A Waste of Energy

Here is an interesting idea from Michael E. Webber and Sheril R. Kirshenbaum, both of the Center for International Energy and Environmental Policy. They advocate creating a cross-disciplinary curriculum on energy in universities through the creation of energy departments on college campuses.
The problem, they say in a piece on the Chronicle of Higher Education Web site, is that there are a lot of people positing on energy who don’t understand all the facets of it. Energy involves engineering, politics, social trends, and several other disciplines. Often people in decision making roles are familiar with one of these areas but almost totally ignorant of the others, hence the need for energy as a discipline. (I ran into this myself last year on a trip to an energy research facility with a group of other journalists. It soon became evident that one of the other journalists in the group — a widely read energy policy analyst — had no concept of what ac current was. Yet this was a guy who many in the energy industry read religiously.)
Basically, the two researchers claim that current situation is just too specialized to do students much good. “Undergraduates are being ushered through an outdated and compartmentalized system in which the education has not kept up with scientific advances. Energy is poorly defined at institutions of higher education, appearing to be an ambiguous professional pursuit or a subset of umbrella departments such as petroleum engineering or geosciences, which tackle only a single slice of the energy pie,” they say.
They say there is progress in this area through certificate programs some universities now offer in energy, but there is still a ways to go.
The whole post can be found here:
http://chronicle.com/article/Its-Time-to-Shine-the/130408/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en