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October 6, 2022
Renewables Subsidies and the Institutionalization of Irresponsibility
The joy of spending huge amounts of tax dollars — Other People’s Money — is a truth obvious and eternal, but the corrupting effects of a systemwide shift toward such subventions are more subtle, and vastly more destructive. That is a central implication of the massive policy favoritism now directed toward unconventional electricity — hugely expensive, unreliable,…
September 30, 2022
Letter: Forget Manchin’s Bill. Real Permitting Reform Is Needed.
Note: This letter to the editor appeared in the Wall Street Journal on September 30th, 2022 in response to the Journal’s September 26, 2022 op-ed titled “Both Parties Should Support My Permitting-Reform Bill,” Sen. Joe Manchin’s bill that ostensibly would have speeded up the permitting process for conventional energy projects (“Both Parties Should Support My…
September 30, 2022
Here’s How to Improve Manchin’s Permitting Proposal — to Help More Energy Projects
While Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) has withdrawn his own permitting bill, it is expected to surface again as Congress turns to permitting reforms to make it easier to build the necessary infrastructure for the energy systems of the future — especially after authorizing $370 billion in funding for new, cleaner-energy sources. All the money in the world will not help…
September 27, 2022
The Manchin Permitting Reform Bill Should Be Defeated
Like the deeply destructive “Inflation Reduction Act” that will do no such thing, the “permitting reform” bill (summarized here) released last week by Senator Joe Manchin carries a title — “The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2022” — utterly divorced from its actual prospective impacts. Its ostensible objective is the speedier development of conventional energy resources and such ancillary…
September 26, 2022
Biden’s Rule-Breaking Integrity Official
A Biden administration official whose job is to ensure the “integrity” of government science has an integrity problem of her own. Last month the National Academy of Sciences suspended environmental scientist Jane Lubchenco for violating basic principles of research integrity. Despite this disciplinary action from one of the most prestigious science organizations in the world—and her own…
September 20, 2022
Adverse Energy Taxes in the Inflation Reduction Act
The process of political meddling in energy markets is endless, an eternal truth that will not prove different for the energy provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act. Most public attention has been directed at the massive subsidies and favoritism directed at unconventional electricity — wind and solar power in particular — and electric vehicles, rather than the tax provisions, less…
September 8, 2022
The Rather Mixed Legacy of Mikhail S. Gorbachev
Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev deserves substantial credit for the reductions in U.S./Soviet tensions during the late 1980s, for the perestroika and glasnost “reforms” — simultaneously too little and too much as tools with which to preserve the Soviet Union — of Soviet communist totalitarianism, for the reduction in the internal security clampdowns by the KGB, for the easing…
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 11, 2022
Enthusiasm for the CHIPS and Science Act Is Overblown
Will the CHIPS and Science Act be an inflection point for the U.S. scientific enterprise? The often overlooked “science” portion of the new bill is the culmination of one of the core legislative priorities of Senators Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Todd Young (R-IN): the Endless Frontier Act (EFA)—an attempt to jumpstart American science and innovation…
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…