Editor-in-Chief, Encyclopedia of Energy Editor-in-Chief, Journal of Ecological Economics Board of Directors, Pardee Institute Boston University	September 2004
	"Here, at the Pardee institute at Boston University, we bring together scholars who have long term views on what the future of society, broadly defined will be. We then take a serious look into the distant future, say 100 to 150 years out and try to identify the drivers of change that we will be dealing with."

Tell me about your general trajectory to where you are now.
I have an undergraduate degree in Biology with a specialization in ecosystems ecology from Cornell University. It was there that I got interested in energy. This was in large part because I was working with a professor who had interests in looking at ecological systems from an energy perspective, which is quite common in ecology. The flow of energy materials within the environment is really the new way by which ecologists characterize and compare different ecosystems. So, we got interested in looking at applying some of the same concepts to human systems, looking at economic systems not in terms of dollars, but in terms of flows of energy materials and how humans use them to meet their economic wants and needs.

From there I went on to get a PhD in geography at the University of Illinois where I continued to develop interest in this connection between society and the environment, looking at the flows of energy between and within those systems. Geography was a natural discipline for me to end up in even though it was not by design. Geography is an interdisciplinary field, which tolerates and encourages rather eclectic backgrounds, which other disciplines, particularly in the U.S., do not foster.

So, you also work with some Government bodies?
Yes, I do consulting work for a number of government agencies, particularly the Department of Energy, where I have worked as a consultant to the Energy Information Administration (EIA). The EIA is the government body which collects and organizes energy data and puts out forecasts of future energy use and production prices. I worked with them on their oil and gas supply model, which tries to forecast future oil and gas discoveries as a function of a variety of economic parameters. I have also done some work for the Ecosystem Research Program within the Environmental Protection Agency, helping them to formulate various research programs. They're trying to broaden the types of approaches that the EPA uses to encourage collaboration between natural and social scientists.

How interested is the financial community is in your work?
I have done a little bit of work with the private sector; I wouldn't say a whole lot. Actually, the most recent venture is working with a consulting firm which handles financial risk assessment U.S. energy companies investing in emerging economies in Central Asia, Southeast Asia and Latin America. They're trying to build an energy risk program into their assessments of investment risk for U.S. companies.

Any awards or publications that you are proud of?
I've won publication awards from the International Association for Energy Economics, for example. Of course, there is the Encyclopedia of Energy, but we'll talk about that later on. I am also Editor-in-Chief of another Elsevier venture, The Journal of Ecological Economics. That is an interdisciplinary journal that tries to bring together and publish work that takes an interdisciplinary approach to looking at environmental problems.

So what is the nature of the relationship to economics, and is this journal more about energy markets?
No, it is much bigger than energy. It deals more broadly with the environment-society relationship of which energy is one connection, but deals much more with the ways in which humans use the environment and the ways in which that use affects environmental quality. It also feeds back onto society and a variety of economic and social, political and human health issues. So it is quite wide in its scope.

Do you serve any additional roles professionally? Do you teach at B.U.?
I teach an undergraduate environmental science class, and I also teach a graduate class in energy society and the environment. There is also a new institute here at Boston University called the PARDEE Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future.

That center is geared towards, again with an interdisciplinary perspective, bringing together people who have long-term views of what the future of society broadly defined will be, looking at 50 to 150 years out. They also sponsor symposia and some research that works at the longer run future of society, and I am on the board of directors of that. We recently sponsored (co-organized) a conference through that center called "Making the great transformation." Its purpose was to look at the great transformations in human society in the past; the industrial revolution, the different energy transitions that we have had, the public health transitions that occurred, the demographic transitions, etc. We looked at what the drivers of those transformations were, and then looked at potentially current and future transformations— information technology, future energy transitions, future directions in human development and poverty elimination, and so on, —and tried to see if we can't apply some insight from the past to look at what the future might be.

Who are the primary consumers of the information once you produce it?
Academics, those involved in government agencies, and others who have an interest in some aspect of human development broadly defined, whether it be the environmental dimension or the social dimension or the economic dimension.

The Encyclopedia of Energy looks like the first of its kind.
Yes, it is…the first of its kind in the sense of its vision and scope, and ultimately its execution. When I first got started thinking about doing this, I came to it with the same type of interdisciplinary and historical perspective that I bring to a lot of my other research and my teaching. The sense that energy is really a concept that cuts across every academic discipline and all segments of society. Clearly, energy is an organizing principle within physics, for example, where the identification of the fundamental properties of energy and the laws of thermodynamics are really the cornerstone of modern science.

