page_title: William Flynn Martin
section_title: Education and early career
hierarchical_section_title: William Flynn Martin / Education and early career
caption_attribution_description: English: Martin with Carroll Wilson, Normandy
context_page_description: William Flynn Martin is an American energy economist, educator, and international diplomat. Martin served as Special Assistant to Ronald Reagan for National Security Affairs, Executive Secretary of the United States National Security Council, and United States Deputy Secretary of Energy during the Ronald Reagan Administration. He was President of the Council of the University for Peace, appointed to the Council by Secretary General of the United Nations Kofi Annan. In 1992, he was Executive Director of the Republican Platform committee under George H. W. Bush.
  Martin was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He achieved his Bachelor of Science from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 1972 and his Master of Science from MIT in 1974. His master's thesis was the basis of an article he co-authored with George Cabot Lodge in the March, 1975 Harvard Business Review entitled Our Society in 1985: Business May Not Like It.
  William Martin is the recipient of seven letters of merit from Ronald Reagan, received the Order of the Rising Sun in person from Emperor Akihito of Japan, and was commended by Czech President Vaclav Havel for significant contributions to the Czech Republic.
context_section_description: As a graduate student at MIT, he was part of a team that prepared ten days of Congressional hearings chaired by Congressman John Dingell on Growth and Its Implications for the Future (Roundtable Press, 1973). The hearings were in response to the Club of Rome's report, The Limits to Growth and were aimed at providing the first Congressional hearings on the world economic, energy and environmental outlook and the need for sustainable growth strategies. He was also part of an MIT engineering group that produced a volume for the United Nations Environmental Program on resource materials for studies in environmental management. He is co-author of the report, Professional Materials for Environmental Management Education (MIT Press, 1975). These publications were induced by the first United Nations conference on the environment held in Stockholm in 1972 and headed by Maurice Strong who said of Growth and Its Implications for the Future, "This small volume summarizes much of the important work going on today with regard to global survival...I know of no other publication to date which emphasizes more systematically or extensively, and in such readable form, the interacting relationships amongst diverse fields."
  Following graduating from MIT, Martin joined the MIT Energy Laboratory as a Program officer for the Workshop on Alternative Energy Strategies (WAES) headed by Professor Carroll L. Wilson, the first General Manager of the US Atomic Energy Commission. This fifteen country energy assessment group, headquartered at MIT, met for three years and produced the report, Energy: Global Energy Prospects 1985-2000 (McGraw-Hill, 1975). Martin was a co-author of the final report and editor of Energy Supply to the Year 2000 (MIT Press, 1977). Martin was responsible for energy supply analysis as well as energy projections of developing nations. He and his co-author Frank J.P. Pinto were responsible for using the SIMLINK model of the World Bank as an economic foundation for projecting energy futures for developing nations. This World Bank-MIT project entitled Energy and Economic Growth Prospects for the Developing Countries: 1960-2000 (MIT Press, 1977). was one of the pioneering research attempts to estimate energy prospects for developing countries.
  Martin then moved to Paris where he was responsible for energy statistics for developing countries at the International Energy Agency Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and was part of a UN expert group that developed the methodology for reporting United Nations energy statistics. The statistics were published in the volumes I and II of the report Workshop on Energy Data of Developing Countries (IEA/OECD, 1978). Martin was also director of the IEA Workshop on Energy Statistics for Developing Countries that resulted in the first publication of energy statistics for over 100 countries in a matrix supply/demand integration format.
  In 1978, he was promoted to Special Assistant to the Executive Director of the IEA, Ulf Lantzke, and served in this capacity for two years during the time of the Second Oil Shock. At the commencement of the Iran-Iraq war, it was agreed that nations should coordinate their oil stock draws in the event of a major disruption. As the Special Assistant to the IEA Executive Director, Martin served as the coordinator for four IEA Ministerial meetings where he aided in the drafting of several communiques, including the one from 1981 that is the basis of IEA agreements today on coordinated stock draw as well as a key element of the 2009 discussions between Henry Kissinger (the founder of IEA), Nobuo Tanaka (then Executive Director) and Martin on expanding this concept to include China, India and other advancing nations. A letter from Kissinger to Martin recognizing his contribution in this regard can be seen online.
caption: Martin with Carroll L. Wilson, Normandy, 1976
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