Apr 25, 2026 | Blog, Democracy and Transitions to Authoritarianism, Energy Transition Policy & Policymaking, Partisanship, Elections and the Energy Transition
[Previous posts in this series: #1 / #2 / #3 / #4 / #5] ——- As of Monday I will have taught my last class as a tenured professor, and I will be considered “retired” as of May 1. I will continue to do some teaching at UT-Austin, but it feels...
Apr 18, 2026 | Blog, Democracy and Transitions to Authoritarianism, Energy Transition Policy & Policymaking, Partisanship, Elections and the Energy Transition
[Previous posts in this series: #1 / #2 / #3 / #4] ——- This is my penultimate “being curious-not-judgmental is good (energy) politics” post, and this one addresses how and why the climate coalition sometimes focuses on the wrong things. For...
Apr 10, 2026 | Blog, Democracy and Transitions to Authoritarianism, Partisanship, Elections and the Energy Transition
[Previous posts in this series: #1 / #2 / #3] Many people are familiar with this Will Rogers quote: “I don’t belong to any organized political party. I am a Democrat.” Democrats have always understood that they are a big tent ideologically; and given...
Feb 20, 2026 | Blog, Democracy and Transitions to Authoritarianism, Partisanship, Elections and the Energy Transition
Last year Republicans in Congress tripled the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) budget, and the agency is establishing a permanent presence (renting offices, etc.) in communities all over the country. The rapid doubling of the number of ICE agents has created...
Jan 28, 2026 | Blog, Democracy and Transitions to Authoritarianism, Journalism, Bias & Censored News
Canadian Prime Minister, Mark Carney’s January speech at Davos on the demise of the “rules based international order” garnered a lot of well-deserved praise for acknowledging the United States’ abandonment of that system, and it’s implications for the rest of...
Jan 20, 2026 | Blog, Democracy and Transitions to Authoritarianism, Energy Transition Policy & Policymaking, Partisanship, Elections and the Energy Transition
We humans are biased toward understandings of reality that include some minimum level of optimism about the future. But if we ignore the bad news, we shut ourselves off from parts of the truth. Which brings me to the Supreme Court’s forthcoming Slaughter...
