Chile’s left-wing government has nationalized its important lithium mining operations, casting doubts about the supply from the world’s second largest lithium producer behind China. Reuters reported Tuesday (Apr. 25), “Chile’s leftist President Gabriel Boric last week announced that control of the country’s vast lithium operations would over time be transferred from Albemarle and SQM (SQMA.SN) to a separate state-owned… More Light Metal Miscellany: Chile, Tesla, China, GM

Germany has closed its last three nuclear power plants, leaving the country without any nuclear generation after 60 years of a nuclear past. The storied French nuclear program continues to be a tale of woe, with continued outages driving up its prices and leading to predictions that the world’s most nuclear nation, once a major… More European Energy Crisis Survived…End of Baseload?

A new, peer-reviewed April scientific article demolishes an earlier claim, largely written by activist opponents of natural gas at the Rocky Mountain Institute, that home stoves burning natural gas cause childhood asthma. That January 2023 article said, “We found that 12.7% … of current childhood asthma in the US is attributable to gas stove use.”… More Restoring the Reputation of Gas Stoves

For natural gas advocates, methane-fueled power plants are ideal: economical, safe, versatile, and reliable. For these advocates, renewables–particularly wind machines — are noisy, intrusive, and – gasp — intermittent and unreliable. The gas case, as stated by its chief Washington lobbying group, the American Gas Association: “Through natural disasters and extreme weather events, the industry’s… More Commentary: Overstating Natural Gas Reliability

California electric customers could be seeing a radical new approach to electricity rates by 2025, if state regulators adopt a plan by the states three large investor-owned utilities. Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), Southern California Edison (SCE), and San Diego Gas and Electric (SDG&E) have jointly filed a plan to comply with a state law… More California Utilities Propose Customer Income Tax

The Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management, landlord of the federal government’s massive ownership of 615 million surface and subsurface acres, mostly in the West, is proposing a major change in focus. The BLM proposal would update its interpretation of the 1976 Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA) to emphasize conservation and protection of… More BLM Moves to Reinvigorate Federal Land Policy

Is the market for electric vehicles, growing gradually but significantly over the last few years, about to boom? The Biden administration, viewing EVs as a key to a lower carbon environment, hopes new public policy will push a step change. The administration’s Environmental Protect Agency, at the direction of the White House, on Wednesday (Apr.… More EVs: Everything, Everywhere, All at Once?

By Henry Sokolski and Andrea Stricker Vladimir Putin seems intent on threatening the West with nuclear war. What’s bizarre is Washington and its allies are helping him. The Russian dictator just proclaimed he may station nuclear bombs in Belarus. The U.S. intelligence community assessed in February that Moscow had “increased its reliance on nuclear weapons” following its… More Guest Commentary: America Helps Fund Russia’s Nuclear Weapons Complex

A federal appeals court has upheld the Biden administration’s plans for updating the official “social cost of greenhouse gases,” more generally known as the “social cost of carbon,” (SCC) rejecting for the second time a challenge led by Louisiana and joined by several Republican states. The states attacked a January 2021 Biden executive order (EO… More Court Upholds Social Cost of Carbon

Fusion energy has recently been a hot topic. Much of the coverage is a combination of hope, technical illiteracy, and fantasy. Given the over 70-year history of fusion hype over fusion reality, some have called it “the fornever fuel.” In January 1958, for example, the British press proclaimed that the domestic “Zeta” fusion experiment meant… More Commentary: Fusion’s Fraught Future