By Brad Plumer
It’s something we hear from policymakers again and again: The world squanders too much energy. And wringing out that waste should be one of the easiest ways for the United States and other countries to save money and curb pollution.
But as it turns out, much of what we know about the topic of energy-efficiency is still fairly hazy…
…The fact that we still don’t have great answers to those questions is what inspired a group of economists at MIT and the University of California, Berkeley to launch a big new project, called E2e, that will try to apply more scientific rigor to the whole topic of energy efficiency.
“Almost all of the previous work on energy efficiency comes from engineering studies, which look at what’s possible under ideal conditions,” says Michael Greenstone, an economist at MIT and co-director of the E2e project. “We wanted to ask a slightly different question — what are the actual returns you could expect in the real world?”…
Continue Reading at Washington Post…