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By Root 786 0

his career in energy, the current generation of environmental scholars has repeatedly feted and toasted the man whose scientific and policy breadth were only exceeded by his pragmatic will and skill in getting things done. What separates Rosenfeld from many analysts has been his willingness to get his hands dirty in both the scientific and political trenches while also maintaining a broad perspective on what does the most social good. Over the last thirty-five years, he’s transformed himself from a physicist running the Bevatron particle accelerator into one of the most respected energy analysts and policymakers in the world. His accomplishments are astonishing.

He coded DOE-2, a computer program that was used to quantify the solar inputs in building design.21 The software, which was adopted into California’s building code in 1978, put solar energy on a fair analytical playing field with fossil fuel–powered HVAC systems. He created the Center for Building Science at Lawrence Berkeley, which did important research into windows that keep heat inside and compact fluorescent lightbulbs. He testified before Congress many times before entering the government in the Clinton administration as a senior adviser in the Department of Energy. In 2000 he became a California Energy Commissioner, part of the powerful board that has been one of the strongest proponents of green technology in the country.22

Many people have fought for what they thought was right or trained highly skilled students or conducted original research or ran institutions that changed the way the world works or served in state and national level government. But Rosenfeld did all of that, after working in a Nobel Prize–winning particle physics group.

Rosenfeld is gifted with the common touch. He has a way of making refrigerator efficiency and thermodynamics seem both important and simple. His innate sense of fairness also led him to seek out solutions that could benefit everyone, especially those with the least.

The self-described “epiphany” that launched Rosenfeld on this tremendous path occurred one Friday in the winter of 1973. He was working late and everyone had gone home. At the time, California burned oil for electricity generation, so he began to think about how many gallons of gasoline-equivalent his office lights used over the weekend. His calculations came out to about five gallons, half as much gas as he needed for his little Fiat. He switched off his lights and then figured that he’d turn off the lights in the other nineteen offices on his floor. Why not? He’d save all of them energy.

In the offices of his European colleagues, the procedure was simple enough: He reached in and switched off the lights. But in the offices of the Americans, there were bookcases and posters and “all sorts of damn stuff” blocking access to the light switches. His colleagues’ offices became a tiny microcosm of the infrastructural problems of America. Few had ever thought about turning off the lights when they didn’t need them, so the life systems they built did not allow them to have that flexibility. American society was, by design and neglect, terribly wasteful.23 Energy usage, and even its control, had been made invisible.

Although part of the solution to that problem may be to make energy usage visible—that’s certainly a major answer from the design field—Rosenfeld focused on a different strategy. If people wanted to forget all about energy, and it appeared that they did, he would simply swim upstream from where consumer purchase decisions were made and change the options they had. He would embed invisible improvements, invisible efficiency, and, in so doing, push efficiency out to every single person, not just those prone to thoughtfulness.

Perhaps the best example of Rosenfeld at work is the efficiency improvements in refrigerators. One might assume that the more expensive a refrigerator, the higher its efficiency—that higher costs meant higher performance. But when Rosenfeld and his graduate student David Goldstein actually looked at refrigerators’ purchase price