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…
By Roger Pielke Jr. | November 19, 2024
In 2022, on a bipartisan basis, the U.S. Congress passed the Global Catastrophic Risk Management Act of 2022 requiring the Department of Homeland Security to coordinate an expert assessment of global catastrophic…
By Roger Pielke Jr. | November 13, 2024
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…
By Roger Pielke Jr. | November 12, 2024
A minor brouhaha erupted on social media this week when the editor of Scientific American, Laura Helmuth, in a late-night fit of rage, posted profanity-filled and disparaging comments about those who…
By Roger Pielke Jr. | November 8, 2024
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…
By Lynne Kiesling | November 7, 2024
In the Financial Times over the weekend, John Burn-Murdoch discussed how projections of global population keep decreasing: Burn-Murdoch concludes: [T]hese estimates are extremely fuzzy and based on frameworks that were true in the…
By Roger Pielke Jr. | October 28, 2024
26 years ago, Virginia Postrel published The Future and Its Enemies, which I still consider one of the most insightful books of our time. The book’s subtitle, The Growing Conflict Over Creativity,…
By Lynne Kiesling | October 24, 2024
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…
By Roger Pielke Jr. | October 24, 2024
A new paper is just out claiming that climate change is increasing the damage associated with U.S. hurricanes: “US hurricane damage, normalized for changes of inflation, population, and wealth, increases approximately 1%…
By Roger Pielke Jr. | October 21, 2024
In 2024 it can be difficult to sort wheat from chaff in the peer-reviewed literature. There has always been better and worse science — that goes with the territory —…
By Roger Pielke Jr. | October 15, 2024
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…
By Roger Pielke Jr. | Ruy Teixeira | October 10, 2024
In the aftermath of many high profile extreme weather events we see headlines like the following: For those who closely follow climate science and the assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel…
By Roger Pielke Jr. | October 8, 2024
In their book, Merchants of Doubt, Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway argue that scientists “know bad science when they see it”: “It’s science that is obviously fraudulent — when data have…
By Roger Pielke Jr. | October 3, 2024
Every so often, I come across a policy analysis that is so quantitatively robust and crystal clear in its presentation, that it clarifies how I think. Today is one of…
By Roger Pielke Jr. | October 1, 2024
Today I’m traveling to the 2024 Institute for Regulatory Law & Economics Workshop for Regulators. The 2024 IRLE Workshop marks not only the 18th annual gathering of regulators and scholars, but also…
By Lynne Kiesling | September 27, 2024