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,...
Mar 27, 2025 | Blog, Energy Transition Policy & Policymaking, News, Partisanship, Elections and the Energy Transition
The national GOP has taken a fairly sharp turn against green energy in the last few years, suggesting that persuading GOP politicians to support a lower-carbon energy future is unlikely in the near term. Instead, it looks like the only near term path to stronger...
Mar 20, 2025 | Blog, Framing and the Energy Transition Debate
The U.S. electricity system has enjoyed several decades characterized by flat (overall) demand, sharply declining costs in less polluting forms of generation, and the presence of firm, mostly legacy gas-fired backup generation on the grid. In most places, these forces...
Mar 12, 2025 | Blog, Energy Transition Policy & Policymaking, Framing and the Energy Transition Debate, Journalism, Bias & Censored News
Part 1 of this post explained why the key to recovering the importance of truth in policymaking rests with voters. This second part addresses a subject I cover in chapter 6 of Climate of Contempt: namely, how to go about breaking the spell that the propaganda machine...
Mar 10, 2025 | Blog, Framing and the Energy Transition Debate, Journalism, Bias & Censored News, Partisanship, Elections and the Energy Transition
Predictably, the second Trump Administration has ramped up its gaslighting and destruction of liberal democratic norms and institutions. Its attack on climate science – indeed, most of the government’s science capability — is more direct this time. It...
Mar 5, 2025 | Blog, Framing and the Energy Transition Debate
I note in Appendix G to Climate of Contempt the reaction of one of my manuscript reviewers to my assertion that the internet distorts the policy thinking of people in both parties. The reviewer wrote that the book reads “too much as if it’s a both sides issue.” That...
