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August 16, 2022
Bill Gates Approves
Always good for a laugh, the New York Times opinion page has few peers as a dependable repository of supreme silliness. Day after day, year after year: It delivers ignorance of basic facts, bad analysis, endless non sequiturs, dishonesty by omission. All of that and more (or less) for a very reasonable price; it truly is the gift that…
August 9, 2022
Banning Exports of Crude Oil and Refined Products Would Increase Prices
A number of perverse Beltway ideas never seem to die despite their underlying fallacies. The latest such nostrum is the argument that a renewed ban on the export of crude oil and refined products would reduce domestic fossil-energy prices, as asserted in a recent letter to President Biden from four U.S. senators urging Biden to “preserve petroleum supplies…
August 5, 2022
What Does Senator Joe Manchin Believe He’s Getting?
Numerous news reports have emerged about the reforms to the energy infrastructure permitting process that Senator Joe Manchin has obtained as promises from President Joe Biden, Senator Chuck Schumer, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in exchange for his support for the “Inflation Reduction Act.” That title sets a new standard for Beltway disinformation: Inflation is a monetary phenomenon,…
July 20, 2022
Letter: The Losing Politics of a Carbon Tax
Note: This letter to the editor appeared in the Wall Street Journal on July 20th, 2022 in response to the Journal’s July 9, 2022 op-ed titled “Is a Carbon Tax the Only Way to Stop the Greens?” Mr. Jenkins is not correct that a carbon tax would “bring us all the energy we want ….
July 19, 2022
West Virginia v. EPA and the SEC Climate Risk Disclosure Rule
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is in the process of finalizing its proposed “climate risk” disclosure rule for public companies. But the SEC has a huge amount of work to do, as the problems with the rule as proposed are legion, reflected by the voluminous economic, legal, scientific and policy- and sector-specific criticism that it has received. And that was before the Supreme Court issued…
June 30, 2022
5 Questions for Tony Mills on Federal Science Policy
Early in his presidency, Joe Biden promised to be a leader on science policy with proposals for new advanced research projects agencies centering on biomedical and climate research. And now, working their way through Congress are two bills designed to boost federal support for scientific research, the America COMPETES Act and US Innovation and Competition…
June 30, 2022
Another Bad Beltway Idea: Suing OPEC on Antitrust Grounds
The “Do Something!” imperative so common in the Beltway as a response to the headlines of the day yields economic or policy improvement only rarely if at all. This cannot be surprising in that this imperative by its very nature does not lend itself to thoughtfulness, even by the standards of federal policy-making. One of the…
June 30, 2022
Supreme Court Holds EPA Can’t Cap Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Power Plants
The Supreme Court just decided “the most closely watched environmental case in decades,” West Virginia v. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. In the 6-3 opinion, the Court holds that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) cannot use Clean Air Act §111(d) to set power-sector-wide greenhouse gas emissions standards for state power plants. The Court also explains that the…
June 23, 2022
Metascience, R&D, and Federal Research Spending: My Long-Read Q&A with Tony Mills
When America endeavors to tackle an ambitious project, we speak in terms of moonshots or a “Manhattan Project for X.” The assumption is that vast government resources, directed toward some objective, can yield results on the scale of the Moon landing or the atom bomb. But federal research funding is more complicated than throwing dollars at…
June 21, 2022
President Biden Asks the Saudis to Bail Him Out
President Biden will attend the Gulf Cooperation Council meeting in Saudi Arabia next month, with the explicit goal of convincing the GCC — that is, the Saudis — to increase production of crude oil as a tool with which reduce gasoline prices in the U.S. From a recent press conference: Q: And my question on Saudi Arabia: Why not have the…