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October 24, 2024
Climate Journalism Done Right
Today, The Washington Post has published a lengthy analysis titled, “The real reason billion-dollar disasters like Hurricane Helene are growing more common.”1 The article, by the Post’s Harry Stevens, is brilliantly done — extensively reported, data rich, grounded in a large body of research, with a wide diversity of voices. Watching reactions to the article will…
October 23, 2024
What Happens in Europe Does Not Stay There
U.S. climate policies, designed to yield a utopia of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by, say, 2050, are preposterous. The costs are massive. Consumer resistance is such that important components of the policy agenda are already collapsing. The metastasizing system of financial regulations imposing penalties upon the fossil energy sector is unlikely to survive judicial scrutiny. And for what? Even if implemented fully, the entire…
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….
July 1, 2024
The ESG Proxy Advisor Game Starts to Crack
For many years “proxy advisory” services have been provided by a duopoly comprising two companies, Glass Lewis and Institutional Shareholder Services, with a combined market share of 97 percent engendered by blatant political favoritism. “Proxy advice” means recommendations to investors, retirement funds and large asset managers holding major stakes in public companies on how to vote on…
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…
August 7, 2023
EPA Is Ignoring the Glaring Problem with Dirty Electric Vehicles
The Environmental Protection Agency(EPA) has launched a new regulatory effort to force a massive transportation shift to electric vehicles (EVs) with its proposed “multi-pollutant emissions standards” for light- and medium-duty vehicles beginning with model year 2027. The reality, however, is that the proposed rule has little to do with “pollutants.” Instead, it is an attempt…
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…
May 24, 2023
The ESG Perversion of Shareholder Resolutions
Back in the old days — oh, before, say, 2021 — the annual general meetings of company shareholders were boring. Questions asked of management more or less uniformly oriented toward the financial condition of the firm and the variables affecting the values of the shareholders’ stakes. How is the firm dealing with exchange rate risk? Are any…
April 26, 2023
Letter: Electric Vehicles Won’t Save the Climate
Note: This letter to the editor appeared in the Wall Street Journal on April 24, 2023, in response to the Journal’s April 19, 2023, op-ed titled “Biden and Media Are EV Grifters.” Electric vehicles are preposterous, in particular as climate policy (“Biden and Media Are EV Grifters” by Holman Jenkins, Jr., Business World, April 19). The…
April 21, 2023
Earth Day 2023: Utterly Bereft of Ideas
Earth Day falls on April 22 — Lenin’s birthday, appropriately enough — so let us first recall the blessed memory of the official theme for Earth Day 2022: “Invest In Our PlanetTM.” “This is the moment to change it all — the business climate, the political climate, and how we take action on climate. It’s going…