Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
energy policy proposals were based. Other sources include an “unfinished business” text written
by the Ford Foundation at the end of the Carter administration (1979) and several other texts writ-
ten by academics (Rosenbaum 1987; Kash and Rycroft 1984; Zinberg 1983; Daneke and Lagassa
1980), proponents of economic development (Schurr et al. 1979; Stobaugh and Yergin 1979), and
proponents of environmental protection (Commoner 1979; Lovins 1979). The world has changed
since then and these topics are all seriously out of date today. Energy prices, technologies, U.S.
international relations, environmental knowledge, and government policies have changed in the
interim.
As oil prices declined, only a few texts on energy policy were published in the 1990s and since
2000. Most of these are also dated (Davis 1993; Lee 1990; Munasinghe 1990). Some are highly tech-
nical and suitable only for a graduate audience in econometrics or computer modeling (Munasinghe
and Meier 1993). Some focus on economic analysis of various fuels without significant treatment
of environmental or national security issues (Banks 2007; Geller 2003), thereby limiting their
utility for policy decision making. Others provide detailed information about energy technologies
but lack an explicit conceptual framework for analyzing energy policy choices (Nersesian 2010).
The need for an operational analytical framework is evident in publication by the Congressional
Research Service of Energy Policy: Conceptual Framework and Continuing Issues (Bamberger
2006). However, at fifteen pages, there are more conclusions than analysis there.
Although Davis (1993) purports to advance a conceptual framework for analysis of energy
policy choices based on three sets of independent variables—physical characteristics of the fuel,
market forces, and a vague notion of “the general political environment”—the analytical frame-
work is weak. It relies in part on a fuzzy description of history (“era in which a particular form
of energy first emerges”) as shaping “the general political environment” without explaining how
one might operationalize this variable for analytical purposes. Plus times have changed: policies
governing hydropower and coal are no longer dominated by the progressive and labor politics
of the eras in which they were first widely utilized. The Davis text devotes full chapters to coal,
oil, natural gas, electricity, and nuclear energy, but deals with all renewables, conservation, and
synthetic fuels in a single chapter. The text is quite out of date and does not lend itself readily to
analyzing energy alternatives or making national policy decisions today.
A recent text providing a more inclusive approach to both conventional and alternative energy
technologies (Cipiti 2007) examines a number of transportation and power generation technologies
“from different perspectives ” (emphasis added), including their environmental impact, economics,
size of domestic resource base, public acceptance, and reliability. However, presentation of these
“perspectives” is more intuitive than conceptually well-explicated, and surveying more than a
dozen energy fuel technologies in terms of each of five “perspectives” in 180 pages produced a
text that is more descriptive than analytical, and not well-developed for decision making among
energy policy choices.
For example, although utilization of domestic energy resources in preference to foreign sources
may in some cases be reasonable, by relying on the size of domestic resource base as a decision-
making variable without much explanation, Cipiti introduces a rather isolationist (or even jingoistic)
emotional flavor into policy making toward U.S. allies like Canada, who may have significant
resources (e.g., tar sands) that can produce oil for use in the United States at reasonable prices,
with arguably acceptable environmental and national security costs. Cipiti's use of a “public ac-
ceptance” variable unsupported by substantial empirical evidence is also somewhat problematical.
Evaluation of several energy fuels (e.g., wind, nuclear) in terms of their reliability of supply while
failing to evaluate the related electric utility delivery system in terms of its questionable reliability
is a serious shortcoming. And Cipiti's failure to evaluate the trade-offs between reliability and price
 
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