You can thank Arthur Rosenfeld for energy savings

Los Angeles Times (Lifsher) - He has been a driving force in making the state a global leader in efficiency. This week, the 83-year-old nuclear physicist will leave his post on the California Energy Commission.

In 1954, Rosenfeld took a position at UC Berkeley at what was to become the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, joining Luis Alvarez in the development of hydrogen bubble chambers for detecting subatomic particles. Fifteen years later, Alvarez, backed by a team of scientists that included Rosenfeld, won the Nobel Prize for physics. But climbing to the heights of quantum physics research was not to be Rosenfeld's destiny.

The turning point came on a cool Friday night in November 1973 during the second Arab oil embargo. Television screens beamed images of frustrated Americans in gigantic cars queuing up for fuel. Pained to see his nation humbled by its spendthrift habits, Rosenfeld looked around his own building. Most of his colleagues had departed hours before, not bothering to turn off the lights. Rosenfeld went from office to office flipping switches. His life's mission suddenly clicked. "The cheapest energy is what you don't use" became Rosenfeld's guiding mantra from that night on. "It would be more profitable to attack our own wasteful energy use than to attack OPEC."

He set out on a mission to engineer U.S. appliances and buildings to use less energy. It wouldn't be easy. Pressure was mounting to build massive nuclear facilities to meet California's growing needs. Manufacturers and builders would undoubtedly balk at tough efficiency standards. The key, Rosenfeld concluded, lay in government policy that could force these changes.

So he and his colleagues at the Lawrence Berkeley lab produced meticulous research showing that conservation was the bedrock of true energy security. Patient, persistent and armed with reams of data and unshakable confidence in his findings, the scientist made believers of officials including Jerry Brown, then-governor of California.

"He gave validation to the very unorthodox notion that economic growth could be decoupled from energy growth," said Brown, now California's attorney general. "He was really the guru of efficiency."