Blog

By Kennedy Maize The Obama administration’s Environmental Protection Agency is declaring that carbon dioxide, a life-giving and ubiquitous atmospheric chemical, is a threat to public health. That’s a completely illogical determination, but also completely expected. The notion that carbon dioxide is a pollutant has nothing to do with chemistry or physics or biology or climatology, […]

By Kennedy Maize A report in the Wall Street Journal that Russian and Chinese spy hackers have penetrated the U.S. electric power grid, and left malware and root kits, cyber time bombs, to explode in the future strikes me as bogus. The story had no named sources, and the details were sketchy at best. Where […]

By Kennedy Maize Is biology the key to improved battery performance? Researchers in a recent issue of Science magazine describe how genetically-engineered viruses could boost the power of lithium ion batteries, expected to be the batteries of choice for plug-in hybrid vehicles. A research team led by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology used […]

One of my favorite folk songs from the Great Depression is “The Big Rock Candy Mountain,” which I remember hearing sung by Burl Ives, the bearded and burley tenor who, among other gigs, performed with Pete Seeger and the Weavers in the 1950s (boy, does that date me). One of the lines in the song […]

By Kennedy Maize Coming in this Sunday’s (March 29) New York Times magazine is a splendid profile of one of the more important global warming skeptics: Freeman Dyson of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Studies. The article by Nicholas Dawidoff – “The Civil Heretic” – is required reading for those who believe climate change is the […]

The Obama administration’s energy secretary, Dr. Steven Chu, has quickly become Dr. Who. As a recent New York Times article noted, Chu has repeatedly stumbled politically, demonstrating that being a Nobelist in physics is no qualification for the bumps-and-grinds of energy politics in Washington. The Times observed that Chu is most comfortable with the science […]

Here’s a hoot. Call it thinking “outside the box,” or, more specifically, thinking outside the boundaries drawn by Congress. Maybe we can drill for oil and gas in the 1002 lands in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska from outside the refuge. The technology is directional drilling, which the oil and gas industry has […]

When it comes to future electricity supply, the Obama administration is engaged in an implicit con game. Whether the president knows this, which I doubt, there must be smart people in his circle who understand that the promises he makes about renewable energy simply don’t stand up to the delusions they create. Those people are […]

I’m a George Orwell fanatic. I own, and display proudly in my office, every book he wrote (Homage to Catalonia is the best), every Orwell (1903-1950) biography, and every critical study of his work. I also have the four-volume edited collection of his works, compiled by his widow, Sonia Orwell, and their friend and collaborator […]

By Kennedy Maize When it comes to access for transmission lines to bring renewable power from where it is located to folks who can use it, who poses the biggest obstacles? In the West, according to Pedro J. Pizarro, Southern California Edison’s vice president of power operations, a chief villain is Uncle Sam. Federal land […]