The Supreme Court just decided “the most closely watched environmental case in decades,” West Virginia v. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. In the 6-3 opinion, the Court holds that the Environmental Protection…
By James W. Coleman | June 30, 2022
President Biden will attend the Gulf Cooperation Council meeting in Saudi Arabia next month, with the explicit goal of convincing the GCC — that is, the Saudis — to increase production of crude oil…
By Benjamin Zycher | June 21, 2022
Proposals for “carbon pricing” and a border-adjustment tax on imports and credits on exports — the central ancillary policy needed to preserve the competitiveness of U.S. companies given the implementation of…
By Benjamin Zycher | June 16, 2022
Beltway nostrums are a dime a dozen, and the climate problem threat emergency crisis existential threat is tailor-made to elicit hundreds of them. An old one now receiving increasing attention is carbon capture and sequestration…
By Benjamin Zycher | June 9, 2022
The Biden administration last week canceled a large oil and gas lease sale — over 1 million acres — in the Alaska Cook Inlet as well as two sales in the Gulf of…
By Benjamin Zycher | May 16, 2022
Let us review the plain language of the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (§1344(a)): “The Secretary [of the Interior] shall prepare and periodically revise, and maintain an oil and gas leasing program,” defined by the Congressional Research…
By Benjamin Zycher | May 3, 2022
The Biden administration announced late last week that it would resume leasing of federal lands for fossil fuel exploration and production, but at a scale (144,000 acres) about 80 percent smaller than…
By Benjamin Zycher | April 25, 2022
It is Earth Day 2022 — always falling on Lenin’s birthday, amusingly enough — the official theme of which this year is Invest In Our Planet™. As with every previous Earth Day,…
By Benjamin Zycher | April 22, 2022
Oh what a tangled web it weaves when first the Biden administration practices to deceive. That is a slight paraphrase of Sir Walter Scott’s famous observation, but it is wholly appropriate…
By Benjamin Zycher | April 14, 2022
Never let a crisis go to waste, as the age-old Beltway wisdom goes, but one might think that the Ukraine crisis, in which thousands of innocents are dying and losing…
By Benjamin Zycher | March 28, 2022
Gasoline prices are nothing if not visible, and that such prices are high and rising is unlikely to help the party holding the White House. Average U.S. gasoline prices have risen from about…
By Benjamin Zycher | March 17, 2022
Amid the ongoing debate in the U.S. about the wisdom of banning the importation of Russian petroleum, roughly 5-10 percent of total U.S. petroleum imports (crude oil and refined products), it is…
By Benjamin Zycher | March 8, 2022
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…
By Benjamin Zycher | February 17, 2022
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…
By Benjamin Zycher | February 9, 2022
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…
By Benjamin Zycher | February 3, 2022