The archive
Agriculture
Across major farming regions, crop conditions are shifting quickly as rainfall and temperature patterns become more uneven. Too much rain is creating problems in some places, while others are dealing with persistent dryness.
Conservation
Instead of reacting after a fire breaks out, public agencies and utility providers must detect dangerous fires before they ignite. This is where companies like Overstory are trying to make a difference.
Transportation
The United States is the world’s largest oil and gas producer, but energy abundance means little if that energy cannot reach the people who need it.
Energy
To unlock affordable grid capacity, policymakers should require utilities to consider the best-available line technologies by default, while utilities themselves modernize planning to reinforce their affordability commitment to customers.
Energy
Rather than causing disparate groups to come together to recognize the importance of all forms of energy, oil prices have resulted in some pushing harder for oil and gas and others pressing harder for solar, wind and batteries. This is a false dichotomy. Both are needed.
Energy
Before instituting sweeping policies that risk creating costs and distortions worse than the supply disruptions and Chinese dependence they aim to solve, Washington needs to weigh the benefits of intervention against its costs.
Energy
Governments shouldn’t determine which forms of energy are “good” or “bad,” using subsidies and mandates to boost the good while imposing restrictions to hobble the bad. Instead, decisions about the fuel mix should be left to the market as much as possible.
Energy
The risks posed by this concentration are worth taking seriously. The problem is that these tools may force taxpayers to take on unnecessary risk—leaving them stuck with the bill if the companies fail—without addressing the underlying problem.
Conservation
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.
Energy
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.
