Energy Follies

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.

Author Biography

Robert R. Nordhaus was the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s (FERC) first General Counsel, and later served as General Counsel for the Department of Energy during the Clinton Administration. From 1963 to 1974, he was Assistant Counsel in the Legislative Counsel’s Office of the US House of Representatives, where he assisted in drafting many of the nation’s prominent legislative programs, including the 1970 Clean Air Act. He was also an adjunct faculty member at George Washington Law School and Georgetown University Law Center. Sam Kalen is the Centennial Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Wyoming College of Law, as well as the founder and co-director of the Center for Law and Energy Resources in the Rockies, at the University of Wyoming. He is the author of numerous law review articles, and co-author of Basic Practice Series: ESA (Endangered Species Act) (2012) and Natural Resources Law and Policy (2016).