Aug 25, 2024 | Blog, Energy Transition Policy & Policymaking
Dangerous heat, more frequent and intense flooding and wildfires, and more violent hurricanes are constantly in the news cycle. What we know about the relationship between climate change and severe weather is worrying enough. We need not embellish reality with the...
Jun 15, 2024 | Blog, Energy Transition Policy & Policymaking
Modern information flows shield the good news about the energy transition from conservatives, and the bad news from liberals. Our insulated realities make us too certain too quickly that our preferred truth is THE truth. In fact, we don’t know how technology will...
Jun 5, 2024 | Blog, Energy Transition Policy & Policymaking, Partisanship, Elections and the Energy Transition
[Note: This is the second in a series of posts looking at how the political analysis (and corresponding prescription) in Climate of Contempt could turn out to be wrong. The first post was here.] Some people, particularly those at the ideological poles of each party,...
May 15, 2024 | Blog, Energy Transition Policy & Policymaking, Journalism, Bias & Censored News
Steve Levine’s 2015 book, Powerhouse: Inside the Invention of a Battery to Save the World, tells the story of one of the laboratories competing for federal (2009 ARRA) stimulus money targeting battery development. Along the way the book illustrates the...
May 10, 2024 | Blog, Energy Transition Policy & Policymaking
In chapters 2 and 3 of Climate of Contempt I describe the gap between folk wisdom about corporate dominance of the policymaking process and what empirical political science research says about that issue. That gap is fairly large. As a general matter, well-resourced...
Apr 25, 2024 | Blog, Energy Transition Policy & Policymaking
Most plans to stabilize atmospheric carbon in time to avoid the worst effects of global warming rely heavily on rapid reductions in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from the electricity sector. We have the proven technologies that would allow us to do so relatively...