On Billionaires and Bullies

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...

Advertorials, Influence, and Guilt By Association

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...

Government by Grievance

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,...

Will the energy transition leave the economically vulnerable behind?

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...

Facts Matter, But They Don’t Win – Part 2

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...

Facts Matter, but They Don’t Win – Part 1

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...