The late Richard L. Gordon was professor emeritus of mineral economics and MISACU University Endowed Fellow emeritus at Penn State University. He was an esteemed energy economist specializing in coal and electric power.
Gordon began his work on energy economics with his 1960 Ph.D. thesis on coal policy in the European Coal and Steel Community. In 1970, this was transformed into his first book - The Evolution of Energy Policy in Western Europe: the Reluctant Retreat from Coal. The book expressed what was to prove a lifetime concern with the excesses of government intervention. He argued that the Western European coal industry had become uneconomic and that state aid would only expansively delay the inevitable need to close the industry. Such an expensive decline occurred.
He wrote three other books on coal, one on electric power, one on energy economics, another on the defects of regulation, and most recently a review of the Microsoft antitrust case. He also wrote over 100 articles and monographs on energy, environmental issues, and public land policy. He participated in several government policy studies including the U. S. Commission on Fair Market Value Policy for Federal Coal Leasing of which he was a member in 1983-1984.
During the 1970's he was a severe critic of the energy intervention in response to rising oil prices. His writings on coal stressed that it was attractive at most as an electric power fuel and criticized efforts both to increase direct use in other sectors and to produce synthetic fuels from coal. He later became a severe critic of public utility regulation and federal public land policies.
He graduated magna cum laude from Dartmouth in 1956 and received a Ph.D. degree in industrial economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1960.
Upon graduation from MIT, he became an economic analyst with Union Carbide in New York City. In 1964 he became an assistant economist at the First National City Bank and later in 1964 joined the Penn State faculty as an assistant professor. He became professor of mineral economics in 1970 and retired with emeritus rank in 1996. At Penn State, he was the advisor to the completion of 48 masters and 24 Ph.D. students. Beginning in 1996, he was an adjunct scholar with the Cato Institute and a frequent contributor to its magazine Regulation. From 1984 to 2011, he was book review editor of the Energy Journal published by the International Association for Energy Economics. He has been a member of the Journal's board of editors since its inception in 1980.
Gordon won The Pennsylvania State University Faculty Scholar Medal for Outstanding Achievement (Social Sciences), 1989; Government of Venezuela, Decoration of Andres Bello (in grade of honor first class) for significant contributions to the field of energy economics and for high quality academic guidance to Venezuelan graduate students, 1989; the Outstanding Contribution to the Profession Award of the International Association for Energy Economics, 1992; Outstanding Contribution to the Association Award of the International Association for Energy Economics, 2007; and Senior Fellow USAEE, 2012.