The text below is from Energy: Friend or Enemy? by William D. Nordhaus in the New York Review of Books. In his review of The End of Energy: The Unmaking of America’s Environment, Security, and Independence by Michael J. Graetz Nordhaus says that though energy is commonly seen as our friend it has become a foe.

What has converted energy into a foe is its unintended side effects, or what are known in the environmental literature as “externalities.”An externality is an activity that imposes uncompensated costs on other people. Externalities from energy use include the deadly air pollution emitted by cars and power plants, oil spills, radioactive emissions from nuclear power plants, sludge from coal mines, and congestion from overloaded streets and highways. More recently, scientists have focused on greenhouse gas emissions, such as the carbon dioxide that comes from burning fossil fuels, as a particularly dangerous externality.

Although our government has enacted thousands of pages of energy legislation since the 1970s, it has never demanded that Americans pay a price that reflects the full costs of the energy they consume. Nothing that we did or might have done has had as much potential to be as efficacious as paying the true price.