General

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 […]