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February 17, 2022
Some of the Public Policies That Factor in Rising Energy Costs
Rising energy costs are highly visible and therefore not politically advantageous for politicians with constituencies comprising large numbers of energy consumers. And in politics, as the old saying goes, when you’re explaining you’re losing, a reality that drives most such public officials away from analytics — even if we assume that they understand them —…
February 9, 2022
Natural Gas Export Limits and the Brownsville U-turn
Once an entity with powers limited to those enumerated in the Constitution, the federal government has become a Leviathan, a central practice of which is the legalized theft of private property to be redistributed to favored constituencies. If additional evidence of this truth were needed, look no further than a recent letter from ten U.S. senators to…
February 3, 2022
Arnold Schwarzenegger Gets a Sunburn
News reports last month about a traffic accident involving former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger noted that he was driving a GMC Yukon, a full-size sport-utility vehicle that decidedly is not among the vehicle choices favored by the environmental Left. Indeed, it is fair to describe it as a civilian approximation of an armored personnel carrier. And good for Arnold: he…
February 3, 2022
Improving Research Funding Efficiencies and Proposal Diversity Through NSF Science Lottery Grants
The United States no longer leads the world in basic science. There is growing recognition of a gap in translational activities — the fruits of American research do not convert to economic benefits. As policymakers consider a slew of proposals that aim to restore American competitiveness with once-in-a-generation investments into the National Science Foundation (NSF), less discussion has been…
January 26, 2022
How a Federal Regulator Is Hijacking Energy Policy
Sometimes you really do have to hit the mule between the eyes to get its attention. The mule of interest here is not a drug smuggler, but instead the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, whose legal mandate is straightforward: “Economically Efficient, Safe, Reliable, and Secure Energy for Consumers . . . at a reasonable cost through appropriate regulatory and market…
January 25, 2022
Is This Still an Emergency?
With a new variant running rampant, an enormous wave of cases, hospitals under strain, mask mandates returning, states of emergency being redeclared, and schools reverting to virtual learning, it is easy to get the sense that we have slid back to where we started. A raft of news articles in late December described the perilous and demoralizing feeling that the country…
January 13, 2022
Will the Climate Industry Move the Goalposts Again?
The international climate alarmist industry comprises a number of special interests. There are the activists, fundamentally anti-human and deeply disingenuous, demanding that billions of the global poor suffer and die in order that the planet be “saved.” There are the “experts” in pursuit of bigger budgets and “research” grants. There are the editors of the peer-reviewed journals, transforming “science” into a propaganda exercise. There are the bureaucrats massively…
December 23, 2021
Science as Craftwork with Integrity
Editor’s Note: The coronavirus pandemic has brought onto the center stage of public debate our deep, although often unarticulated, disagreements about the nature of scientific knowledge and the authority of scientific experts. Seeking insights on these questions, we asked former New Atlantis associate editor M. Anthony Mills, who has written widely on philosophy, science, and expertise, to…
December 16, 2021
Banning Crude-oil Exports Would Increase Gasoline Prices
Having floated a possible export ban on crude oil as a trial balloon last month, the Biden administration earlier this week abandoned the idea, as opposition emerged quickly from Democrats in oil-producing districts. But the mere fact that this proposal received serious consideration illustrates three eternal truths about Beltway policy-making. The first is the virtual certainty of unanticipated or ignored adverse…
November 18, 2021
A More Productive Way to Spread Federal Science Funding Around
In an age of many irreconcilable partisan divisions, lawmakers on Capitol Hill have quietly come to agree on at least one thing: the federal government must do more to shore up American science and technology. To that end, various pieces of bipartisan legislation aim to revitalize US research and development (R&D) by increasing funding for federal science agencies, particularly the…