"In a December 10, 1974, letter, the Chairman, Subcommittee on Investigations and Review, House Committee on Public Works and Transportation, asked us to review the status and reasonablieness of permits issued by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the States under the National Pullutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) established by the Federal Pollution Control Act Amendments of 1972 (33 U.S.C. 1251)... Our review of the NPDES permit program was conducted at EPA headquarters and in regions III and V. We reviewed 120 municipal permits and 50 industrial permits issued to dischargers in four States -- Delaware, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Wisconsin. We interviewed officials at EPA headquarters in Washington, D.C.; EPA regional offices in Chicago (region V) and Philadelphia (region III); and State water pollution control agencies or departments in Dover, Delaware; Springfield, Illinois; Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; and Madison, Wisconsin. We also contacted and obtained information from 29 municipalities of their consulting engineers and 17 industrial dischargers and examined pertinent Federal and State agencies' documents, records, and other literature."--p.1, 3.

Every decision about energy involves its price and cost. The price of gasoline and the cost of buying from foreign producers; the price of nuclear and hydroelectricity and the costs to our ecosystems; the price of electricity from coal-fired plants and the cost to the atmosphere. Giving life to inventions, lifestyle changes, geopolitical shifts, and things in-between, energy economics is of high interest to Academia, Corporations and Governments. For economists, energy economics is one of three subdisciplines which, taken together, compose an economic approach to the exploitation and preservation of natural resources: energy economics, which focuses on energy-related subjects such as renewable energy, hydropower, nuclear power, and the political economy of energy resource economics, which covers subjects in land and water use, such as mining, fisheries, agriculture, and forests environmental economics, which takes a broader view of natural resources through economic concepts such as risk, valuation, regulation, and distribution Although the three are closely related, they are not often presented as an integrated whole. This Encyclopedia has done just that by unifying these fields into a high-quality and unique overview. The only reference work that codifies the relationships among the three subdisciplines: energy economics, resource economics and environmental economics. Understanding these relationships just became simpler! Nobel Prize Winning Editor-in-Chief (joint recipient 2007 Peace Prize), Jason Shogren, has demonstrated excellent team work again, by coordinating and steering his Editorial Board to produce a cohesive work that guides the user seamlessly through the diverse topics This work contains in equal parts information from and about business, academic, and government perspectives and is intended to serve as a tool for unifying and systematizing research and analysis in business, universities, and government