International Energy Policy: The Conflict of Investment Needs and Market Signals

Twenty-one years ago, Resources for the Future (RFF), then about ten years old, released a heavy tome of a little over a thousand pages, half text and half statistical appendix, called Resources in America's Future. Together with my two coauthors, Leonard L. Fischman and Joseph L. Fisher, RFF's president at the time, I had put considerable effort into the project. So had fifteen staff members and consultants and eight research assistants. To the best of my knowledge, none of them ever revisited the scene after 1963, and if they did, they didn't tell the world. We hold no reunions, observe no anniversaries. Still I have never quite freed myself of a degree of curiosity, best phrased as "how did we come out?" My own copy of the book bears the scars of that curiosity. It is full of penciled-in figures, put there in different years, without much orderliness. Once in a while, a current event would cause me to do some quick figuring, some comparison shopping. But it has all been quite unsystematic.