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
Last week, SpaceX pushed back its timetable for the launch of Starship, the most powerful rocket ever built, and singled out government regulations as the cause: Unfortunately, we continue to be…
By Will Rinehart | September 23, 2024
A few days ago Australian legislators introduced a bill focused on “Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation.” The Australian Parliament explains the purpose of the bill: The bill proposes to amend the Broadcasting…
By Roger Pielke Jr. | September 23, 2024
Political scientist Francis Fukuyama is right, at least about one thing. The American political system is a vetocracy, a system ruled by vetoes. And in recent decades, this excessive power…
By Will Rinehart | September 16, 2024
In the U.S. presidential debate earlier this week, the Democratic nominee Kamala Harris offered a strong endorsement of not just the technology of fracking but also of fossil fuels: I was the…
By Roger Pielke Jr. | September 13, 2024
Last week, the California State Assembly passed SB 1047, a controversial AI safety bill that supporters contend would regulate advanced AI models to reduce the possibility of AI going haywire and…
By Will Rinehart | September 9, 2024
Among those who believe that technological change has stagnated, there are two broad categories. One social/institutional theory of stagnation, often associated with Peter Thiel, claims that the world has entered…
By Lynne Kiesling | September 6, 2024
For a time, when I wanted to make a point that AI hype was overblown, I would just cite Elon Musk’s various predictions about autonomous vehicles (AV). In 2013, Musk predicted…
By Will Rinehart | September 2, 2024
Yesterday’s earnings announcement from Nvidia brings my data center electricity use series full circle: Its now-dominant data center segment increased revenue to $26.3 billion—more than 2½ times what that business generated a…
By Lynne Kiesling | August 30, 2024
More than 30 years ago I wrote a master’s thesis that evaluated NASA’s Space Shuttle program (you can read the publications that followed here and here). As I turned to my PhD dissertation,…
By Roger Pielke Jr. | August 30, 2024
Earlier this year, NASA’s most advanced lunar rover—the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover or VIPER—seemed to be on track to the moon. Engineers integrated the VIPER’s final instrument of four in February.…
By Will Rinehart | August 26, 2024
On Tuesday this week the U.S.-China Science and Technology Agreement (STA) is due to expire unless the U.S. and China can agree on its extension. Today I provide some background…
By Roger Pielke Jr. | August 26, 2024
Large-scale, dynamic social and economic change is often more difficult, incremental, and slower than anticipated. Consider James Watt and Matthew Boulton in Birmingham in 1776, having invented and refined the…
By Lynne Kiesling | August 22, 2024
Last January, upon submission of my paper (since published) — Scientific integrity and U.S. “Billion Dollar Disasters” — I submitted a “request for correction” to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)…
By Roger Pielke Jr. | August 21, 2024
It is memory-holed now, but acid rain was the largest environmental threat in the 1980s. Grisly pictures emerged, prompting research and then action by the government to reduce sulfur dioxide and nitrogen…
By Will Rinehart | August 19, 2024