If you go to other disciplines though, such as anthropology and sociology, people characterize and compare different societies and relationships amongst societies based on energy flows within that society, and what types of energy people use. Economists study the impact of oil prices on macroeconomics, GDP growth and the impact of energy prices on inflation and unemployment they study energy markets and so on and so forth. Engineers are engaged in trying to build a better light bulb, a better hybrid vehicle.

Given the role of energy in geopolitics, clearly scholars internationally laced in political science study the geopolitical aspects of energy. There is also a very rich tradition of studying the history of energy, whether it be the history of electricity, or of the oil industry and describing how society and our mastery over different forms of energy coevolved over time. We can learn a lot about great changes in society and events in society by studying energy flows.

When I thought about an encyclopedia of energy, I thought that it really needed to cover all of those aspects, the physical, the social, the historical and so on. And that's what really distinguishes it from any other reference works related to energy. We do have, if you look at the thematic areas that the Encyclopedia covers, the stuff that you would expect to see—what is an oil well, how much oil is left in the world, what is a nuclear power plant, etc.—but it also has entries on the taxation of energy; the history of electricity, public response to energy systems. Why, if renewable energy is so great, why don't people buy more energy efficient light bulbs? I think the whole rich social science aspect is one of the distinguishing features, which really illustrates in its design this interdisciplinary and universal concept of energy.

I think we were very lucky to have a very distinguished associate editorial board, it is really a who's who of energy people in the world from different disciplines, but also most importantly from different regions of the world. The energy issues that we face in the United States or in the Netherlands are quite different than the energy situation that people face in Indonesia or Kenya, and that is where two-thirds of the people on the planet live.

The author of the Encyclopedia’s Foreword mentions that it is not an energy shortage per se, but more of an issue with access to energy or energy services. Can you explain this?
There are a couple of billion of people that still burn animal waste and wood as a fuel. And that has, amongst other things, enormous human health impacts because of indoor air pollution. One out of twelve deaths in the world is due to the inhalation of pollutants from indoor air pollution. That is quite a staggering energy challenge quite different than a shortage of electricity that you or I might encounter, it is an access issue of a different kind.

We had editors that reflected these different types of issues, and then once we got these luminaries on the editorial board, it was much easier to get quite senior scholars to write entries. I think relative to other works in the area, to go through the list of people who actually wrote articles, it is quite impressive.

It sounds like you have a very diverse group, would you like to say anything about the political position of the Encyclopedia?
There is none. It was clear that it had to be an objective treatment of the issue. There are clearly some energy issues that are quite controversial, nuclear power, for example.

I think that you need balanced treatment of the issues, so you need to carefully select people on those topics that can provide that approach. Even though they may see the issue through a particular conceptual lens, you want people who will be able to write objectively. I think we did a pretty darn good job at that. We do have issues that you can't not write about without some polemic. You have to make sure that we have an entry on the other side that presents the other perspective.

Is this a work that is going to have great appeal for technicians and specialists, or to people like myself who are just interested in energy?
Well, it was written for the general educated lay audience, so it is hopefully a place where people can go for a first point of reference on a particular topic. The experts in the field are not going to read every entry, but clearly if you wanted a thorough overview of a particular environmental issue, then this is where you want to start.

What do you see as the Encyclopedia’s legacy in, say, 5 years?
I hope that in five years from now we'll be into doing a second edition of the hard copy and it will be a firmly ensconced and well visited part of ScienceDirect that helps form the glue for a lot of the holdings that Elsevier has in the energy field.

What in the field of energy would you say are the emerging areas, hot topics coming to the forefront?
I don't know about unknown stuff. What I can say is this - energy will continue to grow more important every year, more important in an academic sense and more important in our everyday life sense. As more resources grow scarce, which they will, and as developing nations grow and demand more and more energy, energy markets are going to be increasingly some of the dominant markets in the world.

As climate change grows in importance, which it will, this is going to also focus a spotlight on energy. And so, energy in general is going to become increasingly more important. That means that more and more people within academia are going to be focusing on energy. I would also say that coinciding with that is a general trend within academia for interdisciplinary work. If you look at the National Science Foundation and NASA for example, the types of program offerings that they have require interdisciplinary collaboration. The model of a single scientist with one graduate student off studying something by themselves, divorced from other people and disciplines is slowly going by the wayside. This is particularly true in the environment within NSF. Again, the interdisciplinary nature of teaching and research is going to continue to grow, and that is something that the Encyclopedia of Energy embraces, and really embodies to a great extent.

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Cutler Cleveland
Center for Energy and Environmental Studies
Boston University
675 Commonwealth Ave. Rm. 141
Boston, MA 02135

Phone: 617-353-3083
Fax: 617-353-5986
E-mail: cutler@bu.edu

This article by Joe Martis
j.p.martis@elsevier.com