Toward a Continuing Assessment: Developing the Capacities for National Monitoring, Evaluation, and Informing Decisions about Energy Supply and Use Issues

Energy supply and use is a sector distinctively characterized by collaboration in knowledge development and use, despite widespread impressions that different agendas interfere with expert communication. Unlike, say, the United Kingdom, where government officials rarely interact with private sector leaders as peers, in the United States experts from the Department of Energy, EPA, NOAA, and the Department of the Interior can come together in conferences and symposia with experts from the oil and gas and electric utility industries and with experts from non-governmental institutions and academia and exchange knowledge and views remarkably freely.