The idea of an energy policy began on October 20, 1973 when OPEC’s embargo on oil exports to the United States pushed oil prices up 400 percent overnight, sending geopolitical shock waves around the world. But in the four decades since then, government energy policies have been costly and ineffective. Part of the reason is that energy itself is something that, as Nobel physicist Richard Feynman said, ?no one really understands.”

This Broadside explains why energy policy is so often misguided. Our society’s energy appetite is too broad, deep, and complex to yield to the manipulations of a central government. Energy economies?including agriculture, buildings, telecommunications, homes, defense, and industry?are radically different from each other. Furthermore, energy policy requires predicting our technological future: how and why we will use energy in a quickly-evolving world, and where and how we will extract it from nature’s infinite supply.

The reality is that energy policies are rarely about energy in the first place. Despite prognostications to the contrary, we can take comfort in the fact that we will never run out of energy. At the same time, it is unlikely we’ll ever stop promulgating bad ?energy” policies.