The Carbon Tax Cliff

CITY JOURNAL . ……….. The year 2023 ended with four pieces of legislation in Congress aimed at creating a carbon tax. Since three of those bills have bipartisan sponsorship, we’re more likely to see some form of the carbon tax pass this year. The perceptive Wall Street Journal columnist Holman Jenkins recently observed that Republicans…

X-Raying the Reality and Origin of a Hollow Phrase: ‘Energy Transition’

REAL CLEAR MARKETS …………. It is often useful to contrast rhetoric with reality. The phrase, an “energy transition,” the goal to replace hydrocarbons, has origins that trace back to a 1977 speech by President Jimmy Carter. It was an “address to the nation” that commandeered national media, as is the convention on occasions when presidents seek to…

Energy Realities at the Nexus of Techno-Optimism

REAL CLEAR MARKETS . . . . . Every annual gathering of the technology glitterati at George Gilder’s COSM summit gives us a glimpse of a future that’s exciting for many, even if scary for some. It’s an optimistic vision of the future quite different from what is so often proposed by many myopic forecasters.…

AI’s Energy Appetite: Voracious & Efficient

DAKOTA DIGITAL REVIEW . . . . . . The invention of useful artificial intelligence (AI), epitomized by the hype over ChatGPT, is the latest example of a basic truth about technology. There have always been many more inventions that use energy than those that can produce it. Such is the nature of progress in…

Illusions of Security

CITY JOURNAL ………. As awful events unfold in Israel and Gaza, it’s likely that historians will view Hamas’s surprise attack as analogous to the epic failure of France’s Maginot Line in World War II. Immediately following the surge of terrorists across the border on October 7 came the question: How did it happen, especially given…