Washington, D.C., July 15, 2014 – Is Miami sinking under the assault of a climate gone wild? That’s the characterization of an article in Britain’s left-oriented Guardian newspaper. But the piece is generating push back from non-ideological and moderate journalists. And the Guardian’s breathless hype is too often reflective of general media coverage of the […]

Washington, D.C., July 12, 2014 – In public, Gina McCarthy, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, comes across as a no-nonsense, rough-and-tumble, tough cookie. But a recent flap over the origins of her agency’s proposed rules for controlling carbon dioxide from existing coal-fired power plants shows her to be defensive and thin-skinned. The revelation of […]

Washington, D.C., July 9, 2014 – President Obama made a major political mistake in using the ambiguous authorities in the 1990 Clean Air Act to take on the task of reducing carbon dioxide emissions from existing coal-fired power plants. Today, it looks like Obama’s petulant push to go where Congress wouldn’t on climate policy is […]

Washington, D.C., July 3, 2014 – Do you want a future in which you have to plug in your username and password on your smart phone to open you refrigerator? Talk about an annoyance. This thought came to me when reading a new report in the June 30 issue of MIT’s Technology Review magazine. Much […]

Washington, D.C., June 30, 2014 – There appears to be a cyclical element to the story of nuclear power in the U.S., an ebb-and-flow that repeats itself over time. There’s no lock-step periodicity, but the tides of hyperbole and deflation occur with some regularity. The most recent case of the binge-and-repent cycle in nuclear comes […]

June 27, 2014 – Iceland, the westernmost country in Europe, is unique. Its geology is entirely volcanic, as it sits on the meeting place of the Eurasian and North American tectonic plates. It has a unique language, with a 32-letter alphabet, based on Scandinavian, Saxon, and Celtic roots. Iceland had the first parliamentary system of […]

  Washington, D.C., June 10, 2014 – How can governments and businesses make investment and policy decisions in the face of enormous uncertainties? That’s a question facing many in the world today as scientists assert that global warming could be an existential crisis, but with great uncertainties attached. The World Bank’s economics team offers some […]

Washington, D.C., June 6, 2014 – Could the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit’s decision vacating the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s demand response rules for organized markets also spill over into the FERC’s controversial rule on regional transmission planning? That thought occurred to me when I read the decision on Order 745, the […]

Washington, D.C., June 3, 2014 – Amid all the hype and hoopla over the Obama administration’s plan, revealed this week, to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from existing power plants – this will end civilization as we know it, this will create a brave, new world, and so forth from all over the political and ideological […]

Washington, D.C., May 28, 2014 – Norman Bay is the wrong choice to head the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Currently head of FERC’s enforcement office, Bay has demonstrated that he is a skillful and tenacious prosecutor. That may be what FERC needs in its staff enforcement office. It’s not what the agency needs at the […]