By Kennedy Maize The U.S. Supreme Court Tuesday (Oct. 14) refused to hear an appeal from a tiny West Virgina coal company to a Federal Energy Regulatory Commission ruling in favor of a large natural gas company. It’s a dispute over whether mining on the coal company’s land could endanger a Columbia Gas Transmission Co.’s … More SCOTUS, D.C. Circuit hand FERC wins and a loss
By Henry Sokolski The whispering campaign against the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), an international pact that aims to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, has begun. Several US officials recently asked me, “What good is the NPT?” The developing world uses it to gang up on us to push disarmament. China and Russia use it to argue against forward-deploying American nuclear weapons. … More Guest Commentary: Should the U.S. Walk Away from the NPT?
By Kennedy Maize President Trump professes to love coal and has expressed his ardor through executive orders, in his “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” and through actions at the Departments of Energy and Interior. Given coal’s history over the past couple of decades, are those agency actions likely to make a significant difference in coal’s … More DOE, DOI push Trump’s “clean, beautiful coal” agenda
By Kennedy Maize In December of 1996, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan, commenting on the effect of the “dot-com bubble” on the stock market, coined the term “irrational exuberance.” Some observers of the hype over an end to the decades-long doldrums of U.S. nuclear power are casting a gimlet eye at the claims. Could … More Alan Greenspan and the nuclear revival
By Kennedy Maize White House actions going back to April and put into place last week combine to complicate the bureaucratic lives of two major independent energy regulatory agencies: the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The two agencies are faced with a need to detail how they plan a regulatory … More Trump’s regulatory double whammy hits FERC, NRC
By Kennedy Maize Biden administration $7,500 tax subsidy for purchasing electric vehicles, which helped propel a boom in EVs, expired at the end of September at the hands of the Trump administration. Trump has long professed a distaste for the new automotive technology sweeping the world. Ironically, Trump’s ire at EVs seemed to be tempered … More As federal EV subsidies vanish some state programs persist
By Kennedy Maize Last year, connecting data centers to the PJM transmission grid cost customers in seven states “more than $4.3 billion in additional costs, with billions more still to come,” according to a new report from the Union on Concerned Scientists. The need to link data centers to the grid required “transmission upgrades made … More Do data centers shift costs to normal utility customers?
By Kennedy Maize Is the Trump administration making a mistake eyeing a major equity position in a large Nevada lithium mine? Is it pondering investing in a mineral that will soon see its current advantages overcome by market and technology developments? U.S. news media have been widely reporting that the White House is looking at … More Trump Li mine deal: What could go wrong?
By Kennedy Maize As a November deadline looms, discussions on a new plan for managing the Colorado River as it flows through seven Western states remain stalemated. Under the 1922 Colorado River Compact, the states in the basin must agree on a plan to share the water that provides for irrigation, electricity, and drinking water. … More Fate of the Colorado River Basin in play
By Henry Sokolski Only a handful of cases exist in which US officials have applied US criminal law against soldiers who have harmed noncombatants. As a result, mining national case law for guidance is unlikely to produce many useful insights. That said, the US military has discouraged inflicting unnecessary harm on noncombatants.13 But what of … More Guest commentary: Part 2, A Case for Military Proportionality: Disabling Nuclear Plants