“Texas generates the most renewable energy in the nation. Three Republican bills being advanced by the state legislature could halt Texas’ green energy progress and give fossil fuels a leg up in the state’s energy market.
Senate Bill 388, which has passed the state Senate, would require at least 50 percent of power generation installed after January 1, 2026, to come from “dispatchable” energy sources, which include natural gas, nuclear power, and coal. This bill effectively subsidizes fossil fuel projects by requiring utility providers to purchase power generation credits from dispatchable energy sources.”
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“A report from Aurora Energy Research estimates that this bill would add $5.2 billion to Texas power prices over the next decade; residents could pay an extra $200 per year in energy costs.”
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“Using the “police power” of the state ignores what regulators and the market are saying: Texas needs every energy source to meet future demand. That includes renewables.”
“The 2025 report ranks state highway systems across a range of metrics, including capital and maintenance spending, rural and urban pavement quality, traffic congestion, bridge quality, and safety.
Similar to reports in recent years, North Carolina and Virginia continue to be top performers, respectively ranking first and fourth on this year’s report. (Virginia was ranked first on last year’s report.)
Both states scored high on pavement quality and relatively low highway spending. Feigenbaum chalks this up to these states using quantitative metrics to select highway projects and having dedicated maintenance units within their departments of transportation.
States like California that rely less on more politicized processes to select projects tend to rank much lower on the report. Despite being one of the highest spending states, it has some of the worst pavement quality, worst traffic congestion, and an uninspiring safety record.
“You can spend above average if everything else in your system is good and still get an excellent ranking,” says Feigenbaum, pointing to Utah (which scored eighth on the report) as an example. The state’s spending is on the high side, but it also ranks highly on pavement quality, safety, and congestion.
States like California and New Jersey both spend a lot of money for no apparent improvement in performance.”
“The 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act apportioned more than $1 trillion to a wide variety of projects deemed “infrastructure,” including $550 billion toward “‘new’ investments and programs.” Among its line items, the law included $7.5 billion to build electric vehicle (E.V.) chargers across the country.
The rollout was uninspiring. Under the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) program, which controls $5 billion of the $7.5 billion total, only 183 chargers have come online at 44 stations across the country, more than three years after Biden signed the bill into law. (Under federal rules, each station funded by the law is required to have at least four charging ports.)
In fairness, not all of the cash has been spent: The NEVI has only allocated $2.4 billion and awarded $520 million, as of press time.
Still, it’s a dispiriting result from an administration that came into office with big promises to “build a national network of 500,000 charging stations.”
Similarly, the 2021 infrastructure law included the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program, with $42 billion to expand broadband internet access across the country. In his speech at the 2024 Democratic National Convention, Biden equated it with the New Deal, calling the broadband expansion “not unlike what Roosevelt did with electricity.”
But three years after its creation, the program has disbursed no money and supplied broadband to zero households. “Thanks to a federal affordability requirement that telecommunications companies say is too tight, many states have sparred with Washington over their funding applications, delaying the rollout,” Politico wrote in September.”
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“Biden’s supporters would counter that while the initial rollout was underwhelming, much of this spending is designed to pay off over time: NEVI, for example, is apportioned $1 billion per year through FY 2026 when the program’s funding runs out.”
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“it’s clear by this point that Biden’s big-spending dreams were hamstrung by bureaucracy and red tape, much of which was included in the bills themselves or in administration guidelines.”
Cities should not have minimum apartment sizes. Such restrictions make city living more expensive, preventing some people from moving or staying there, and worsening homelessness. Some people can live just fine in tiny apartments and spend time in city amenities while utilizing the city’s intellectual and job benefits.
“Although only 14 percent of urban road miles nationwide are under state control, two-thirds of all crash deaths in the 101 largest metro areas occur there, according to a recent Transportation for America report. In some places, this disparity is widening: From 2016 to 2022, road fatalities in Austin, Texas, fell 20 percent on locally managed roads while soaring 98 percent on those the state oversees.”
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“Instead of fixing such roadways, state officials tend to keep them as they are, citing limited resources or a need to maintain traffic speeds. In doing so, they constrain the capacity of even the most comprehensive local reforms to respond to urgent problems like car crash deaths, which are far more widespread in the US than among peer countries, or unreliable bus service.
Unless state DOTs recognize that a successful urban road must do more than facilitate fast car trips, that problem will persist.”