The federal Environmental Protection Agency has announced that from now through August 15 it will use infrared cameras mounted on planes to identify large emitters of methane from oil and gas wells in the Permian Basin, an area spanning west Texas and east New Mexico that supplies about 43 percent of the oil produced in […]
EPA Takes Aim at Permian Basin in Continued War on Fossil Fuels Learn More »
Eight-and-a-half years ago, E&E News called Joseph Goffman a “law whisperer” because “His specialty is teaching an old law to do new tricks.” The epithet was well enough deserved that Harvard Law Today repeated it five years later. Now, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee is considering Goffman’s nomination to become Assistant Administrator for
Should an Environmental Regulator Teach Old Laws to Do New Tricks? Learn More »
Washington, DC26th July 2022 Dear Chairman Carper, Ranking Member Capito, and Members of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works: The undersigned organizations and individuals write to express and explain our opposition to the confirmation of Joseph Goffman as Assistant Administrator for Air and Radiation in the Environmental Protection Agency. Mr. Goffman served in
For years the federal government, especially its Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), has sought to use “social cost of carbon” (SCC) as justification, at the cost of billions of dollars, for regulations making it more difficult to drill for and use fossil fuels. That practice can continue—for now. On May 26, the Supreme Court declined a
States’ Opposition to Federal Social Cost of Carbon Use Survives Supreme Court Decision Learn More »
A year before being inaugurated President in 2021, Biden professed that “we are going to get rid of fossil fuels.” Before the recent inauguration, America, for the first time since Harry Truman was president about 70 years ago, had finally become crude oil independent and no longer relied on unstable Petro-powers and foreign crude oil
Biden’s Crude Oil Policies May Be The Cause of Shortages and Inflation Learn More »
I have a new article published in the latest issue of International Affairs Forum. The topic of this issue is Climate Change and Energy. Mine is one of twenty papers. A range of topics are covered. My article is the least alarmed among them. You may recognize several of the authors, which include Don Wuebbles and
A ‘Plan B’ for addressing climate change and the energy transition Learn More »
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) just released its latest big report, this one titled Climate Change 2022: Mitigation of Climate Change (a mere 2,913 pages). Practically nobody will ever read it. (I confess haven’t.) Its Technical Summary is just 142 pages. (No, haven’t read that yet, either.) Its Summary for Policymakers
The new Pause has lengthened by another month. On the UAH satellite monthly global mean lower-troposphere temperature dataset, seven and a half years have passed since there was any trend in global warming at all. As always, if anyone has seen this surely not uninteresting fact mentioned in the mainstream news media, let us know
Global Temperature Has Not Been Rising Steadily Learn More »
In 1920, to protect American shipping from foreign competition, Congress passed the Merchant Marine Act, also known as the Jones Act. Section 27 requires that ships carrying goods from one US port to another be built and flagged in the US and owned and crewed mostly by Americans. While they can make sense in terms
Hundred-Year-Old Mistake Comes Back to Bite US Learn More »
Regardless how stringent climate policies are, or how rapidly we move from internal combustion to electric vehicles, increasing battery needs around the world presage a huge increase in demand for cobalt. Right now, as Ronald Stein and Todd Royal demonstrate in their book Clean Energy Exploitations, most of the world’s cobalt comes from mines with
New Cobalt Mine in Idaho Could Start a Trend Good for People and the Planet Learn More »
