President Donald J. Trump recently announced tariffs on imports, which will cover energy commodities like oil and gas to a certain extent. At a glance, this policy may appear to advance “energy independence,” an agenda Trump favored on the campaign trail—but it’s not quite so simple. Defenders of tariffs on energy would point out that they will reduce...
Put another way, while productivity gains in the economy reduce emissions by letting us consume more with fewer inputs, the taxes and regulations that accompany climate policies carry a “deadweight loss” that trades productivity improvement for direct emission abatement. This creates a tradeoff typically not included in analysis and potentially explains why having many regulations...
After his electoral victory, President Donald J. Trump announced the formation of a “National Energy Council” that will coordinate energy and environment-related activities within the administration—though the specifics of when this may arrive and in what form are still unknown. This prompts two thoughts: First, this is going to make for very confusing acronyms since the...
Washington, D.C. is in a tizzy over President Donald J. Trump’s rescission of a slew of policies implemented under former President Joe Biden, and energy policies are receiving special attention in multiple executive orders (EOs). Trump withdrew from the Paris Agreement, ended the social cost of carbon, and ordered a halt to climate-related regulation and offshore renewable energy leases—all with the...
California has mandated an end to internal combustion engines, but consumers aren’t going along with this central plan. The brilliance of the market economy is that the customer actually is the king, which has become obvious when it comes to electric vehicles. Like any product, EVs offer benefits and disadvantages that consumers can sort through on...
The Biden administration recently set new tariffs on photovoltaic solar panels imported from Southeast Asia. Always a thorny issue, trade policy is expected to be especially controversial in 2025. Therefore, it’s worth understanding when tariffs might be appropriate and when they might carry more cost than benefit. The solar panel import issue is challenging because it isn’t...
In 2009, then-Vice President Joe Biden was stumping for what was known as the stimulus bill. To paint a picture of the administration’s successes, he was championing a half-a-billion-dollar clean energy innovation project supported by the Department of Energy Loan Programs Office (LPO). That project was called Solyndra, and it promised a novel type of solar power generation. Solyndra...
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