You’d think the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) would know better than to mess with Texas. But a planned wind turbine facility in West Texas owned by a Chinese entity with links to the CCP exposes just how vulnerable our electric grid is to national and cybersecurity threats. Legislation filed in Texas to ban power plants owned by hostile nations...
If the gas shortages plaguing the Southeast left you high and dry last week, then buckle up. This is just a taste of our future under President Joe Biden’s energy policies. Though these shortages were largely driven by panic buying rather than actual supply constraints due to the Colonial Pipeline hack, they demonstrate just how much energy—something the average...
Is a criminal conspiracy going on in plain sight? Major banks and investment firms are conspiring with radical environmentalists to deny lending and investments to fossil fuel companies—jeopardizing our economy, energy future, and the rule of law. A new white paper from Ambassador C. Boyden Grey for the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s Life:Powered project exposes, for the...
Amid the seemingly endless debate over infrastructure proposals, Congress passed a resolution that’ll have significant negative consequences for U.S. oil and gas production. Using the Congressional Review Act (CRA), Congress reversed the Trump administration’s changes to regulations of methane—also called natural gas—from production wells and pipelines. The use of the CRA means that the Obama-era methane rule...
Amid the hubbub of the Texas House Democrats’ flight to Washington, D.C. to avoid voting on election protection reforms during the special session, many Texans are wondering why electric reliability didn’t make the special session agenda. After all, isn’t this a critical issue, especially as summer continues to heat up? But Gov. Greg Abbott’s recent...
Corporate virtue-signaling is the new black. In this era of hyper-connectedness and social media shaming campaigns, global mega-companies no longer battle over who can offer the best products for the best price. Instead, they fight to see who can sound the greenest. The trend is fueled by environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing, which pressures...
You’d think ERCOT would have learned its lesson. I warned last year that summer blackouts were coming to Texas; it is likely we would have had outages in August 2020 if not for lower electricity demand caused by the COVID-19 economic shutdowns. The winter outages that killed 111 Texans — and the close call on...
Between the pandemic, divisive politics, and a media culture obsessed with rare but headline-grabbing shootings, it’s been a heavy year and a half for many Americans. This Earth Day, environmentalists will only perpetuate the doom-and-gloom zeitgeist by fixating on minuscule, insignificant changes in air pollution and overblown fears of apocalyptic climate change. But we can...
If the February blackouts weren’t a wakeup call to the Texas Legislature, this week’s electricity conservation alerts — unheard of in mild April weather with demand nowhere close to peak levels — should make them bolt upright. It’s clear we desperately need market reform that prioritizes reliability, not just capacity. Unfortunately, “Texas-style blackouts” is already...
Let’s start with a simple fact: It’s not economic “stimulus” when someone comes along, takes money from your right pocket and puts some of it back in your left pocket (keeping much of it for “other uses”). That’s sleight-of-hand, not stimulus, which is a reason the government can’t stimulate anything other than more government. That’s...
With President Biden wasting little time in office, he has clearly set his sights on Texas’ prosperity — first by canceling the Keystone Pipeline and thousands of jobs along with it, then by rejoining the Paris Climate Agreement, and lastly by banning fracking on federal land. Who could expect him to remember his promise on...
Astronauts. Ballerinas. Doctors. Firefighters. Oilfield workers? One of these things is not like the others. When children daydream about what they want to be when they grow up, oil and gas jobs rarely make the list — even in Texas, the country’s top energy-producing state. That needs to change for sake of the future of...