Energy Policy
May 18, 2013 — John Hinderaker
I have always been skeptical of electric vehicles, mostly because of my perception that electric car makers are more interested in subsisting on government subsidies than in competing on a level playing field for my business. So I was intrigued when I got an email this morning from Jeff Evanson, Tesla Motors’ Vice-President of investor relations. Evanson, a long-time Power Line reader, pointed out that the company raised over $1
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May 8, 2013 — Steven Hayward
If you want to understand how the United States is suddenly eating everyone’s lunch when it comes to energy, see the chart below, from the Financial Times. No wonder Europe is getting off its duff and trying to move forward with plans to expand its own shale natural gas potential. Not coincidentally, cheap natural gas is starting to prompt several states to back off of their renewable portfolio standards that
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May 1, 2013 — John Hinderaker
Sometimes the really important news is obscured by layers of transient trivia. Actually, that is usually the case. The most important things that happen on any given day are rarely noted. This one at least made the news: the North Dakota/Montana natural gas bonanza is at least twice as large as previously estimated: The sea of oil and natural gas underneath North Dakota is far larger than first thought. There
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April 26, 2013 — Steven Hayward
Just in time for the Weekly Winston comes the fabulous news that the Bank of England has decided to put Churchill on the five-pound note. Now, can we please put Reagan on the twenty, or something? Speaking of Winnie, who according to legend (surely apocryphal) was the inspiration for A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh, loyal Power Line reader RS sends along this adaptation of Milne to remind us of why
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April 11, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
Have left-liberals killed liberal education? I’ve come to think so, and recent developments at Vassar and Bowdoin help confirm my fear. The indispensable Stanley Kurtz is on top of both stories. At Vassar, the subject of this post, he reports on attempts to block a speech by Alex Epstein, a proponent and defender of America’s conventional energy industries. Epstein was invited to speak by Vassar’s Moderate, Independent, Conservative Alliance (MICA).
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April 11, 2013 — Steven Hayward
Robert Redford is, among other deplorable things, an opponent of the Keystone XL pipeline. But comes now Alison Redford, who is no relation, but something more important: she is the premier of the Canadian province of Alberta. And she told the Washington Post yesterday that if the Obama administration rejects the Keystone XL pipeline, it would be a significant thorn in Canadian-U.S. relations. This is fairly tough talk from a nation
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March 21, 2013 — John Hinderaker
Sure, that’s an optimistic question to ask. But following the election, fissures have appeared in the Left’s coalition, and frustration is mounting. Here are a couple of examples. First, an email that MoveOn.org sent out yesterday on gun control. The email is long, so I will excerpt it: Subject: Argh! Dear MoveOn member, This is the nightmare scenario: “Reid guts Senate gun control bill.”1 “Tuesday’s developments are a major win
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March 15, 2013 — Steven Hayward
If you have nineteen minutes–and if you don’t, you should find a way to get them–sit back and take in this video of Matt Ridley by our friends at ReasonTV. Here Ridley explains his “greening earth” hypothesis–why many environmental conditions are getting better around the world–so long as we don’t keep doing stupid things like growing food for biofuel. (Among his other stunners in this presentation is the factoid that
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March 12, 2013 — Steven Hayward
Two days ago Tom Friedman weighed in urging further civil disobedience to block the Keystone Pipeline. The title of the column is ironically apt: “No to Keystone; Yes to Crazy.” Apparently Friedman is in competition with Paul Krugman to be the most egregiously wrong NY Times columnist, which is rather like a contest between Hitler and Stalin to see who is the worst tyrant—a contest impossible to judge since they
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March 3, 2013 — Steven Hayward
It’s been a bad couple of weeks for the fruit-juice vegan energy set. Where to begin? How about Japan, which went through the entirely predictable cycle with regard to its nuclear power in the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster of two years ago. You can follow the cycle in the hilarious New York Times headlines: Japan Sets Policy to Phase Out Nuclear Power Plants by 2040 (Sept. 12, 2012) Then,
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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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