The climate obsessions of the Obama administration yielded a substantial myopia with respect to the other central goals of energy policy, the cost and reliability of the electric power system…
By Benjamin Zycher | August 7, 2017
Sometimes leftist environmentalists have a point. For instance, they argue that oil subsidies are wasteful and should be abolished. Unfortunately, they typically pollute their sound argument with gross inconsistency and…
By Benjamin Zycher | August 3, 2017
California is the center of the political campaign to induce pension funds and others to divest from fossil-fuel investments, justified as a path toward environmental improvement. Unsurprisingly, a new study finds that divestment would lead to…
By Benjamin Zycher | June 21, 2017
It’s been a long and winding road toward the resolution of the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority bonded debt. It totals $9 billion, the largest single component of Puerto Rico’s overall debt of about…
By Benjamin Zycher | June 21, 2017
This piece originally appeared as “NY attorney general is the ‘Energizer Bunny’ of Exxon deceit” in The Hill. When last we observed New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s pursuit of ExxonMobil, he…
By Benjamin Zycher | June 15, 2017
My colleague Alex Brill has continued the widespread practice of economists pretending to be politicians with his short new essay arguing for a “carbon” (greenhouse gas) tax as a “permanent” replacement for…
By Benjamin Zycher | June 8, 2017
Now, this is entertainment. “This” is The Washington Post’s Fact Checker “analysis” posted online less than four hours after President Trump ended his speech announcing the US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on climate…
| June 6, 2017
Mr. Trump yesterday announced that he would withdraw the U.S. from the international climate agreement reached in Paris in late 2015, but would seek to renegotiate it so as to achieve…
By Benjamin Zycher | June 2, 2017
There is a time to weep and a time to laugh. And the recent letter from ExxonMobil urging President Trump not to exit the Paris climate agreement provides a time for both, with a…
By Benjamin Zycher | May 30, 2017
My colleague Jim Pethokoukis deserves applause for his recent argument that the effects of increasing greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations are uncertain, notwithstanding the loud assertions of many, and that incremental policy interventions are vastly…
By Benjamin Zycher | May 25, 2017
Let us put aside initially any dispute about the science and evidence underlying the Paris COP-21 agreement to limit global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Let us ask instead what the agreement ostensibly…
By Benjamin Zycher | May 25, 2017
Thee heat is on, not because summer beckons, but instead because of a pressure campaign now being aimed at the new California Attorney General, Xavier Becerra. An alliance of environmentalists, plaintiff attorneys,…
By Benjamin Zycher | May 18, 2017
Is it “discriminatory” to trim the subsidies bestowed upon a given class of power consumers by everyone else? Would those customers be transformed into second-class citizens? That is the gist…
By Benjamin Zycher | May 16, 2017
Saudi Aramco has announced its intention to sell up to 5 percent of itself to investors as part of a larger plan by the House of Saud to diversify the Saudi economy…
By Benjamin Zycher | May 3, 2017
Is it confusion? Or is it malevolence? “It” is the driving force underlying the loud clamor for divestment from fossil fuel assets, a political pressure campaign that is growing in sound and fury—and international jet-setting—even as actual government…
By Benjamin Zycher | April 21, 2017