Welcome to Our Research Archive
Search and filter by content type, issue area, author, and keyword
January 13, 2025
The Hardware and Software of AI
Friends, it is great to talk with you again. I hope you had a restful break. In the two weeks since we last chatted, I spent some time organizing my work and thinking about what I want to accomplish in the next year to eighteen months. One big thing I am going to do is…
January 13, 2025
EPA Should Reject California’s Locomotive Electrification Regulation
The California Air Resources Board last November requested from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency a waiver under section 209(e) of the Clean Air Act for implementation of its “In-Use Locomotive Regulation,” an effort to electrify the cargo trains operating in California and therefore across the entire country. As of early January, EPA still has not acted, a…
January 10, 2025
Regional Transmission Organizations as Market Platforms I
2025 is already shaping up to be a year of change for many reasons related to the economics and technology of energy. Between the uncertainty arising from a political change in presidential administration and the dynamics of technological change in the economy, the only prediction I’d hazard is that change will happen. Some of these…
January 9, 2025
Meta’s Content Moderation Turnabout
Today, Meta, the parent company of Facebook, announced that it would immediately stop using “fact checkers” to police the content on its platforms, which also include Instagram and Threads. Meta explained: “In recent years we’ve developed increasingly complex systems to manage content across our platforms, partly in response to societal and political pressure to moderate content….
January 8, 2025
The Interests of the U.S. and the Honolulu Climate Case Before the U.S. Supreme Court
The Office of the Solicitor General — part of the Department of Justice —was created by the Statutory Authorization Act of June 22, 1870. The Act states that there shall be an officer “learned in the law,” to be called the Solicitor General, to assist the Attorney General in the performance of his or her duties. The…
December 23, 2024
DOGE Needs to Dig Deeper Than Its Leaders Understand
An undergraduate class on Congress and legislation was one of the lowlights of my academic career. In my work for the class, I would often get wrapped up in critiquing legislation from the angle of bureaucratic implementation, when the professor was very clearly testing for understanding of the material about Congress. I resisted the class…
December 23, 2024
Fixing Universities
In my courses on policy analysis I teach my students to focus on problem definition before even thinking about policy options. The problem facing major American research universities, as characterized in this series, is that large segments of the public has lost confidence in them, at least in part because faculty are overwhelmingly on the…
December 17, 2024
Economics of Grid Defection II
Last week I wrote about the grid defection discussion circa 2014, motivated by Elisa Wood’s webinar with Seyyed Ali Sadat and Joshua Pearce of Western Ontario University on their new paper in Solar Energy. Let’s pick up the story from 2014 and discuss the research leading up to their paper. Evolution of the Research In the ensuing…
December 16, 2024
How to Get Rid of a Tenured Professor
I am the answer to a trivia question. Who is the only person to appear in the leaked 2009 Climategate emails and in the 2016 Hillary Clinton Wikileaks emails? That’d be me. At the time, in both cases the leaks revealed efforts to censor my research and damage my career. In both cases I thought…
December 16, 2024
A Venture Capitalist as AI and Crypto Czar
When I first conceived this newsletter, one of the audiences I had in mind was what I called the “All-In crowd,” the people who listen to and engage with the All-In Podcast. For those who don’t listen to All-In, it’s a weekly conversation among four veteran venture capitalists: Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis, David Sacks, and David Friedberg. They…