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December 16, 2024
How to Get Rid of a Tenured Professor
I am the answer to a trivia question. Who is the only person to appear in the leaked 2009 Climategate emails and in the 2016 Hillary Clinton Wikileaks emails? That’d be me. At the time, in both cases the leaks revealed efforts to censor my research and damage my career. In both cases I thought…
December 12, 2024
Economics of Grid Defection I
Yesterday Elisa Wood hosted a webinar with Seyyed Ali Sadat and Joshua Pearce of Western Ontario University, who have a new paper: The threat of economic grid defection in the US with solar photovoltaic, battery and generator hybrid systems(Solar Energy, November 2024). Grid defection occurs when electricity customers generate and store enough power locally to become fully self-sufficient…
November 19, 2024
Energy Realism and Climate Pragmatism at the Department of Energy
He’s a climate denier! That is the standard reaction of many in the climate lobby when encountering views on climate and energy deviating from the monomaniacal view that climate is the world’s single-most important issue. Reactions from climate advocates to the nomination of Chris Wright,1 CEO of Liberty Energy, to serve in Donald Trump’s cabinet as Secretary…
November 12, 2024
A Memo for Trump’s Energy Czar
Last week, the Financial Times reported that President-elect Donald Trump is considering appointing an “energy czar,” described as: The new energy tsar role and its powers are not yet finalised, but people familiar with the plans said it would co-ordinate Trump’s deregulatory agenda across a patchwork of agencies including the Department of Energy, Department of Interior, Federal Energy Regulatory…
November 7, 2024
History of Technology: Cheaper, Cleaner, Easier
Every fall since 2020 I have been teaching energy economics in Northwestern University’s Master of Science in Energy and Sustainability (MSES) program. I team teach with my friend Mark Witte, and my part of the course is backloaded—natural monopoly theory and regulation in theory and in history, new generation technology invention and adoption, wholesale power markets, digitalization…
October 10, 2024
The Clean Energy Transition’s Voter Problem
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….
December 23, 2023
A Deal on Permitting Reform Is Still Possible
Senator Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.) has failed in his pursuit of a final approval of the Mountain Valley pipeline from northwestern West Virginia to southern Virginia, as the Senate refused even to give majority support for his effort to attach his “permitting reform” bill to the defense budget authorization. The environmentalist Left and many congressional Democrats have no interest in…
August 29, 2023
No One Is Above the Law? Biden’s Bureau of Land Management Thinks It Is.
One central characteristic of the Biden administration is its contempt for the letter of the law. When laws interfere with overriding political objectives, they are cast aside, and the courts are often forced to clean up the mess. Nowhere is this norm-busting reality more pronounced than at the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM),…
August 8, 2023
The IEA and Congressional Opponents of Fossil Fuels Are Chasing Windmills
The Biden administration’s regulatory onslaught is no mere rumor. It’s a harsh reality deeply problematic for the rule of law, for the concept of self-government, for the institutions of our constitutional republic, and for federalism. And, not least, for a U.S. economy subjected to ever-increasing legal burdens, bureaucratic interference, distortions in the productivity of resource use, and metastasizing Beltway mindlessness. But it’s…
May 31, 2023
The EPA Forges Ahead Toward Less Electricity Supply and Greater Electricity Demand
The Biden administration’s Environmental Protection Agency is nothing if not ambitious, striving as only a bureaucracy politicized and single-minded can to save the world from the purported ravages of the climate “crisis.” Indeed, the central focus of EPA regulatory efforts is the promulgation of requirements for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions that can survive judicial review. A…