The passage of the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” means that subsidies for wind and solar power are slated for repeal after 2027. Unsurprisingly, this has sparked a litany of analyses explaining just how catastrophic the end of these subsidies will be for the United States and the world. While there’s good reason to doubt those claims, they shouldn’t...
We hope you are all having a happy Independence Day! We have a fun cookout-related fact to share: Did you know that U.S. beef is among the least emission-intensive cattle meat in the world? The emission intensity of U.S. beef production is also declining, as noted in an excellent analysis from The Breakthrough Institute, which found...
The rapid evolution and adoption of generative artificial intelligence (AI) have sparked numerous debates, ranging from the impact on employment to broader concerns about societal implications. One of the most contentious aspects is the intersection of AI and copyright law, with 39 copyright lawsuits underway against AI companies. The U.S. Copyright Office recently weighed in with a report focused...
Two weeks ago, tens of millions on the Iberian Peninsula lost electricity. While the reason for the disturbance could take years to discern, it’s likely that no single cause led to the blackout. Previous issues of this type and magnitude resulted from a confluence of mishaps and misfortune. If the American experience is any gauge, a final assessment of the...
This has been a busy week with trade wars and a lot of uncertainty for various commodities. Most notably for the Low-Energy Fridays audience, oil—despite being exempted from many of the tariffs—fell sharply in price, and still hasn’t fully recovered to last week’s level. The reason for this is simple: Oil investors anticipate lower oil demand under the...
The Trump administration, like the preceding Biden administration, is making liberal use of a little-known Cold War law called the “Defense Production Act” (DPA). Utilization principally goes like this: The administration identifies some sort of production deficiency (e.g., minerals, solar panels, heat pumps) and then invokes the DPA, declaring it an issue of national defense in order to...
As discussed previously, the series of 31 deregulatory actions recently announced by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) contains enough content for a month’s worth of Low-Energy Fridays. But, today, we are focusing on one of the more high-profile actions announced: the elimination of the EPA’s so-called “endangerment finding.” The story began two decades ago during the George W....
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently announced a slew of actions aimed at curtailing climate-related regulation, including repealing the Social Cost of Carbon (SCC), the metric regulators use to estimate the economic benefits of avoiding climate change and determine whether climate regulation is worth its burdens. While one could argue that the EPA’s move is purely political, the reason...
President Donald J. Trump recently issued a new executive order (EO) that will require “independent agencies” to submit their rulemaking to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for review. Interestingly (but unsurprisingly), this led to a deluge of news articles and quotes from opponents of the administration decrying the move as a power grab and part of an anti-regulatory agenda....
Over the last 50 years, America has seen domestic energy production grow much faster than energy consumption. As a result, we now export more energy than we import. International trade in energy, both imports and exports, has been an important part of the energy industry’s success; however, recently proposed tariffs threaten this achievement. On Feb. 1, the...
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