Energy Follies
Missteps, Fiascos, and Successes of America's Energy Policy

examines principal energy policy decisions and their lingering effects, by recounting the historical context surrounding the interplay of law, markets, and technology.

Robert R. Nordhaus (Author), Sam Kalen (Author)

9781108423977, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 20 September 2018

254 pages, 6 b/w illus.
23.6 x 15.7 x 1.8 cm, 0.48 kg

'… this book is an excellent resource, especially for courses in energy policy.' T. Brennan, Choice

Conversations about energy law and policy are paramount, undergoing new scrutiny and characterizations. Energy Follies: Missteps, Fiascos, and Successes of America's Energy Policy explores how a century of energy policies, rather than solving our energy problems, often made them worse; how Congress and other federal agencies grappled with remedying seemingly myopic past decisions. Sam Kalen and Robert R. Nordhaus investigate how misguided or naïve energy policy decisions caused or contributed to past energy crises, and how it took years to unwind their effects. This work recounts the decades-long struggles to move to market supply and pricing policies for oil and natural gas in order to make competition work in the electric power industry and to tame emissions from the coal fleet left to us by the 1970s coal policies. These historic policies continue to present struggles, and this book reflects on how future challenges ought to learn from our past mistakes.

1. Introduction
2. Federal energy regulation begins flowing
3. The Supreme Court creates a gap
4. The gap continues: changing electricity markets
5. Natural gas' tortured road from regulation to decontrol
6. Oil shocks, gas lines, and energy policy
7. Carter crowns coal king: coal's war on people
8. Energy eclipsing air
9. Oil, cars and climate
10. Embedded judgments and energy resilient transitions.

Subject Areas: Energy & natural resources law [LNCR], Coal & solid fuel industries [KNBC], Environmental economics [KCN]