Blog

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., June 12, 2012 – It’s hard to cry the blues for a union worker at a nuclear power plant making $122,000 a year with a good health plan and a solid 401(k). That’s the situation of the average striking (or locked out, if you will) member of Local 369 of […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., 3 June 2012 — An international effort is underway to give control and governance of the Internet to a United Nations agency, with implications for ways that U.S. utilities might implement smart grid technologies. Led by Russia and China, the plan to turn the Internet over to the International Telecommunications […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., 5 May 2012 — A Federal Energy Regulatory Commission financial audit finds that the North American Electric Reliability Corp. is failing to focus its work on the new, mandatory electric grid reliability powers Congress gave it in the 2005 Energy Policy Act. Instead, says the FERC staff audit released May […]

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 […]