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Title: Energy strategy: Roadmap to consensus

Technical Report ·
DOI:https://doi.org/10.2172/5852586· OSTI ID:5852586

The United States lacks a comprehensive approach to policy-making in the energy realm. Today, as in the past, individual constituency groups tend to focus on their particular aspect of the energy challenge. Many employ a decide-announce-defend'' approach to policy-making, setting out to secure a unilateral advantage for themselves. By so doing, they inevitably pit interest against interest. The result is a polarization of constituencies, and shortsighted policies designed to address the issue of the moment. The American Energy Assurance Council (AEAC) is a non-profit organization founded in 1987 for the sole purpose of facilitating progress toward a fair efficient wise, stable, and consensus-based national energy strategy. AEAC does not have a substantive policy agencies. Rather, we are committed to supporting a process whereby the many stakeholders and policy makers concerned with energy-related issues can come together in productive discourse, thereby overcoming ignorance of each other's positions. The Council seeks to act as a facilitative body, providing a safe'' context for inventive and creative thinking. We attempt to build a store of common knowledge, and to build on that store according to mutually agreed-upon groundrules, and employing sophisticated approaches to facilitation and mediation. This report, the National Energy Consensus Experiment (NECE), was an ambitious experiment in consensus-building. We learned a great deal from it, both in terms of substance and process, and we are convinced that it holds important lessons for others who may seek to build consensus in the public policy realm.

Research Organization:
American Energy Assurance Council, Denver, CO (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE; USDOE, Washington, DC (United States)
DOE Contract Number:
FG01-90PE79073
OSTI ID:
5852586
Report Number(s):
DOE/PE/79073-T2; ON: DE92007910
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English