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Richard G. Newell

economist (Duke University, Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences; National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER); Duke University)

Correspondence, annotated notebooks and portrait silhouettes prepared for research
People and ideasInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionAug 31, 2026
Entity authorityQ41799770 ↗
Source-derived summary

Richard G. Newell (born 1965) is an American energy economist, environmental economist, and climate policy expert who served as the seventh administrator of the United States Energy Information Administration from 2009 to 2011. He was also once the president and CEO of Resources for the Future, a nonprofit environmental economics research and policy institute in Washington, D.C. He has previously served as Senior Economist for Energy and Environment on the President's Council of Economic Advisers and as Professor of Energy and Environmental Economics at Duke University.

Newell is often cited as an authority on climate, energy, and environmental policy issues in major media outlets like the Financial Times, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, NPR, and C-SPAN. He has testified on multiple occasions in the United States Senate and House of Representatives. He has been described by former US secretary of energy Steven Chu as "a leading expert on the economics of energy and environmental markets, policies, and technologies".

Early life and education

Newell earned a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1997 in public policy, specializing in environmental and resource economics. Newell holds an MPA from the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, as well as a BS in materials engineering and a BA in philosophy from Rutgers University.

Career

In the 1990s and early 2000s, Newell was a senior associate at the global advisory and digital services provider ICF International, a teaching fellow at Harvard University, and a senior fellow at Resources for the Future. During 2005–2006, Newell served as Senior Economist for Energy and Environment on the President's Council of Economic Advisers, where he worked with chairman Ben Bernanke, providing economic analysis on issues including energy market disruptions, energy innovation, automobile fuel economy, and renewable fuels.

Newell later joined Duke University as the Gendell Professor of Energy and Environmental Economics at the Nicholas School of the Environment. There, he taught from 2007 to 2016, and in 2011 also became a professor in the university's economics department.

Editorial summary

“Richard G. Newell” enters the record as economist (Duke University, Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences; National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER); Duke University). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Richard, Newell and economist can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA productive starting point for separating a subject’s documented career from later reputation and commemoration. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1965, 2009, 2011, 1997—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1965-01-18. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Richard, Newell and economist.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“Richard G. Newell” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Richard, Newell and economist provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q41799770. VIAF identifies the subject as 35588672. The Library of Congress control number is no2004000252. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1965, 2009, 2011 and 1997.

Critical limits

Later biographies can compress uncertainty and repeat inherited reputations, so apparently settled claims may still require comparison. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Richard G. Newell” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.