Sep 24, 2025 | Blog, Energy Transition Policy & Policymaking, Framing and the Energy Transition Debate
Recently, two items came across my energy news feed within a few days of one another, each underscoring a different aspect of the ongoing challenge of maintaining a reliable electricity supply on a rapidly changing electric grid. The first item was an a report from...
Sep 19, 2025 | Blog, Democracy and Transitions to Authoritarianism, Journalism, Bias & Censored News
As we watch the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) use its power to stifle political dissent, we should step back and look at the story of how we got here. It is a story about the simultaneous (re)concentration of economic power, on the one hand, and the...
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...
