General

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., Oct. 25, 2010 – Over the years, presidents have appointed energy secretaries with a variety of backgrounds: policy wonk, business person, political apparatchik, former elected official, military officer, even dentist. None have exactly worked out. Scratch that. None have worked out at all. The latest incarnation at the fortress-like Forrestal […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., Sept. 29, 2010 – I love Alaska. The beauty of the mountain ranges, rivers, islands, and glaciers is stunning. The diversity of habitat and wildlife inspires wonder. The summer days and winter nights are filled with mystery. The people, of all ethnicities and political persuasions, are endearing and quirky. My […]

By Kennedy Maize Let us hope that the false hope of fast breeder reactors fueled with plutonium reprocessed from spent light water reactor fuel is finally properly interred. A new report from the same MIT crew that examined the future of nuclear power in 2003 buries the pipe dream of breeder reactors, or, at least, […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., Sept. 7, 2010 — The time has come for all of us to abandon the sterile, and now futile, brawl over massive federal legislation to deal with the alleged problem of global warming. For the advocates of measures such as carbon taxes, cap-and-trade (a second-best tax), or Environmental Protection Agency […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., Sept. 3, 2010 – Look for significant changes in the way Congress addresses energy policy and legislation when the 112th Congress convenes in January 2011. By most expert accounts, Democrats are going to suffer major losses at the polls in November, with many pundits predicting a Republican takeover of the […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., Aug. 23, 2010 — It’s time to stop fretting about climate change and start worrying about space weather. In an opinion article in the Aug. 15, 2010 New York Times, journalist Lawrence E. Joseph raises the issue of the havoc a major solar storm could have on modern electric power […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., Aug. 9, 2010 –  Washington is abuzz with talk of a lame-duck session of Congress after the November mid-term elections. Many pundits seem to assume that the Democratic leadership will call the solons into session after the elections (with the Democrats having done very poorly, possibly losing their control of […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., July 29, 2010 — More hurdles have arisen for the nascent nuclear renaissance. It now appears that federal loan guarantees for new nukes could turn out to be a dead end, meaning that only two utilities, at most, will get Department of Energy support for new reactors. In passing the […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., July 28, 2010 — Will global warming overwhelm the U.S. with illegal Mexican immigrants? That’s the preposterous claim by three Princeton academicians in an online article for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and it has prompted guffaws from among sophisticated readers. In the article – “Linkages among […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., July 22, 2010 — Is anyone really surprised that Senate majority leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada) has finally declared major energy legislation dead? For weeks, Reid has been singing words from a country classic that I’m sure he knew were false: “Mother’s not dead, she’s only sleeping.” Today, he recognized the […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., July 8, 2010 — It’s become a cliche that government should not try to pick winners and losers in the marketplace. But cliches are useful by the circumstance that they are often correct. So now we come to government loan guarantees, a classic example of government picking winners and losers. […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., June 28, 2010 — Sen. Robert Byrd — the most important coal-state legislator in the country — had barely checked into the hospital last week before speculation began about who might succeed the 92-year-old Democratic legend if he were to die. When Byrd died on Sunday, the rumor mill kicked […]

[Editor’s note: This commentary first appeared in The Energy Daily, our sister publication on June 14. Llewellyn King was the founder and, for many years, publisher, of The Energy Daily and I worked for him for a decade as a reporter. We often disagreed on policy and politics, but I completely agree with this take […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., June 11. 2010 — Their lips say “yes”, but their eyes say “no”. That’s my take on the offer of “practical” energy legislation this week by Senate Republicans. Yes, I’m cynical about the strategy and tactics of the GOP embodied in this legislative proposal (as far as I know, it […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., 6 June 2010 — I’m offering a challenge and opportunity to those of you who believe that the science of global warming is settled: take a look at an informed contrary view. Last month, I wrote in this blog about noted physicist Will Happer, and his proposal to create a […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., May 26, 2010 — A breathless article in today’s New York Times outlines ties between U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu and, today’s chief villain, British Petroleum. Turns out that BP dropped half-a-billion dollars on Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory for work on alternative fuels when Chu ran the lab. When he got […]

