Edward Bee

Ed Bee, CEcD, is President and founder of Taimerica Management Company, a management consulting firm headquartered in Mandeville, Louisiana. The firm counsels development groups and businesses worldwide on issues of location strategy and economic development. Bee has earned a number of achievements and awards during his career, including a Distinguished Service Award conferred by the American Economic Development Council in 1994 and the Alumni of the Year Award in 2004 by the Geography Department of Youngstown State University. He has authored more than a dozen articles on leading edge economic development topics in Economic Development Quarterly, The Economic Development Journal, and Economic Development Review. Ed is a graduate of the Economic Development Institute at the University of Oklahoma and has held the Certified Economic Developer designation since 1983. After a brief assignment as a researcher at the Federal Reserve Bank in Atlanta, Bee led local and regional economic development groups in Georgia, Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana for twenty years. His career accomplishments include passage of the Oklahoma and Louisiana Quality Jobs Acts and leadership in the team that sold the first MAPS program to the voters of Oklahoma City. The genesis of this book was the discovery of shale gas in Louisiana and the passage of The Emergency Stabilization Act of 2008. The confluence in 2008 of shale technology, a rapid escalation in fossil fuel prices and generous tax credits for alternative energy led Bee to conclude that energy policy would have a profound influence on global economic development in the next two decades. Fueling Prosperity is the culmination of two years of research and analysis on the connection between energy policy and economic development. Ed resides in Mandeville, LA with his wife Carole and two children.