Earth Day is upon us yet again, and it is difficult not to notice its transformation into a vehicle for corporate virtue signaling: Full-page ads in national and local print…
By Benjamin Zycher | April 20, 2018
The Environmental Protection Agency announced on Monday that it and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration would reinstitute the mid-term evaluation of the greenhouse gas (GHG) emission standards — the fuel-economy rules — for…
By Benjamin Zycher | April 4, 2018
For years Congress has refused to impose limits on greenhouse gas emissions, and now the Trump administration is rolling back the Obama regulations. What are politically-ambitious blue-state politicians to do?…
By Benjamin Zycher | March 6, 2018
Let us now recall the blessed memory of Godzilla, King of the Monsters. I know him as Zilly, as we have grown close over the years and the 30-plus movies that bear his…
By Benjamin Zycher | March 1, 2018
With respect to Washington governor Jay Inslee’s renewed proposal for a “carbon” tax on that state’s greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions, a number to keep closely in mind is: 2/1000 of a degree.…
By Benjamin Zycher | February 1, 2018
Litigation may be as American as apple pie, but some lawsuits are so destructive that they stand out even among the hugely expensive wreckage wrought by our legal system. The…
By Benjamin Zycher | January 12, 2018
They have failed to convince Congress—even Congresses controlled by the Democratic Party—to impose limits on US greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, despite decades of effort, political threats, and grandstanding. Given the election of Donald Trump, they are losing their efforts to…
By Benjamin Zycher | November 2, 2017
I take a back seat to no one in my condemnations of subsidies and other policy distortions of state and regional electric power markets, a stance that I have maintained for decades.…
By Benjamin Zycher | October 20, 2017
Never let a crisis go to waste, say the politicos, a stance adapted for its purposes by the permanent regulatory bureaucracy: Never let a corporate scandal go to waste. That…
By Benjamin Zycher | October 18, 2017
A rotten apple spoils the barrel, as the old saying goes, and because of regulatory politics and the incentives of agency officials, the spoilage often proceeds unimpeded even if the rotten…
By Benjamin Zycher | August 20, 2017
Principles are to be found in many places, a blessing in the Beltway where principles are needed on a daily basis. One such principle is enshrined in the appropriations clause…
By Benjamin Zycher | August 20, 2017
The climate obsessions of the Obama administration yielded a substantial myopia with respect to the other central goals of energy policy, the cost and reliability of the electric power system…
By Benjamin Zycher | August 7, 2017
Sometimes leftist environmentalists have a point. For instance, they argue that oil subsidies are wasteful and should be abolished. Unfortunately, they typically pollute their sound argument with gross inconsistency and…
By Benjamin Zycher | August 3, 2017
California is the center of the political campaign to induce pension funds and others to divest from fossil-fuel investments, justified as a path toward environmental improvement. Unsurprisingly, a new study finds that divestment would lead to…
By Benjamin Zycher | June 21, 2017
This piece originally appeared as “NY attorney general is the ‘Energizer Bunny’ of Exxon deceit” in The Hill. When last we observed New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s pursuit of ExxonMobil, he…
By Benjamin Zycher | June 15, 2017