Jun 15, 2025 | Blog, Energy Transition Policy & Policymaking, Framing and the Energy Transition Debate, News, Partisanship, Elections and the Energy Transition
So far 2025 has seen a lot of “pivoting” away from clean energy and toward natural gas. Los Angeles Times writer Sammy Roth recently documented one such pivot, by wind energy champion and conservative billionaire Phil Anschutz. Tech industry giants who led the charge...
Jun 10, 2025 | Blog, Democracy and Transitions to Authoritarianism, News, Partisanship, Elections and the Energy Transition
A few weeks ago was graduation weekend at the University of Texas, during which I had the occasion to walk from the law school (in the northeast corner of campus) to an appointment at the business school (at the southwest corner). In that 15 minutes I passed by many...
Jun 5, 2025 | Blog, Democracy and Transitions to Authoritarianism, News, Partisanship, Elections and the Energy Transition
It is no secret that ideological and social media have amplified the worst of human nature in many ways. One away it does this is to supercharge the human instinct to blame a group for the bad acts of its individual members, and to endorse punishment of all the...
May 9, 2025 | Blog, Energy Transition Policy & Policymaking, News, Partisanship, Elections and the Energy Transition
Over the last few months Republicans in Congress have been writing strongly worded letters to each other about the various green energy subsidies created by the 2022 passage of the Inflation Reduction Act. In early March, 21 House Republicans urged Speaker Mike...
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...