Use of Models in Decision Making: A Policy Maker’s View

Abstract

My excuse for standing here is that I work for a corporation whose activities are spread more or less evenly between the United States, the United Kingdom, the other members of the Alliance, and the rest of the world. But my corporation is an oil company, and if anybody thinks that oil companies make national energy policy, they should be at a psychiatrists’ meeting and not at a systems dynamics meeting. However, although I and my colleagues are not policy makers, we are policy takers in the sense that we are greatly concerned with national energy policies because they affect our operations. Therefore, a fair amount of time in the policy advisory group which I lead is spent in analyzing national energy policies in order to try and predict them and to prepare the corporation to adapt to them.