Blog

By Thomas W. Overton, JD The news blogosphere was briefly contorted earlier this week by a study published in Nature Climate Change that appeared (to some laymen, at least) to suggest that large-scale wind farms were contributing to global warming. Naturally, given the intersection of several hot-button issues (renewable energy and climate change), and the […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., 28 April 2012 — A vexing problem faces those who advocate massive global political and economic responses to a warming climate allegedly marred by mankind’s insatiable appetite for goods and services that produce carbon dioxide. The data to justify climatastrophism are mighty thin. As Woody Guthrie put it in a […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., 19 April 2012 — Advice to NRC commissioner Kristine Svinicki: it’s time to start polishing that resume. Your days on the regulatory commission are over. The term of Republican Svinicki, who led an unsuccessful attempted regicide of NRC chairman Greg Jaczko last year, expires June 30. Under the law, the […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., 16 April 2012 — So clever of the White House. President Obama says his administration’s latest energy strategy — mimicking his GOP adversaries — is “all of the above.” This is the “welcome ever more trotters into the trough” approach. And most everybody who makes energy loves the free lunch. […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., 28 March 2012 — Just how significant is the Obama administration’s new regulation on carbon dioxide emissions from new coal-fired power plants, announced yesterday? From here, it looks like a fair amount of ado about not very much. In today’s cynical political environment, it’s hard not to see the Environmental […]

By Thomas W. Overton San Diego, 20 March 2012 — A fair amount of ink has been spilled in the commodities market over record natural gas storage inventories in the U.S. As of March 9, they stood at 2,369 Bcf, a whopping 735 Bcf more than this point last year, and well above the previous […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., March 20 2012 — The most important economist you probably have never heard of is William Stanley Jevons. Contemplating the convergence of coal, industry, and technology in the middle of the 19th Century, Jevons explained why increasing efficient use of coal meant more, not less, use of the dusky diamonds […]

By Thomas W. Overton, JD San Diego, 16 March 2012 — Yesterday, the NRC announced that it is sending a special team to San Onofre after several steam generator tubes in one of the reactors failed an inspection. This isn’t good, but probably sounds worse than it is. First, full disclosure and some background: I […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., 14 March 2012 — Climate science is a wicked mess. That’s not a political statement or a casual description of the difficulties of the man-made global warming knife fight. It’s a technical term some social scientists use to shed light on complex, convoluted, interconnected problems. It also provides a useful […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., March 4, 2012 — Conflating climate and energy policy in the U.S. over the past several decades has produced incoherent policy in both areas, along with considerable confusion and loss of focus, argues economist Denny Ellerman in the current issue of Economics of Energy & Environmental Policy, the journal of […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., February 13, 2012 — Environmental activists have a long record of miscalculation and misadventure. That’s been particularly true when it comes to coal. Remember acid rain? No such thing, according to a decade-long government scientific inquiry (which can’t ever quite turn itself off). Global warming? A global yawn, Al Gore […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., January 29, 2012 — Detroit is back and the year 2012 looks promising for U.S. automakers. But unlike the hype of early last year, the color that most of the auto industry is seeing in its dreams for 2012 isn’t green, it’s black. That’s in black ink, which has firmly […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., January 25, 2012 — For as long as most of us can remember, both U.S. political parties have been shouting from the partisan tree tops that the country needs an “energy policy,” whatever that might mean. The parties disagreed on just what it should be. The GOP’s mantra has always […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., January 24, 2012 – President Obama yesterday said he will nominate Tony Clark, retiring chairman of the North Dakota Public Service Commission to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, replacing departed commissioner Marc Spitzer in one of the two Republican seats on the commission. Clark was first elected to the North […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., January 21, 2012 — What’s a poor reader to do? Industrial giant General Electric, a crucially important company for many in the energy biz and long a stalwart of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, announced its fourth quarter economic performance this week. The New York Times, which always follows GE […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., January 18, 2012 – In denying TransCanada’s permit for the Keystone XL pipeline to move oil from Alberta’s tar sands projects to U.S. refineries, the Obama administration has stepped directly into a Republican political trap. Given how savvy the Obama folks are about these sorts of events, I confess I’m […]

