Leon Schipper, Physicist and Iconoclast, Dies at 64
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Leon J. Schipper, a physicist whose passion for data led him to question the value of popular energy policies, like government subsidies for ethanol and for electric cars and the "cash for clunkers" program, died Tuesday in Berkeley, Calif. He was 64.
The cause was pancreatic cancer, according to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where he had worked for more than 20 years.
Dr. Schipper, who was known as Lee, held a bachelor's degree in music and a Ph.D. in astrophysics, both from Berkeley, but he specialized in energy efficiency and transportation energy and was often a critic of the conventional wisdom.
For example, in his view the 2009 "cash for clunkers" program -- which offered rebates of up to $4,500 to people who bought a new car that got better mileage than their old one -- did little to save energy. In many cases, he found, buyers were using the rebate money to buy something bigger and more high-powered than they would have otherwise. "The effect is inverse of what we were hoping for," he said.
Analyzing the Chevy Volt, the new sedan that is supposed to go 40 miles on batteries and then use a gasoline engine, he calculated that because of inefficiencies in electricity generation, its fuel economy was no better than a Toyota Prius hybrid running on gasoline, while its price was roughly double that of the Prius.
"Does the extra $20,000 justify the overall fuel and possible carbon dioxide savings?" he asked. "If two drivers switched to Prius, the overall savings of oil likely would be larger than one driver switching to a Volt, for the same money."
Ethanol, he complained, probably did not reduce emissions of greenhouse gases by much, and would never become a major source of transportation energy unless it could be competitive with oil on an unsubsidized basis.
John P. Holdren, President Obama's science adviser, said that when he set up the Energy and Resources Program at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1973, Dr. Schipper was his first hire.
"He was one of the first people to point out that people don't want to consume energy," Dr. Holdren said, "they want to consume energy services, like transportation, comfortable rooms, cold beer and so forth. And that there was an enormous variation in the amount of energy needed to perform those services."
First Published August 20, 2011 12:00 am
