![]() ![]() Planners extrapolated historic growth in energy demand and built supply to meet it. ![]() Previously, the problem was where to get more energy - more, of any kind, from any source, at any price. The article was so influential because rather than just proposing yet another portfolio of energy investments, it redefined their purpose and logic. By the current decade, two leading journals of the electricity industry generously recognized our approach’s prescience, and the article’s thesis broadly has prevailed in the energy marketplace. Over the next decade, the article’s thesis gained enough credence that many of its harshest critics hired RMI, founded in 1982, to help them adopt it. When the hubbub died down, ARCO’s chief economist, David Sternlight, nicely captured the conclusion of sober observers: He for one didn’t care if I were only half right - that would be better performance than he’d seen from the rest of them. Nowadays it makes amusing reading, reminding us that 40 years ago energy efficiency was novel and controversial, while renewable energy was strange, threatening or absurd. A four-inch-thick Senate hearing record compiled three dozen pairs of critiques and responses. Incumbent energy industries greeted the article with skepticism, scorn, even outrage. He now says he found it very helpful in forming his energy policy - apart from Energy Secretary Schlesinger’s synfuels effort, the most coherently pro-efficiency-and-renewables policy before or since. To this 28-year-old author, it felt like dropping a seed crystal into a supersaturated solution, suddenly crystallizing the liquid into a whole new form.Ī year later, President Jimmy Carter invited me into the Oval Office to discuss the article. Forty years later, a review of its initial reception and continued influence shows what lessons have and haven’t been learned. The article soon became that venerable journal’s most reprinted, spreading as virally as pre-internet technologies permitted. The "hard path" was more of the same the "soft path" combined energy efficiency with a shift to renewable supply. Policy imagination was stuck.Īt that teachable moment, my Foreign Affairs article "Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?" reframed the energy problem and added an alternative vision of U.S. Yet by autumn 1976, no coherent alternative vision had been articulated. The huge capital requirement would choke off other needed investments and ultimately make energy prices soar, so faltering demand couldn’t pay for the costly new supplies. ![]() Intensifying business as usual - drilling oil and gas wells, building giant coal and nuclear plants, perhaps developing coal-to-liquids synfuels - vigorously was proposed, but soon began looking too costly, dirty, slow and difficult. When the 1973 oil shock threatened security and prosperity, America’s initial policy responses were confused and ineffectual. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |