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July 2, 2024
Climate Fueled Extreme Weather
It is now a ubiquitous cultural ritual to blame any and every weather event on climate change. Those hot days? Climate change. That hurricane? Climate change. The flood somewhere that I saw on social media? Climate change. With today’s post, the first in a series, I go beyond the cartoonish media caricatures of climate change,…
July 1, 2024
The End of Chevron Deference
In 1981, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), under Administrator Anne Gorsuch (the mother of Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch), decide to change how it defined a “source” of pollution under the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1977. An environmental group, the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) petitioned the EPA in federal court arguing that there was a…
June 26, 2024
That’s AllotA Energy!
Later this week on Colorado’s beautiful Western Slope, I’ll be giving a keynote talk at an energy transition conference. The timing is perfect because I get to share some of my first analyses of the 2024 edition of the Energy Institute’s Statistical Review of World Energy — an absolutely indispensable resource that was just released a few…
June 20, 2024
Data Center Electricity Use I: Framing the Problem
Yesterday the silicon chip platform company Nvidia became the most valuable public company in the US, surpassing Microsoft: Nvidia became the U.S.’s most valuable listed company Tuesday thanks to the demand for its artificial-intelligence chips, leading a tech boom that brings back memories from around the start of this century. Nvidia’s chips have been the workhorses of…
June 20, 2024
The Death of Environmentalism at 20
Twenty years ago, Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus “dropped” (in Ted’s words) an essay at the annual meeting of the Environmental Grantmakers Association titled, The Death of Environmentalism (DoE). The DoE prompted a vigorous debate about environmentalism in the United States that continues today. Here is how the New York Times characterized the reaction to the essay in 2005: The…
June 17, 2024
Billion Dollar Disasters on Steroids
Shortly after my paper Scientific integrity and U.S. “Billion Dollar Disasters” was accepted for publication, I was tipped off to a public but unnamed and well-hidden directory on the website of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that contained 17 (now 18) of the most recent versions of the “billion dollar disaster” (BDD) tabulation, dating to March 2020….
June 10, 2024
Climate Science is About to Make a Huge Mistake
Scenarios are fundamental to climate research and policy. As THB readers know better than most everyone, for years climate science and policy have been off trackin relying heavily on an outdated extreme emissions scenario called RCP8.5, one of four RCP scenarios developed starting almost two decades ago.(1) Some in the climate science community, though slow out of the…
June 6, 2024
The Energy Policy Act of 2026
“When I talk about energy, I am talking about jobs. Our American economy runs on energy—no energy, no jobs. In the long run, it is just that simple.” President Gerald Ford, 1975 Following the passage of the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975, House Majority Leader Thomas “Tip” O’Neill (D-MA) drolly observed, “It is extremely difficult…
June 4, 2024
Scientific Integrity and U.S. “Billion Dollar Disasters”
Today, npj Natural Hazards, a journal in the Nature family of journals, officially published my new paper, “Scientific integrity and U.S. “Billion Dollar Disasters.” The paper shows — irrefutably in my view — that the “billion dollar disaster” tabulation of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), fails to meet the agency’s standards for information quality and scientific…
May 29, 2024
What the IPCC Says about Drought
Last week, I testified before the Senate Committee on the Budget in a hearing titled, Droughts, Dollars, and Decisions: Water Scarcity in a Changing Climate.1 The hearing was the 18th in the Committee’s series on climate change this Congress, prompting the Wall Street Journal to suggest “the old-fashioned idea that the Budget Committee ought to focus on the budget.” The hearing could…