After months of review and mammoth change, the Wyoming legislature sent Governor Mead's budget back to him for his signature. When the governor sent it back – signed – it had more line item vetoes than ever before. The nature of Governor Mead's line item vetoes in the Wyoming budget bill created a couple of underlying themes. According to Governor ...

We won. The Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) will not spend any money on the Clean Power Plan (CPP) until the Supreme Court's stay on the CCP is lifted, if ever. Here, for the terminally curious, is the longer version. Wyoming has an extremely short budget session, 20 working days. To work within that, the budget bill is done as a "mirror ...

On Tuesday, February 9, the Supreme Court stayed the Clean Power Plan (CPP), much to everyone's surprise. The Supreme Court issued a terse order, less than a page long. It gave no explanation and no indication of the thinking of the five Justices who voted for the stay. The Supreme Court has never before granted a stay of any federal regulation whi...

Such is the stuff of unicorns and leprechauns.– FERC Commissioner Tony Clark One aspect of the Clean Power Plan (CPP) we have not yet discussed in this series of blogs on the Clean Power Plan is the reliability of America's electric power generation in 2030. The recent winter storm Jonas on the east coast should remind us of how much we have come t...

A meme has been going around Facebook asking, "Did you know that it would take an area of just 254 kilometres squared filled with solar panels to power the entire world?" No sources, no calculations from known data, nothing. Just a bald faced assertion. Really? Let's see if someone with a degree in philosophy, not in engineering, can do a quick bac...

What will the environmental effects of the Clean Power Plan (CPP) be? Recall that the stated media driven, post-Kyoto Protocol (to which the US did not subscribe), goalis to reduce the Earth's temperature increase between now and 2100 to less than 2 ℃. The short answer is: zilch. NERA Economic Consulting estimates that CPP by 2030 will reduce the g...

What is the EPA's Clean Power Plan (CPP)? It is a cap and trade scheme intended to reduce emissions from existing power generators such as coal generators. It was proposed by the EPA in June, 2014, and the final rule was unveiled by President Obama on August 15, 2015. The final version of the plan aims to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from ...

Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts, Antonin Scalia and Bryan A. Garner. Thomson/West, 2012. $69.93 new, $43.27 used, and Kindle edition at Amazon.com. As they say on the Internet, IANAL. I am not a lawyer. So what am I, a non-lawyer, doing reviewing a book on reading legal texts? A book that might well be a law school text or part of an...

This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill - the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill - you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes. – The Matrix, 1999 What if I were Morpheus, and you had just taken the red pill? Where...

The opponents of the Transfer of Public Lands (TPL) from the federal government to the states use several arguments against the proposal. Two of them are: The states can't manage their public lands.The states will sell off the public lands for development. Really? Tell that to Adirondack Park in upstate New York. Adirondack Park was set up by the N...