‘A Sword and a Shield’: How the Supreme Court Supercharged Trump’s Power
The Supreme Court has been significantly changing presidential and executive power.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fDQg28O1EM
Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
The Supreme Court has been significantly changing presidential and executive power.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fDQg28O1EM
“absent a comprehensive permitting reform bill that shrinks the role of the federal government, developers in the U.S. will be unable to rapidly build out power generation to meet future demand.”
https://reason.com/2024/11/11/regulations-are-making-it-harder-to-meet-the-nations-power-demands/
The United States is doing way better than seemed likely since the end of the Cold War as far as its economic power compared to the rest of the world. Improving efficiency rather than protecting jobs is the best way to maintain prosperity. The federal debt is a major concern.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7udKsziNqRQ
“According to the study, reservations today are 46 percent less likely to host wind farms and 110 percent less likely to host solar projects compared to neighboring non-reservation lands. Although the lands provided to Native Americans have historically been less agriculturally productive, those lands are now seen as perfectly conditioned for solar and wind energy, according to research from the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability.
Federal policy, however, continues to pigeonhole Native Americans into farming because of how difficult it can be to use the land for anything else. Since the Dawes Act of 1887, which broke up communal land into parcels among Natives in an attempt to assimilate them into American society, and its subsequent reversal through the Wheeler-Howard Act, Native land policy has been overwhelmingly bureaucratized.
Despite its reversal, the Dawes Act has had long-lasting consequences. Inheritance rules imposed by the law spurred a phenomenon called fractionation, in which parcels of land had to be divided up between all heirs after the owners passed away. As a result, some parcels have hundreds of owners, increasing the cost of development exponentially as the number of owners who needed to be contacted for approval ballooned.
A green light from the Bureau of Indian Affairs is also required for most energy projects on Native lands. “Typically, you have to work with different agencies, including the Bureau of Indian Affairs,” said Sarah Johnston, one of the study’s co-authors, “which, anecdotally, can be quite slow in terms of getting the necessary approvals.” Additionally, ownership records from the Bureau are often incomplete, making cases involving fractionated land even more fraught.
Were reservation lands to host more energy facilities, this would help lower the rate of unelectrified tribal communities. In just Navajo Nation homes, the largest federally recognized tribe in the United States, 21 percent lack electricity.
Altogether, removing regulatory barriers would give Native American tribes the ability to move past the raw deals they’ve gotten throughout history, allowing them to generate electricity, wealth, and prosperity for their communities.”
https://reason.com/2024/10/03/many-native-americans-struggle-with-poverty-easing-energy-regulations-could-help/
“Noah acknowledges, in passing, one particular provision of the existing nuclear regulatory framework on the United States that’s very important: radiation is held to the As Low As Reasonably Achievable (ALARA) standard, which makes it essentially impossible for nuclear to be cost-competitive.
Suppose I had a design for a cost-effective nuclear reactor, and I said I should be allowed to build it, because electricity is good and air pollution is bad. The regulator is going to look at it and say, “Well, that reactor seems awfully cheap to build, why not add a bunch more features to make the radiation levels even lower?” And then I will say, “That would be hideously expensive in a way that is net bad for public health, because it leads to more burning of fossil fuels and worse air pollution.” But the regulator comes back and says, “We’re not using a cost-benefit framework, we’re using ALARA.” And I say, “That doesn’t make sense, coal ash is radioactive — you are creating more radiation by raising my costs.” And the regulator says, “I don’t regulate coal plants, I regulate you — ALARA!”
As Jason Crawford writes, “any technology, any operational improvement, anything that reduces costs, simply gives the regulator more room and more excuse to push for more stringent safety requirements, until the cost once again rises to make nuclear just a bit more expensive than everything else. Actually, it‘s worse than that: it essentially says that if nuclear becomes cheap, then the regulators have not done their job.”