By David E. Wojick, PE, Ph.D. Washington, D.C., May 22, 2010 — Listed below are the National Research Council panel members who wrote the so-called National Academies of Science report on climate science, published this month. Several are old time anthropogenic global warming (AGW) proponents, like Bob Corell of the Heinz Center, Warren Washington of […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., May 21, 2010 — Thanks to the far-reaching and meticulous online research for which he is justifiably famous, my friend Glenn Schleede has answered the conundrum that stands in the way of widespread adoption of renewable energy technologies. Writes Glenn, “I haven’t been able to verify this, but I’ve heard […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., May 29, 2010 — File this in the “empty threat” folder: Gary Pierce, a member of the five-person, elected Arizona Corporation Commission, the state’s utility regulator, has suggested that Arizona should block a move by the city of Los Angeles, Calif., to boycott the Grand Canyon State by cutting off […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., May 16, 2010 — Will Happer, noted Princeton physicist, and a veteran of Washington’s bureaucratic wars, has an intriguing suggestion about how to reconcile the views of raving advocates for climate controls with the objections of skeptics, when both sides are populated by reputable scientists. He wants the government to […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., May 7, 2010 — The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency never saw a regulation it didn’t like. The Competitive Enterprise Institute never saw one it did. Now the federal agency and the Washington-based conservative think tank are involved in a silly but amusing battle of “Did not! Did so!” It promises […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., May 6, 2010 — Gambling appears to be a nearly ubiquitous human trait, as a news release I received recently demonstrates. The release, from Bookmaker.com, an offshore gambling den (online betting is technically illegal in the U.S., but that’s a joke) offers the odds that BP will be able to […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., April 28, 2001 — Having spent decades as a Washington reporter, I’ve read more government reports that I can count. Paper is policy currency in D.C. But this week’s interagency report – A Human Health Perspective on Climate Change – is the loopiest I can recall. This report, honchoed by […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., April 25, 2010 — The Senate has again failed to kick off debate on energy/climate legislation.  A bipartisan group — Sens. John Kerry of Massachusetts (D), Joe Lieberman of Connecticut (I-D), and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina (R) — have been laboring for a year to create a bill that […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, April 7, 2010 — The coal mine disaster at Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia rips at my heart. The 25 miners who died, and that’s likely to be 29, are the kind of folks I grew up with and lived with a major portion of my life. […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, April 2, 2010 — Greenpeace doesn’t like cloud computing. The out-on-the-edge environmental group also doesn’t much care for Apple’s upcoming IPad computer platform, which adds to the data content of the cloud. Why is this? Because the data cloud, and its associated applications such as the IPad, dwell on server islands […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, March 25, 2010 — Hype in the energy world has long history, going back to many generations of perpetual motion machines and the like (cold fusion for example). Nuclear hype is one of the most presistent forms, from electricity “too cheap to meter,” to atomic-powered bombers, to cars with nuclear-powered engines, […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, March 22. 2010 — Remember all that hype about a nuclear renaissance? Push it all a couple of years into the future, as the economy has caused growth in demand for electricity to slow considerably, making the need for new baseload capacity less pressing. In a wire service interview, Marvin Fertel, […]

Dennis the Menace Takes on Obama Nuke Support By Kennedy Maize Washington, March 19, 2010 — The Obama administration’s decision to offer some $8.3 billion in loan guarantees to the Southern Company for a new, two-unit expansion at its Vogtle nuclear power station in Georgia is drawing fire from the Democratic left in Congress. Rep. […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, March 11, 2010 — As reported in POWER NEWS, the Obama administration has formally pulled the plug on the Yucca Mountain, Nevada, project to store spent commercial reactor fuel, the latest in more than a 50-year record of failure on the part of the federal government to fashion a way to […]