Jay Hakes has had a long career in government dealing with energy and environmental issues. His posts included: assistant to the U.S. Secretary of the Interior, director of the Florida Governor’s Energy Office, administrator of the U.S. Energy Information Administration, and director of policy and research for the presidential commission on the BP Oil Spill. He has testified before congressional committees on more than two dozen occasions. Between 2000 and 2013, he served as Director of The Jimmy Carter Presidential Library.
Hakes has also been active in research, writing, and speaking on critical national issues. After earning his PhD in political science at Duke University, he taught at the University of New Orleans. More recently, he has published three books and numerous articles on the intersections between energy, the environment, the economy, and national security. His most recent one, The President and the Planet: Climate Change Science and Politics from Eisenhower to Bush, recently received the Association of American Publishers’ 2025 Prose Award for the best book on environmental science.
View Article Predicting the future of energy has never been easy. For Jay Hakes, an energy historian who built a career on such prognostication, decades spent studying the industry have taught him that the answer to what the future holds
View Report Washington, D.C. –Today, the Consumer Policy Center (CPC) is releasing a report by senior fellow Jay Hakes – U.S. Military Interventions and Oil: A History of Unanticipated Political and Economic Costs. The report shows that a key
Introduction As the war between the Israeli/U.S. alliance and Iran drags on, a looming question deserves special attention. Is this another military deployment far from America’s shores, where (1) the roots of the conflict involve disputes over oil
When oil shortages disrupted daily life in the 1970s, Americans were forced to rethink consumption, and the crisis set in motion decisions that continue to shape energy policy today. In the 1970s, when oil-producing nations cut supplies to the United
Policymakers Seeking to Reduce Atmospheric Pollution from Cars and Trucks Should Consider Correcting the Flaws in Fifty Years of Mileage Regulation Washington, DC — Cars and trucks are the largest and fastest-growing source of U.S. carbon
View Original Article “Drill, baby, drill” became a frequent refrain during the 2024 presidential campaign. Despite the largely successful appeal to oil producers, several recent trends have begun to undermine the people doing the drilling. The promise of a grand
Observers from various camps call for basing public policy on sound science. Yet, as the understanding of climate science has progressed, the relationship between scientists and government decision-makers has proved both constructive and tortuous. This history provides several lessons on
Keynote Speech at Tulane University’s Future of Energy Forum
View Original Article America’s response to climate change has many moving parts. But how people travel from point A to point B in an environmentally sustainable manner stands atop the challenges of slowing the human alteration of our earth’s
Choose the topics you’d like to hear about. We’ll only email you when we publish something new
