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April 28, 2025
Why the AI Revolution Will Require Massive Energy Resources
The rapid rise of generative AI has triggered a sharp escalation in data center electricity consumption, with profound implications for national energy use, system planning, and climate goals. Data centers have long been critical infrastructure for digital services, but their energy demand is now accelerating due to the emergence of compute-intensive AI workloads. Data center…
March 26, 2025
Another Day Ending in “Y,” More Meritless Lawsuits Against the Fossil Energy Producers
One would think that Republicans would know better. One would think that Republicans from an important oil- and gas-producing state would know better. One would think, or hope, that they would prioritize the economic wellbeing of their states and the livelihoods of their constituents over their narrow political ambitions. And one would be wrong. Illustrating the perverse…
February 19, 2025
Trump’s Tariffs Would Prime Prices at the Gas Pump
Donald Trump promised tariffs, and he delivered, imposing by executive fiat tariffs of 25 percent on imports from Canada (10 percent on Canadian energy) and Mexico and 10 percent on imports from China. His justifications are “the major threat of illegal aliens and deadly drugs killing our Citizens, including fentanyl,” and our “major trade deficits with those countries.” According…
January 12, 2025
The Collapse of Offshore Wind Power Is Only the Beginning
The “clean energy transition” — the wholesale replacement of conventional (for the most part fossil) energy with such unconventional technologies as wind and solar power — has been the raison d’être for great masses of the well-off living in comfort in Western economies for many years. And they now are grieving. Why? Because that transition, aided with…
October 29, 2024
The Energy Permitting Reform Act Doesn’t Go Far Enough
This summer, Senators Joe Manchin and John Barrasso’s Energy Permitting Reform Act passed out of the Senate Energy and Natural Resource Committee by a 15-4 vote and the House of Representatives is now working on passing its own permitting reform. Both bills reflects a growing bipartisan consensus that after years of bottlenecks and delays to…
October 23, 2024
Both Harris and Trump Pose Problems for U.S. Energy Producers.
AEI Scholar Benjamin Zycher contributed to the Dispatch’s Symposium titled Regulatory Policy Experts: Both Harris and Trump Threaten Constraints on Innovation, as a group of experts outlined the many ways in which either potential administration’s understanding of how regulation of technology can impede innovation and threaten America’s dominance in that sector. Below is a section from Benjamin Zycher’s contribution. For…
September 16, 2024
Is Joe Biden the “Drill, Baby, Drill” President?
My AEI colleague Roger Pielke Jr. argues in a recent post that “Joe Biden Is the ‘Drill, Baby, Drill’ President,” by virtue of the time trend for U.S. oil production on federal lands (onshore and offshore) for 2008-2023. In summary, Pielke reproduces the data on oil production from federal lands as reported by the U.S….
July 17, 2024
Sen. Whitehouse’s Attacks on Fossil Energy Producers Are Incoherent
It might seem difficult to take positions on a prominent issue diametrically opposed and equally preposterous. But Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), a man whose Pavlovian opposition to the U.S. fossil energy producers has led him into incoherence rare even by Beltway standards, has achieved just such a magical trick. Whitehouse, the chairman of the Senate…
May 29, 2024
Managers of Large Public Retirement Funds Need to Grow a Backbone
Oh, what a tangled web they weave when first the managers of the California Public Employees’ Retirement System and the New York State Common Retirement Fund practice to have it both ways. The problem is the demand from the environmental Left that the retirement funds divest from fossil fuel producers. On the one hand, the fund managers have legally enforceable fiduciary…
May 14, 2024
Another Day, Another Mindless Attack on Fossil Energy Producers
It is another day ending in “y” in the Beltway, and with it we have another “climate crisis” attack on the oil and gas companies — the very ones that produce efficient energy for the great mass of Americans and, indeed, the world. The latest example of this game of pin the climate blame on the energy…