painfully shy that she's worried she'll go through high school without being kissed. Then her girlfriends cook up The Popularity Plan, and she practically has to fight off the boys - except, alas, for Ronnie. So go some of the plots in the latest crop of children's books being brought out by American publishers. Despite all the hoopla and enormous advances heaped upon blockbusters for adults, books about cuddly bears and adolescents' tribulations regularly bring in pleasing sums of money.