Sep 15, 2025 | Blog, Democracy and Transitions to Authoritarianism
I don’t normally do confessional posts on this blog, so please ignore this one if it’s not your cup of tea. But this ties back to how to preserve our deteriorating democracy. The confession is that when it comes to questionable or unethical behavior, I am...
Sep 10, 2025 | Blog, Democracy and Transitions to Authoritarianism, Framing and the Energy Transition Debate, Journalism, Bias & Censored News, Partisanship, Elections and the Energy Transition
Readers of this blog are regularly subjected to my whining about people ignoring what empirical social science research has to say about the roots of our political dysfunction. 🙂 In the Internet era, having an opinion and commanding an audience passes for deep...
Sep 4, 2025 | Blog, Democracy and Transitions to Authoritarianism, Journalism, Bias & Censored News
In Climate of Contempt I lament the way today’s political information environment breeds so much interpartisan fear, anger, and distrust that we “under-attend[] to the health of our democratic institutions.”[1] But one thing I did not do in my book was to...
Aug 30, 2025 | Blog, Energy Transition Policy & Policymaking, Framing and the Energy Transition Debate
Among energy and environmental policy wonks in the northeast, an obscure provision of a 1972 environmental law is at the heart of a dispute over a natural gas pipeline. The provision in question is Section 401 of the Clean Water Act, and it gives states a veto over...
Aug 25, 2025 | Blog, Democracy and Transitions to Authoritarianism, Journalism, Bias & Censored News, Partisanship, Elections and the Energy Transition
One of the consequences of our balkanized, fractured, and insular information environment is that fringe political movements can grow more efficiently, away from public view. People who share the same false beliefs and harbor the same political resentments can nurture...
Aug 19, 2025 | Blog, Energy Transition Policy & Policymaking, Partisanship, Elections and the Energy Transition
As policy, the abundance agenda was inevitable. It is a reaction to a pollyanna-ish view that assumed away the complexity and hard choices of the energy transition. Its popularity is a learning story. One of the joys of teaching is helping students develop a deep...
