Over the past several years, the issues of energy demand and energy use have increasingly become the concerns of the research community. A significant number of scientists and technologists, as well as specialists in the economic and social disciplines, have responded to the critical need to resolve these issues, which are only now seriously activating decision makers in government and in the private sector and engaging the attention of consumers. In fact, the study of energy problems is rapidly gaining the status of a formally recognized subject area, supported by a sizable body of published research. This book makes a solid contribution to the foundation of this new subject area.
The book is based on a conference held at MIT in February 1973. It includes in their entirety three important invited papers—“Ways of Looking at Future Economic Growth, Resource and Energy Use,” by Tjalling C. Koopmans; “Theory and Practice of Effluent Control,” by Robert Dorfman; and “The Fuel Shortage and Thermodynamics—The Entropy Crisis,” by Joseph H. Keenan, Elias P. Gyftopoulos, and George N. Hatsopoulos, and George N. Hatsopoulos—and a number of contributed papers that were presented at the conference by authorities from across the country and from abroad.
The editor has organized the papers into a number of groups that represent major study areas and topics of general concern: economic growth and energy resources, the modeling of the energy system, input-output methodologies applied to energy studies, institutional problems, problems of gas regulation, energy supply, studies of electrical demand, transportation of energy, energy in transportation, and energy conservation.
The conference was organized by MIT's Energy Laboratory under a grant from the RANN program of the National Science Foundation.
