Energy Policy
February 19, 2013 — Steven Hayward
Never mind the Keystone pipeline for a moment–could Obama have opened the door to drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR)? If he did that, environmentalists would literally (meaning, in this case, actually) riot in the streets, rather than just getting arrested as a a symbolic gesture as they have done with Keystone. The Washington Free Beacon (which I always want to render as the Washington Free Bacon, even
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February 18, 2013 — Steven Hayward
That was my first reaction this morning to seeing the news that Colorado’s Democratic Governor John Hickenlooper recently drank a glass of fracking fluid to demonstrate that it is safe. From the Washington Times account: Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper went to unusually great lengths to learn firsthand the strides the oil and gas industry has made to minimize environmental harm from fracking. The first-term Democrat and former Denver mayor told
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February 13, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
President Obama’s discussion last night of “energy” was dishonest even by his standards. After briefly citing the nation’s energy gains under his administration, he turned to “climate change,” using a few quirky weather events as the springboard for advocating more federal regulation of the economy. Ben Cole of the Institute for Energy Research has offered a forceful and, I think, largely meritorious response to Obama’s BS on energy and climate
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February 6, 2013 — John Hinderaker
Everyone knows that the U.S. is experiencing a boom in oil and gas production, but that boom is limited to private lands and, to a lesser extent, state lands, since the Obama administration continues to block energy development on federally-owned lands. How badly is the Obama administration hurting our economy by suppressing energy development wherever it can? The Institute for Energy Research commissioned Prof. Joseph Mason of LSU to estimate
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January 24, 2013 — Steven Hayward
Not sure whether we have added to the chorus about the new documentary Fracknation that debuted this week, from the dynamic Irish film duo Philem McAleer and Ann McElhinney and co-director Magdalena Segieda. (We did have a brief squib featuring McElhinney in my highlight reel from CPAC last February.) It’s the perfect antidote to Matt Damon’s Promised Land, which, shall we say, isn’t exactly setting the box office on fire like
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January 22, 2013 — Steven Hayward
The Governor of Nebraska, Dave Heineman, has approved a new route for the long-delayed Keystone XL pipeline. But now the State Department is slow-walking the final decision as long as it can. State has the say on Keystone because the pipeline will cross a national boundary. This is actually good news, since State has to deal with Canada directly about many matters, unlike the EPA, which can disregard Canadian interests.
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January 18, 2013 — Scott Johnson
All is not as it appears in the case of Richard Windsor, the alias used by outgoing EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, apparently to shield email messages from discovery and disclosure. Under court order to cough up the email messages to Chris Horner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and having turned over a first installment of 2,100 such email messages earlier this week, the Obama administration is making this a case
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January 18, 2013 — Steven Hayward
All the leaves are brown, and the budget is still red, even with Jerry Brown’s big income and sales tax hike the voters foolishly approved back in November. The latest entirely predictable piece of news was reported yesterday. The Wall Street Journal headline tells the story succinctly: “California Budget Hit By Facebook’s IPO.” Wait a moment: how exactly is a budget “hit” by the creation of massive new liquid wealth?
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January 3, 2013 — Steven Hayward
I mentioned here yesterday that Pennsylvanians are enjoying a surge of prosperity while New York Governor Andrew Cuomo kowtows to cheap-energy-hating environmentalists who are making their last stand again natural gas. Cuomo keeps hiding behind “safety reviews,” missing several deadlines for a decision and calling for additional investigation. Today the New York Times reports that Cuomo has been sitting on a state Health Department assessment that concluded months ago that
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January 2, 2013 — Steven Hayward
The good folks at the Energy Information Administration have produced this stunning 22-second video that shows the boom in natural gas drilling in Pennsylvania from 2005 to April 2012. While you watch this explosion of prosperity for the Keystone state and contemplate with glee the anguish this is causing environmentalists, keep in mind that next-door New York has continued to ban most natural gas exploration and production, which not only
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December 28, 2012 — Steven Hayward
If Matt Daaaymon was hoping his new Arab-funded film “Promised Land” would do for natural gas “fracking” what “The China Syndrome” did for nuclear power, he’d better hope for a sequel to “Team America” to rescue him from being an embarrassment to the professional Left. John already took official Power Line notice of the movie a few weeks ago, and I already gave Damon a Green Weenie back in September
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December 24, 2012 — Steven Hayward
The federal budget is not the only thing looking at dropping off a fiscal cliff. One of the loose ends caught in the whole mess is the renewal of the “production tax credit” (PTC) for wind power, a supposedly “temporary” measure to help the industry get on its feet, but which, like wartime rent control, somehow becomes a permanent necessity to “save jobs” now. The wind industry is currently lobbying
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December 10, 2012 — Steven Hayward
The defenders of clean green energy “investment” (which I put in scare quotes because when a liberal says “investment,” he means “taxpayer subsidy”) say we should look past Solyndra, A123, and other bankruptcies because it is normal for there to be failures in an infant industry. But the Washington Times reported last Thursday that the RENIXX index–the specialty index for renewable energy companies (it stands for the Renewable Energy Industrial
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November 8, 2012 — Steven Hayward
Energy was an issue, sort of, in the campaign, and in the aftermath there’s lots of chatter about whether, among other things, Obama will now approve the Keystone pipeline, or block it, as his enviro buddies demand. Whether he’ll regulate the heck out of hydrocarbon energy, or get out of the way of the extraordinary boom (and boon) the private sector unexpectedly dropped in his lap. (The shale gas boom
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November 1, 2012 — Steven Hayward
One of my last projects at AEI was writing and producing, with my frequent writing partner Ken Green (who nailed it on The News Hour last night), a series of short videos on basic energy literacy. One of the biggest problems for office holders, the media, and the public alike is that energy seems simple. Why not? you plug things in or throw a switch, and voila!–it works! But in
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October 19, 2012 — Steven Hayward
The fine folks at The Onion, who I sometimes think are closet conservatives because they skewer liberal icons so often (yes, I know the same thing happens on The Simpsons, and why this happens), have produced the following video sendup of a TED talk about compost-powered cars (3:30 long): Trouble is, how can you tell the difference between this sendup and what liberals actually believe about energy, as I explained
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October 18, 2012 — John Hinderaker
The vision of the future touted by many environmentalists includes electric automobiles. The dream of the electric car is an old one; for quite a few decades now, electric vehicles have supposedly represented the future. Thus, a friend sent me this photocopy of a newspaper article titled “Ford Chief Says Electric Car Now Is Under Development.” The article appeared in January 1971; click to enlarge: Ford Motor Co. is nearing
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