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October 31, 2024
Regulating Artificial Intelligence in a World of Uncertainty
Key Points Read the pdf. Executive Summary New and increasingly capable artificial intelligence applications are a fact of life. They offer great promise of advances in human welfare but also have engendered fears of misalignment with human values and objectives, leading at best to harm to individuals and at worst to catastrophic societal outcomes and…
September 23, 2024
Response To The Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy
SummaryEnergy “savings” as asserted by DoE in its notional CRE Standards as analyzed in theNotice of Data Availability and Request for Comment are illegitimate as a benefit of any suchStandards because they shunt aside the CRE performance benefits attendant upon the higherenergy use currently observed. CRE consumers, after all, are not fools. In any event,…
September 10, 2024
The Precautionary Principle, Safety Regulation, and AI: This Time, It Really Is Different
Key Points Read the pdf. The precautionary principle (PP) holds that in the face of scientific uncertainty about the outcomes of deploying a new technology, and especially when serious or irreversible damage could occur, a cautionary approach is justified—“better to be safe than sorry”—which necessitates strictly regulating the technology’s release. The PP has long been…
July 17, 2024
Recovering Science Policy
Key Points Executive Summary The aftermath of a global public health crisis, combined with the rise of populism at home and growing economic and security threats abroad, has persuaded a wide swath of Americans that a more interventionist state is needed to shore up, promote, or protect particular sectors of the economy. This has led…
July 11, 2024
The Refs Are Working Us
“Not true, Governor Romney.” President Barack Obama, widely considered to have lost his first debate against Mitt Romney thirteen days previously, was eager to defend his record. But Romney, having returned to familiar territory, was unwilling to concede the point. “In the last four years,” Romney had said, “you cut permits and licenses on federal…
June 6, 2024
Scientific integrity and U.S. “Billion Dollar Disasters”
Abstract For more than two decades, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has published a count of weather-related disasters in the United States that it estimates have exceeded one billion dollars (inflation adjusted) in each calendar year starting in 1980. The dataset is widely cited and applied in research, assessment and invoked to…
May 29, 2024
Response to the Environmental Protection Agency: Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions from New and Existing Fossil Fuel-Fired Stationary Combustion Turbines at Power Plants
Summary The Environmental Protection Agency in its “framing questions” on greenhouse gasemissions from natural gas combustion turbines at electric generating stations asserts that suchGHG emissions are important “pollutants” in the context of anthropogenic climate change. Butthat premise is not consistent with the future temperature effect — 0.017°C by 2100 — ofeliminating such emissions, as predicted…
March 1, 2024
Permitting the Energy Transition
Abstract The United States now has a landmark climate and clean energy law: the Inflation Reduction Act. The Act may provide more than a trillion dollars in spending on new clean energy technology—over $8,000 for every household in the United States. What will Americans receive for this titanic investment? The answer largely turns on how…
October 23, 2023
Spatial Spillovers and the Effects of Fiscal Stimulus: Evidence from Pandemic-Era Federal Aid for State and Local Governments
Abstract We analyse whether US federal aid to state and local governments impacted economic activity through either direct or cross-state spillover effects during the COVID-19 pandemic. Deploying an instrumental-variables framework rooted in the funding advantage of states that are over-represented in Congress, we find that federal assistance had significantly less impact on state and local…