Choices

We’re all pretty busy these days with the big, flashy stories which are eating up the news cycle, from Benghazi to Boston to the IRS, oh my! But even with all of this going on, the nation’s governors are still stuck with the tedious business of keeping their states functioning, creating jobs and generally doing [...]

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So you say this is... a "good thing" here?

Great news! Those new EPA regulations which we’ve been trying to warn all of you voters about since the day Obama was elected are close to a reality. And when they go into effect there will be some really super terriffic things happening, at least according to a new study from Duke University, based on [...]

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Irregularities.

Environmentalists went into fits of delight when the EPA left some critical comments on the State Department’s draft environmental impact review of the Keystone XL pipeline on Monday (apparently, “the State Department is incapable of doing a proper analysis of the climate, wildlife, clean water, safety and other impacts of this disastrous and unneeded project” [...]

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Expedience

Normally when I see somebody upset with the EPA, it’s because they’re shoving their regulatory boot down on the throat of somebody else. That’s why it came as something of a surprise to learn that the agency may be facing a lawsuit from a coalition of very blue states. What on Earth, I wondered, might [...]

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Show him the money!

At this point it’s feels as if we’ve been debating and fighting and waiting for some sort of resolution to the Keystone XL pipeline question since roughly around the beginning of Eisenhower’s third State of the Union address. Are we at least close to the point where President Obama is going to finally make a [...]

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Geniuses.

Do you suppose the eco-trendy crowd really, carefully thought this one through before jumping on the self-righteously outraged bandwagon? I have some pretty severe doubts on the matter, but they’re in this thing, and they’re certainly not going to back down now that they’ve invested so much time, money, and media coverage to the issue [...]

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Six of which are in...

I’m starting to think that President Obama should probably drop Gov. Rick Perry and some other red-state governors a quick thank-you note for contributing more than their “fair share” to this economic “recovery” we’re in. As Ed summarized last week, final fourth quarter GDP growth came in at 0.4 percent with overall 2012 GDP growth [...]

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Fiat.

As keen as President Obama and the White House are to take credit for the fact that oil imports are down and domestic production is going strong, this isn’t due to any especial efforts on behalf of his administration as much as it is due to state and private endeavors — unfortunately, it’s all too [...]

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Zoinks!

In yet another of a wide array of examples demonstrating just how deeply the Obama administration’s especial penchant for frivolously dropping taxpayer dollars on favored projects whose only profitable returns come in the form of political capital, a new IG report details some glaring mismanagement of one of their stimulus-backed, climate-change minded green tech ventures. [...]

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Unfair

Should one avenue of “increasing revenue” for the government come from jacking up taxes on American energy companies? If you talk to people in the Obama administration – as well as a number of prominent Democrats in congress – the answer is yes. But according to a recent Harris poll, Americans aren’t even remotely close [...]

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Obviously.

President Obama and the Democrats’ calls for more revenue are almost never complete without some kind of shoutout to how we need to end loopholes for those treacherous, evil oil companies, but just a friendly reminder: Oil companies provide for some of the most handsome portions of federal revenue already. To identify the companies that [...]

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Er, just give us minute.

The Obama EPA has made it their especial mission to bring about the demise of the coal industry post-haste, and last year, they announced that they were getting to work writing the first-ever regulations to limit greenhouse gas emissions from new power plants — even though the industry protested that such rules would “make it [...]

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Let's Make a (rotten) Deal

There must be some fans of The Walking Dead at the White House and the DNC these days, because there are apparently some bad ideas which never die, no matter how many stakes you drive through them. One of these is the carbon tax, not so subtly invoked during the State of the Union address, [...]

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Energizing.

While naysayers have been claiming that the natural-gas revolution is more of a flash in the pan riddled with problems than an economic boon built to last, a comprehensive new study from the University of Texas concludes that the rate of natural gas production is only going to keep increasing for decades to come before [...]

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Trends.

California Gov. Jerry Brown’s administration yucked it up when Texas Gov. Rick Perry offered an open invitation to California companies to come on down and check out the Lone Star state’s business climate, chiding that maybe Texas should devote a little more of their time and resources to fixing their own domestic troubles and claiming [...]

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Let's approach this calmly and rationally.

For decades, eco-radicals and Malthusians have been crying wolf at the calamitous and ever-imminent phenomenon of “peak oil,” when extraction reaches its highest possible rate and the wells will start running dry — leading to famine- and war-inducing energy price shocks that will send humanity into an economic and environmental tailspin, so everybody start running [...]

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"I think the world changed"

It’s time for a short break from politics and a brief excursion into… SCIENCE! (Yes, yes… I know. Republicans don’t care about science, but this may turn out to be important for your smart phone. More on that later.) Some of the great scientific breakthroughs of the last century came about entirely by accident. Many [...]

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33 straight days of increases.

We’re in the middle of a colder-than-usual winter, with record snow storms in the Northeast and average-or-better snowfall in the Midwest.  After last year’s mild winter, temperatures have gotten much frostier in 2013.  Normally, this would lower demand for gasoline and push prices downward.  So why, the Washington Post wonders, have gas prices increased for [...]

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Truth.

Like Ed noted after Sunday’s rather underwhelming anti-Keystone XL pipeline protest in DC, the project really is a no-brainer across all imaginable fronts — and the Obama administration’s continue stalling is getting politically incorrigible. It’s completely understandable that the president would want to wait to make such a controversial high-profile decision until after the election, [...]

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Ho ho ho.

As protests go, the anti-Keystone XL Pipeline march doesn’t seem terribly effective.  First, organizers scheduled it during a vacation weekend for Barack Obama, when the President hit the links with Tiger Woods and left the White House press corps steaming over a lack of photo ops.  Its turnout failed to get even 10% of the [...]

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Federalism and fluids.

While President Obama is more than happy to impose one-size-fits-all, top-down regulations from the federal level on down when it comes to energy production (and just about everything else for that matter, ugh), state governments are the more efficient stewards of their own interests — fiscal, economic, and environmental. States are more than capable and [...]

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Putting our money where his mouth is.

Sorry to barrage you with the tiresome train wreck of platitudes that was President Obama’s State of the Union address last night, but this little fact-check nugget just caught my attention and you know I can’t let it go without commenting. Now, four years ago, other countries dominated the clean-energy market and the jobs that [...]

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Mum's the word.

This entire time, I thought that there was hardly a real chance that the Obama administration would ultimately reject the Keystone XL pipeline when it really came down to it. Sure, they’ve been stalling out the wazoo — presumably hoping the PR furor over the proposal would die down a bit, and/or to think up [...]

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Decisions.

Huzzah! …Er, maybe? Hopefully? When I say “proponent,” I mean that in the sort of weak-tea, oh-so-careful, still-a-greenie-enthusiast, bureaucratic sense of the word, and I don’t want to speak too soon (Lisa Jackson was a kind of Fracking “Supporter” In Name Only), but… at least it isn’t one of those fossil fuel-loathing, hardcore eco-zealots currently [...]

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