By Kennedy Maize   Washington, D.C., January 12, 2012 — The ancient English idiom “It’s an ill wind that blows no good” takes on specificity following an article in tomorrow’s Science magazine. The article argues that increased winds in the Southern Ocean, likely caused by a changing global climate, are a boon to the wandering […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., December 21, 2011 – Call it “The Little Breeder that Could.” Sixty years ago – December 21, 1951 – on the remote, high Idaho desert near Arco, legendary atomic scientist Walter Zinn from the Atomic Energy Commission’s Argonne lab outside Chicago, overseeing the Idaho project, wrote in his log book, […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., December 15, 2011 – The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission yesterday gave a big lump of holiday coal to Duke Energy and Progress Energy, putting the colossal Carolina utility merger on hold pending an improved plan to mitigate market power. It isn’t clear whether FERC’s latest skepticism about the merger will […]

By Dan Auld San Diego, December 4, 2011 — Will Rush Limbaugh save the solar industry? It looks that way for Toni Lynch in Allentown, Pennsylvania and Spiro Basho in Hicksville, New York. That’s a hoot, given Limbaugh’s well-known antipathy toward anything remotely resembling renewable energy. Limbaugh has repeatedly taken to the airwaves to slam […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington DC, December 6, 2011—The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has rolled out the latest, and fifth, of its Future Of series of studies of U.S. energy policy, this one focused on the interstate electric transmission grid. The massive transmission tome contains little that’s new to anyone who has followed this subject. Included […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., December 2, 2011 — Think the tension between electric reliability and environmental protection is just theoretical hand-waving? Debra Raggio, assistant general counsel at GenOn Energy, the non-utility generator formerly known as Mirant, will tell you you’re wrong, and she can back it up. Raggio told her tale of regulatory Catch-22 […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., November 17, 2011 — Let’s stipulate: Texas Gov. Rick Perry is a doofus. I’ve elsewhere characterized him as “a stuffed shirt, in an empty suit, talkin’ through his hat.” I was being kind. In his recent debate “Oops!” moment, Perry was able to name only two of the three federal […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., October 18, 2011 — Remember the flap about inconsistencies between the Energy Information Administration and the U.S. Geological Survey over shale gas estimates for the Marcellus formation? Forget about it. According to a new paper from the Washington think tank Resources for the Future, there’s no discrepancy at all: the […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., October 17, 2011 – To describe Progress Energy’s Crystal River nuclear power plant on Florida’s west coast as a problem unit is a substantial understatement. Commissioned in 1977, the 838-MW Babcock & Wilcox pressurized water reactor has been one of nuclear’s Poor Pitiful Pearls for the past few years. Currently, […]

By Carl Zichella Oct. 5, 2011 — The Obama administration’s Rapid Response Team for Transmission (RRTT), today announced a plan to accelerate the permitting and construction of seven transmission lines that are forecast to create thousands of operational and construction jobs. These projects are intended to serve as pilot demonstrations of streamlined federal permitting and […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., September 29, 2011 — A story in the Wall Street Journal recently – about a Chinese wind firm pirating U.S.-owned software that controls wind turbines – reminded me of how, in the 1980s, China stole a coal mine from legendary U.S.-Russian oilman Armand Hammer. The moral of the story, for […]

By Steven Aftergood Updated below When the Central Intelligence Agency established a Center on Climate Change and National Security in 2009, it drew fierce opposition from congressional Republicans who disputed the need for an intelligence initiative on this topic.  But now there is a different, and possibly better, reason to doubt the value of the Center:  It […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., September 20, 2011 — Having failed to implement the provisions of the 2005 Energy Policy Act aimed at facilitating interstate electric transmission, the Department of Energy now wants to punt the problem to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Whether FERC wants this political black spot isn’t clear, but in any […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., September 16, 2011 — Add another prominent name to the list of know-nothing, scientifically illiterate skeptics of the conventional wisdom about global warming. Ivar Giaever, co-winner of the 1973 Nobel Prize in physics, has resigned as a Fellow from the American Physical Society over the scientific group’s political position on […]