Jun 5, 2025 | Blog, Democracy and Transitions to Authoritarianism, News, Partisanship, Elections and the Energy Transition
It is no secret that ideological and social media have amplified the worst of human nature in many ways. One away it does this is to supercharge the human instinct to blame a group for the bad acts of its individual members, and to endorse punishment of all the...
May 20, 2025 | Blog, Democracy and Transitions to Authoritarianism, Energy Transition Policy & Policymaking, Framing and the Energy Transition Debate
The indiscriminate cuts to the executive branch being made by Elon Musk’s DOGE operation are crippling the government’s ability to provide essential public goods to consumers, and to protect consumers from the predations of unregulated markets. As reported recently in...
May 4, 2025 | Blog, Democracy and Transitions to Authoritarianism, Framing and the Energy Transition Debate, Journalism, Bias & Censored News, Partisanship, Elections and the Energy Transition
[This is the last post in a multi-part look at new books addressing what we know, and don’t know, about today’s politics. Part 1 is here; part 2 is here; and part 3 is here.] The Final Book: Focus on Public Debate The books we have reviewed to date have...
Mar 30, 2025 | Blog, Democracy and Transitions to Authoritarianism, Framing and the Energy Transition Debate, Journalism, Bias & Censored News
“All culture is Internet culture.” – Taylor Lorenz (technology and media writer) The first two months of the second Trump administration are best understood as a kind of retributive lashing out at the people who MAGA voters believe have been attacking,...
Feb 25, 2025 | Blog, Democracy and Transitions to Authoritarianism, Journalism, Bias & Censored News
I recently began teaching a course on the regulation of “networks, platforms and public utilities,” using a 2022 casebook by the same name. It is from a group of progressive legal scholars who are trying to recover the national memory of the public interest reasons...
Feb 15, 2025 | Blog, Democracy and Transitions to Authoritarianism, Journalism, Bias & Censored News
Much of the energy world is waiting on the Trump Administration to disperse funds that Congress directed to be used to support specific types of energy projects. The Administration’s withholding of that money is just one small stream in a firehose of illegal,...