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January 21, 2025
California’s Insurance Crisis
Dave Jones, California’s insurance commissioner from 2011 to 2018, explained California’s growing insurance crisis in 2023: Due to the failure to substantially reduce greenhouse-gas emissions in the U.S. and globally, we are marching steadily to an uninsurable future. Jones sentiment is widely shared — Climate change is causing more and more intense extreme events, which are…
January 17, 2025
Demystifying Social Media Addiction Litigation
The old sales pitch hollered by baseball game vendors was “you can’t tell the players without a scorecard.” Something similar rings true today about not only knowing the litigants but also their theories in more than 1,000 lawsuits wending their way through numerous courts and blaming social media platforms for addicting and harming minors. The…
January 17, 2025
Climate Science Whiplash
Did you know that climate change is making the San Francisco region more foggy? The Bay Area just had its foggiest May in 50 years. And thanks to global warming, it’s about to get even foggier. Did you also know that climate change is making the San Francisco area less foggy? Declining fog cover on California’s coast…
January 16, 2025
After Net Neutrality: The Return of the States
Last week I discussed the Sixth Circuit decision classifying broadband as a Title I information service and effectively eliminating the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) general power to regulate broadband. But like nature, regulators abhor a vacuum. While closing the door to federal regulators, the decision also creates opportunities for states to act. This post examines the present…
January 16, 2025
AI-Generated Regulation: Not Ready for Prime Time (Yet)
Key Points Read the PDF. Executive Summary Generative AI has attracted great attention in the policymaking sphere, including for agency rulemaking. This report compares a final rule drafted by a generative AI model with the Department of Transportation’s actual rule. The AI model’s policy recommendations appear overly sensitive to the number of commenters supporting a…
January 15, 2025
Goodbye and Good Riddance to Meta Fact-Checking
The decision last week by Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, to immediately stop using “fact checkers” — groups hired by Meta to determine what information is true and what is false, and thuswhat should be removed — represents not just a return to common sense but also good news for both science and…
January 13, 2025
Restoring the Lost Law of Eavesdropping
Under a standard of recency that allowed me to review a 40-year-old book in 2023, I want to celebrate the very recent publication, over a year ago, of two articles on the law of eavesdropping. Historically, there was fairly robust law on listening in. Given new technological forms of secret overhearing, that law may have…
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….