KU News Release

KU professor brings lessons from European energy policies back to United States

LAWRENCE — If, as the cliché says, a reporter’s knowledge is a mile wide and an inch deep, then Martin Rosenberg is digging farther into the ground.

Rosenberg, a lecturer in the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Kansas, is deepening his knowledge of alternative energy sources and why the United States could take notes from European nations.

“Europe, right now, is several years ahead, maybe more, of the United States in its use of renewable technology for energy,” he said.

Rosenberg, also editor-in-chief of EnergyBiz magazine, is one of three recipients of a German Marshall Fund Domestic Policy Research Grant. The award allows him to spend three to four weeks in Europe researching why those nations are ahead of the United States in harnessing alternative energy.

“If you take a train across Europe these days, you’ll find a concentration of wind power turbines all over the landscape,” Rosenberg said. The British, for example, are exploring putting a system of dams and turbines into the ocean to generate power from the waves.

Those countries are preparing to roll out and put to use their new technologies, but the United States is still in the research stage at best.

What’s more, he said, the United States’ energy problems don’t stop with gas prices and foreign oil dependence.

“What most people are not aware of is we’re facing a power shortage that might be equally profound with not enough electricity to keep our society going,” Rosenberg said.

Facing that power shortage, he said, many states are left to pursue their own policies.

He notes that California, for example, is planning to make existing energy plants more efficient instead of building new ones.

But in Texas, the main utility company is planning to build 11 coal-burning plants at a cost of approximately $10 billion.

“To a certain extent it’s a failure of national policy that we don’t have a national solution,” Rosenberg said. “So every state is out there trying to figure out what it needs to do.”

If the United States can invest in making the whole energy system more efficient instead of investing in newer coal-fired plants, the country can address serious economic and environmental concerns.

Through his magazine and other avenues, Rosenberg will tell lawmakers and the energy industry what he learned about Europe’s efforts.

He plans to travel in November.

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