The need to reduce fire risk is apparent, and we know how to do so through active forest management. Yet policy continues to slow those efforts down and that urgently needs to change.
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Federal Grid Reforms Pick the Right Route and the Wrong Builder
The Department of Energy’s recent National Transmission Needs Study identifies several of these cases, where regions’ electricity costs would decline substantially if they were connected by a high-capacity transmission line. Providing these benefits to consumers, however, requires confronting not just the incentives that discourage utilities from building interregional lines, but the state laws that let incumbent monopolies control who builds them.
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Common Sense Returns to the Endangered Species Act
By rescinding the expansive regulatory definition of “harm” under the Endangered Species Act and returning to Justice Scalia’s narrower textual reading that limits “take” to direct actions against individual animals, federal agencies have struck a blow for property rights, reduced unnecessary land-use controls, and restored freer market incentives.
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Pennsylvania Wants Data Centers to Pay Their Own Way. There’s a Better Way to Do It.
Lawmakers in both parties are scrambling to address the issues revealed by data centers. President Donald Trump, his administration officials, and several governors (including Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro) signed on to a statement of principles that encourage data centers to bring their own power or pay for the power they need.
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Advisory Council on Historic Preservation Releases Section 106 Modernization
Congress is running short on time to pass a comprehensive permitting reform package before the lame duck this fall. On the table awaiting votes are bills reforming the National Environmental Policy Act, Endangered Species Act, and Clean Air Act. The National Historic Preservation Act, which has recently gained traction as a permitting barrier to projects, has received comparatively little attention in Congress.
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The Wire Inside the Wire: Energy Capacity Hiding in Plain Sight
Building more is no substitute for building smarter. At times, this has been a challenge for America's energy infrastructure, particularly transmission. It is evident that the U.S. needs more transmission, but which transmission lines it builds matters for protecting ratepayers and keeping costs in check. An overwhelming number of House Members just reaffirmed this guiding principle for how America should approach the development of electric transmission.
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Will the Ratepayer Protection Pledge Work?
As Americans crank up their air conditioning bills in the summer months, the importance of affordable, dependable power is critical but often taken for granted. Especially today, families are more acutely aware of how much they’re paying as electricity rates have risen at a pace more than double the rate of inflation over the past year.
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Endangered Species Modernization and Genetic Rescue Will Flip The Script On Conservation
The 50-year era of “don’t-touch” conservation may have ended three weeks ago, after the Trump administration narrowed the definition of harm under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). Harming an endangered species used to encompass damage to the land the species lives on. Landowners with endangered species were limited in how they could steward their plots of land. After all, endangered species’ recoveries relied on proactive efforts by landowners, which will remain intact regardless of the changing incentive structure of the ESA. The unnecessary penalties landowners had to incur were lifted, and conservation efforts will be able to fit the needs of the land and life rather than keeping the overburdening punishments of the ESA.
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Energy‑Only, Not Energy‑Never: A Better Path for Generator Interconnection
Many American power plants are stuck in a dysfunctional express lane. Energy Resource Interconnection Service, or ERIS was created to give generating facilities a faster, leaner way to connect to the grid without waiting in the main queue. Instead, in many markets, ERIS today places fast-trackers on the same slow schedule as projects in the main line. When new, highly competitive generation cannot be connected to the grid in a timely way, a key affordability and efficiency opportunity is left on the table.
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Red State Freedom Is Better for the Environment Than European Green Socialism
Here is a fact that should embarrass every climate activist: States with the most liberated energy markets in America are producing better environmental outcomes than the green mandators of Europe — and doing it without impoverishing their people in the process. Freedom, it turns out, is a remarkably effective environmental policy.