May 1, 2025 | Blog, Energy Transition Policy & Policymaking, Partisanship, Elections and the Energy Transition
A Texas faculty friend who worries about our political descent keeps asking me “So, how does it end?” He shares my sense that today’s assault on our liberal democratic institutions is more than a swing of the pendulum to the political right. It...
Apr 20, 2025 | Blog, Framing and the Energy Transition Debate, News, Partisanship, Elections and the Energy Transition
Climate of Contempt bemoans the way ideological and social media encourages and supercharges the human instinct to make attribution errors in politics. These errors involve a number of logical fallacies I describe in the book, and they often take the form of assigning...
Apr 12, 2025 | Blog, Framing and the Energy Transition Debate, Journalism, Bias & Censored News, News, Partisanship, Elections and the Energy Transition
As a couple of billionaires (or one billionaire and one pretender) run roughshod over legal standards and democratic norms, it reinforces the suspicion that economic elites get the policies that they want at the expense of the public interest. Folk wisdom says that he...
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...
