General

By Kennedy Maize Look out, the political wobbles are beginning for Senate climate legislation. The wheels could come off anytime soon now. The Energy Daily reported that the Senate’s schedule for taking up climate legislation won’t begin on Sept. 8, as originally announced. Instead, said Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), chairman of the Senate Environment and […]

By Kennedy Maize Bobby Hefner, the doyen of deep gas, is back on the energy policy scene in a big way. That’s the only way Hefner has ever wanted to be seen: on a big canvas. Back in the 1980s, Hefner’s Oklahoma-based GHK company was the prophet of natural gas finds way down below where […]

By Kennedy Maize There’s a new debate developing about the politics of  cap’n’trade v. health care: can the administration pass both health care legislation and climate legislation?  Alternatively, would failure of the administration’s health care initiative, whatever it ultimately looks like, make passage of energy legislation more likely? The proposition that health care defeat will […]

By Kennedy Maize God, I love global warming. This spring and summer has been the coolest and wettest since we moved to our current western Maryland farm 20 years ago. My pastures are lush with clover, and we took our lambs to the butcher six-to-eight weeks earlier than normal. We raise 99% grass-fed lambs (a […]

By Kennedy Maize I’ve been reading a lot lately about “geoengineering,” aka “climate engineering,” as a way to deal with global warming, instead of a cumbersome, bureaucratic international command-and-control regime, or a cap-and-trade mechanism. This is intriguing. I suspect this engineering approach is another policy dead end, but it is worth contemplating and discussing. Ultimately, […]

By Kennedy Maize When Congress comes back to D.C. after Labor Day, it will face important strategic decisions, as will the Obama administration and the Democratic leadership. In particular, they will face the decision whether to focus on health care legislation or energy policy. I’m betting heavily on health care. I suspect that the administration’s […]

Assertions by renewable energy advocates that renewables have now exceed nuclear in the overall U.S. energy mix are dead wrong, the equivalent of mixing apples and hand grenades.

By Kennedy Maize USEC, the Bethesda, Md., uranium enrichment company that took over the Department of Energy’s enrichment program in 1992 is claiming that the Obama administration is reneging on promises to provide $2 billion in loan guarantees for the company’s “advanced” centrifuge enrichment plan, made during the 2008 presidential campaign. DOE’s decision to withhold […]

By Kennedy Maize Here’s a hoot. The recent global cooling we have seen would have been cooler without global warming. That’s the claim of Dr. Brenda Ekwurzel of the Union of Concerned Scientists. In a letter to the Washington Post on July 27, Ekwurzel objected to a column by conservative George Will, who has taken […]

By Kennedy Maize One of funniest pieces of political satire that I have read in many years is in the current issue of the New Yorker magazine. Written by Ian Frazier, the article’s title is “The Temperatures of Hell: A Colloquium.” The premise is that temperatures in Hell have risen by 3.8 degrees since 1955 […]