This is a deeply dysfunctional regulatory paradigm, and it reflects the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s origins in 1974 legislation that was explicitly motivated by a belief that the old Atomic Energy Commission was too friendly to the industry.
In 2019, Congress passed the Nuclear Energy Innovation and Modernization Act, which, among other things, “requires the NRC to develop new processes for licensing nuclear reactors, including staged licensing of advanced nuclear reactors.” The hope of NEIMA’s proponents was to change 45 years of the NRC fundamentally being an agency that says “no” to stuff and make them into an agency that would create a regulatory pathway under which new kinds of nuclear reactors could be licensed and built. And after several years, the NRC did get around to writing the new rules for SMRs, but they came up with an even longer and more cumbersome regulatory process.
Earlier this summer, the ADVANCE Act reiterated Congress’s determination for the NRC to change.
But the NRC staff, to the best of my knowledge, fundamentally does not believe that America’s elected officials genuinely want them to make it faster and cheaper to build nuclear reactors. And one reason they don’t believe it is that even though the Biden administration says lots of pro-nuclear stuff, has plenty of pro-nuclear appointees, signed the ADVANCE Act, and has done a lot to help with SMRs in terms of financing, they still coughed-up an NRC nominee who basically supports the status quo. You need a team of political appointees at the agency who are willing to both drive change and also personally take the heat when change makes people mad. You can’t “just use nuclear, bro.” You need to put people in place to actually drive specific policy change in a way that will let the industry grow and work.
And of course, even if you did that, it might not work.”
https://www.slowboring.com/p/noah-smith-is-too-down-on-nuclear
“The blackout is the culmination of decades of disinvestment, an economic crisis, and global factors affecting the country’s oil supply, and there doesn’t seem to be a long-term solution to the crisis.
The Cuban government regularly imposes hours-long blackouts in different parts of the country to conserve the fuel necessary to run the electrical plants. But the current outage is different. It was sparked by a breakdown at one of the country’s aging electrical stations and has affected every facet of life for ordinary people: They cannot cool or light their homes, food is spoiling in refrigerators, they cannot cook, and many can’t access water to drink or wash.
Though the situation has now reached a crisis point, it’s a tragedy that has developed over time and emphasizes Cuba’s fragile economy, development imperatives, and its tenuous place in world politics.”
https://www.vox.com/politics/379206/cuba-power-grid-collapse-castro-venezuela-oil-blackout-russia
“Check the U.S. Constitution, and you’ll see that Article 1, Section 8 clearly gives Congress sole authority over “Taxes, Duties, Imposts, and Excises.” Unfortunately, Congress traded away much of that power during the 20th century, beginning in the aftermath of the Great Depression—which was considerably worsened by a series of tariffs passed by Congress—and continuing with various laws passed in the 1960s and 1970s, as the Cato report details.
In theory, handing over those powers made sense. Lawmakers were more likely to be influenced by parochial interests and would favor protectionism that benefited some local industry, even if it came at the expense of the nation’s economy as a whole. Presidents, it was assumed, would take a more expansive view of the benefits of trade and would use those powers to reduce barriers like tariffs.
For a long time, that was true. It no longer is. Both Trump and President Joe Biden have favored protectionism, and have faced scant opposition from Congress or the courts.
If Trump returns to the White House in 2025, he would assume huge power over the flow of goods into the United States “without substantial procedural or institutional safeguards” due to the “broad and ambiguous language” included in many of those trade laws passed decades ago, Packard and Lincicome write.
The tariffs that Trump imposed during his term in office took advantage of many of those same powers.”
https://reason.com/2024/10/10/could-trump-impose-more-tariffs-without-congressional-approval/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDgLuL4ZDMs
CHINA Power Shortages Damaging Economy & Industry as Hydro Output Falls & Chinese Industry Suffers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-41GyGSqTEg
Shapiro Doesn’t Realize This Big Mistake & Gets It All WRONG
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1yaePHlgsA