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November 25, 2024
Astronomer Carl Sagan observed in his popular 1980 television show Cosmos, “There are many hypotheses in science that are wrong. That’s perfectly all right; it’s the aperture to finding out what’s right. Science is a self-correcting process. To be accepted, new ideas must survive the most rigorous standards of evidence and scrutiny.” The scientific community’s historical…
November 20, 2024
As President Trump takes office for the second time, a pressing question will be how to handle the Biden administration’s legacy of targeting large businesses. In 2021, President Biden issued an executive order on competition, launching an all-of-government effort to reverse, or at least stay, a century-long trend: the rising share of national output produced by large firms….
November 15, 2024
Opponents of fossil fuels claim to oppose pollution, but they are all too happy to pollute our legal and constitutional institutions in pursuit of their climate-policy agenda. The latest manifestation of this trend is a litigation campaign against fossil-energy producers in state courts under state laws, alleging that the energy producers “knew” decades ago that…
November 8, 2024
A minor brouhaha erupted on social media this week when the editor of Scientific American, Laura Helmuth, in a late-night fit of rage, posted profanity-filled and disparaging comments about those who voted for Donald Trump.1 As often happens in social media brouhahas, many are calling for Helmuth to be fired from her role as editor. However, this…
October 31, 2024
As the Kamala Harris-Tim Walz and Donald Trump-JD Vance campaigns pour resources into Maine to compete for electoral votes, both the Vice President and former President Trump could benefit from something more than campaign dollars: a lesson from Maine on how to fix the stalled Biden-Harris broadband rollout. The $42.5 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and…
October 31, 2024
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…
October 30, 2024
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 25, 2024
Last month, the DC Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral argument in TikTok Inc. v. Garland, which tests the constitutionality of a federal law that would ban the popular social media platform from app stores early next year unless its Chinese-affiliated parent company divests ownership. While seasoned lawyers caution against predicting decisions based on oral…
October 25, 2024
The future of the clean energy transition is cloudy. It’s well-known that there are disagreements—wide disagreements—between Republicans and Democrats about our energy future. But less well-known is the bedrock of public opinion on America’s energy supply, the importance of a rapid transition away from fossil fuels, and the general salience of the climate change issue….
October 17, 2024
Innovation for Frontier Artificial Intelligence Models Act, reignited the debate about how best to regulate the rapidly evolving field of artificial intelligence. Newsom’s veto illustrates a cautious approach to regulating a new technology and could pave the way for more pragmatic AI safety policies. The robust debate SB 1047 sparked, imperfect as it was, is…