December 3, 2024
Message from Voters: Remove Politicized Constraints on Fossil Energy Production
On Election Day, voters delivered at least one clear message: Remove the policy roadblocks standing in the way of greater fossil energy production, American oil and natural gas in particular. The reason is obvious: The efficient production of more fossil energy yields huge economic benefits for millions of working Americans and for the productivity of…
December 2, 2024
The MAGA Science Agenda Reveals America’s Future
The leader of the Republican Party and our country’s next president has tapped a pro-choice scion of the country’s most famous Democratic dynasty to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. In keeping with the bewildering dynamics of today’s negative partisanship, conservative groups such as the Heritage Foundation have cheered the selection of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., while liberals have…
November 25, 2024
The Roots of Public Mistrust: Science, Policy, and Academic Integrity
Astronomer Carl Sagan observed in his popular 1980 television show Cosmos, “There are many hypotheses in science that are wrong. That’s perfectly all right; it’s the aperture to finding out what’s right. Science is a self-correcting process. To be accepted, new ideas must survive the most rigorous standards of evidence and scrutiny.” The scientific community’s historical…
November 20, 2024
President Trump Should Abandon Biden’s Misguided War on Big Business
As President Trump takes office for the second time, a pressing question will be how to handle the Biden administration’s legacy of targeting large businesses. In 2021, President Biden issued an executive order on competition, launching an all-of-government effort to reverse, or at least stay, a century-long trend: the rising share of national output produced by large firms….
November 15, 2024
Should State Laws Determine National Energy and Climate Policies?
Opponents of fossil fuels claim to oppose pollution, but they are all too happy to pollute our legal and constitutional institutions in pursuit of their climate-policy agenda. The latest manifestation of this trend is a litigation campaign against fossil-energy producers in state courts under state laws, alleging that the energy producers “knew” decades ago that…
October 31, 2024
Maine Shows the Way: Low Earth Orbit Satellites Can Rescue the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment Program
As the Kamala Harris-Tim Walz and Donald Trump-JD Vance campaigns pour resources into Maine to compete for electoral votes, both the Vice President and former President Trump could benefit from something more than campaign dollars: a lesson from Maine on how to fix the stalled Biden-Harris broadband rollout. The $42.5 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and…
October 31, 2024
Regulating Artificial Intelligence in a World of Uncertainty
Key Points Read the pdf. Executive Summary New and increasingly capable artificial intelligence applications are a fact of life. They offer great promise of advances in human welfare but also have engendered fears of misalignment with human values and objectives, leading at best to harm to individuals and at worst to catastrophic societal outcomes and…
October 30, 2024
The Energy Permitting Reform Act Doesn’t Go Far Enough
This summer, Senators Joe Manchin and John Barrasso’s Energy Permitting Reform Act passed out of the Senate Energy and Natural Resource Committee by a 15-4 vote and the House of Representatives is now working on passing its own permitting reform. Both bills reflects a growing bipartisan consensus that after years of bottlenecks and delays to…
October 25, 2024
TikTok’s No Good, Very Bad Day in Court
Last month, the DC Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral argument in TikTok Inc. v. Garland, which tests the constitutionality of a federal law that would ban the popular social media platform from app stores early next year unless its Chinese-affiliated parent company divests ownership. While seasoned lawyers caution against predicting decisions based on oral…
October 25, 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….