Abstract

Michael J. Graetz's The End of Energy is a welldocumented lamentation over the forty-year failure of the U.S. political system to develop effective energy policies. Graetz, a professor of law at Columbia University, documents the key energy initiatives of successive administrations that have steadily increased our dependence on Middle Eastern oil for transportation and environmentally dangerous supplies of domestic coal for electricity. He starts with Richard Nixon's "new economic policy" in August 1971, a sharp policy turn that included wage and price controls and ended the dollar's convertibility to gold, and he carries the story through to the congressional gridlock over cap-and-trade legislation in 2010 that would have capped the total amount of greenhouse gases to be produced and required polluters to acquire permits for their emissions.

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