Wearing jeans, sneakers and a backpack, his hair rumpled and his T-shirt turned inside out to hide the logo, Merritt Graves looked like any other carefree undergrad as he strolled across the bucolic Pomona College campus in Claremont, California, climbed the steps of the Carnegie Building and took a seat in class. If attendance at his energy economics and policy course was a little thin that April morning, the professor joked, it might have been the fallout from the previous week’s midterm exam.
Graves, who got a B+ on the test, pulled out a notebook and began copying key provisions of the Natural Gas Act of 1938 from the blackboard, along with the diagram of the flow of gas from the ground to the end consumer. The course is one of two that Graves is taking this semester, both electives for his major in environmental analysis.
"One of the...