Welcome to Our Research Archive
Search and filter by content type, issue area, author, and keyword
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…
April 17, 2023
OPEC Remains an Obstacle for Biden’s Green-Energy Fantasy
Can it surprise anyone that the multiple Biden–administration gambits intended to save the planet are proving perverse in every possible dimension? This is the case in particular for the fossil-fuel industry, both in the U.S. and internationally: In a nutshell, the administration seeks a long-term decline in investment and production on deeply dubious “climate” grounds, while at the same time begging foreign producers to increase output so as…
April 10, 2023
The EPA Regulatory Reconsideration of Fine Particulates
I betray no secret when I report that much regulatory policy has been deeply politicized, and that is a vast understatement when it comes to many EPA actions under the Clean Air Act. Consider the regulation — the promulgation of a new National Ambient Air Quality Standard — of fine particulate matter (“PM2.5”), which, under…
March 28, 2023
The Energy Transition Is a Delusion Indeed
The “energy transition” continues to receive thunderous applause from all the usual Beltway suspects, an exercise in groupthink fantasy amazing to behold. For those with actual lives to live and thus uninterested in silliness: The “energy transition” is a massive shift, wholly artificial and politicized, from conventional energy inexpensive (Table 1b and here), reliable, and very clean given the proper policy environment,…
March 3, 2023
Letter: Schumer’s “Free-Market” Defense of ESG Falls Flat
Note: This letter to the editor appeared in the Wall Street Journal on March 2, 2023, in response to the Journal’s March 1, 2023, op-ed titled “Republicans Ought to Be All for ESG.” Sen. Chuck Schumer argues in favor of a regulation explicitly allowing retirement-fund managers to include environmental, social and governance objectives as investment criteria,…
January 25, 2023
Don’t Foul Up the Federal Supply Chain with Global Warming Nonsense
For the Biden administration, climate is everything, and everything is climate. The latest example of this single-minded obsession is a proposed amendment to the Federal Acquisition Regulation that would require “certain Federal contractors disclose their greenhouse gas emissions and climate-related financial risk and set science-based targets to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.” The proposed regulation cites four executive orders…
January 19, 2023
Letter: Cows Are Not Going to Solve Global Warming
Note: This letter to the editor appeared in the Wall Street Journal on January 19, 2023 in response to the Journal’s January 17, 2023 op-ed titled “There’s a Climate Solution in Dairy Cows’ Stomachs.” In “There’s a Climate Solution in Dairy Cows’ Stomachs” (op-ed, Jan. 17), Fred Krupp and Antoine de Saint-Affrique manage to get everything wrong. Agriculture contributes about a…
December 12, 2022
This Winter We Will See the Dangerous Results of Climate Alarmism
Despite alarmist media claims, there is no evidence that a climate “crisis” looms in our future, let alone imminent danger of a climate catastrophe. Nevertheless, we are now witnessing decisions by the Biden administration and other countries that could endanger lives around the world this winter. In an effort to reduce GHG emissions, the administration…