Policy

The New Deal at 75: An Inspiration, Not a Blueprint

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Whatever your political perspective, Americans need to admire the New Deal for, if nothing else, its ambitious agenda. In a way unparalleled in the 20th Century, the New Deal left us a legacy of achievement – one that we can still see in big cities like San Francisco and small towns like Wishek, North Dakota.  read more »

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How China Co-opted the Green Movement

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Rising empires require collaborators to expand their influence and win over adversaries. In this respect, China and other anti-Western regimes increasingly count on green activists, investors, and media to advance their interests.  read more »

The High Cost of California's Green Energy Policies

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Since the early 2000s, governors and legislators from both parties have signed onto a climate agenda in California that is making energy steadily unaffordable.  read more »

Pipe Dreams

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In the early 1990s, Ken Lay and his colleagues at Houston-based Enron, were, as one veteran of the energy business told me, “the kings of the American pipeline business.”  read more »

Did Over-Reliance On Solar & Lack Of Grid Inertia Cause Spain’s Blackout?

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Less than two years ago, climate activists in Spain celebrated after a utility announced it would close the country’s largest coal plant, the 1,468-megawatt As Pontes facility.  read more »

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Europe is Second Best in Deep Tech and Willing to Trade

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A systematic mapping of where the world’s global leading companies in deep tech are located shows that the US continues to have a significant advantage. However, Europe is catching up  read more »

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Trump’s Chaos has Brutally Exposed the EU’s Fatal Flaws

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I thought crack-smoking had lost its appeal, but perhaps it is still a regular pastime among journalists determined to take down Trump’s America. The Economist, for example, has suggested that “the land of the free” has moved across the Atlantic, from America to Europe.  read more »

5 Reasons Why I'm Cancelling My Subscription to The New York Times

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We have lived in Austin for 40 years. And for nearly all of that time, Lorin and I have subscribed to the New York Times. For decades, we took the paper version.  read more »

Can Democrats Exploit Trump's Tariff Chaos?

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As with many political movements, MAGA represents a fragile coalition of groups that often have little in common — and, at the extremes, may even detest one another.  read more »

The Profoundly Misunderstood Housing Affordability Crisis

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Over the last half-century, more restrictive urban planning policies have been associated with undermined housing affordability  read more »