Well, this is it, friends — my last post as a full-time blogger for Hot Air, and it is a bittersweet moment if ever there was one.

On the one hand, as regular readers might have noticed in my blogging over the past two-plus years, I’ve developed something of a penchant for energy issues and environmental policy, and that’s an avenue that I’m excited to keep pursuing when I start my legal education at the University of Arizona later this summer. As ever, I believe that free markets/trade, private property, competition, and bottom-up innovation are much more effective agents for solving environmental problems than the big government, public spending, collective ownership, top-down regulatory methods for which self-titled environmentalists are constantly advocating, and the unintended consequences of which they always seem to be neglecting; with that philosophy in mind, I’ll be working to bring the fight to eco-progressives on what is usually their presupposed home turf.

On the other hand, the many opportunities afforded to me via Hot Air are what helped me to thresh that philosophy out in the first place, and I know I am going to feel bereft without the regularly scheduled missives that allow me to opine/engage/rage about the news of the day. (Le sigh.) I still have to pinch myself sometimes when I see my byline next to those of Ed Morrissey, Allahpundit, Jazz Shaw, and Mary Katharine Ham, all of whom work tirelessly to make this site what it is and have inspired me in so many ways. A huge thank-you to that stupendous team, as well as to Jonathan Garthwaite for giving me the chance to be on it and to Guy Benson and Katie Pavlich for being such supportive colleagues and friends. And, of course, a major thank-you to our sincere commenters — you all have helped me to catch my mistakes and reevaluate my own conclusions on about a zillion occasions — and to our loyal readers, without whom this site obviously wouldn’t be a thing.

I’ll try not to be a stranger and to drop in with updates from law school, and in the meantime, keep up the fight, ya’ll!