Good Reads
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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International Emergency Economic Powers Act
11 min read
The article discusses the Supreme Court case 'Learning Resources v. Trump' about whether presidential emergency powers allow tariff authority. IEEPA is the specific 1977 law Trump invoked for Liberation Day tariffs, and understanding its history and scope is central to the legal debate described.
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European Union Emissions Trading System
14 min read
The article discusses Greece vetoing EU carbon fees on shipping and broader European debates about climate targets versus economic competitiveness. The EU ETS is the world's largest carbon market and the mechanism through which these policy tensions play out.
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Nondelegation doctrine
13 min read
The Supreme Court tariff case mentioned centers on whether Congress can delegate broad regulatory powers to the president. This constitutional doctrine—experiencing renewed interest from the current Court—is the legal framework that will determine the case's outcome.
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My fall university tour continues with a visit to Johns Hopkins this week, Cornell next week, and the University of Wyoming on November 19. If you are local please come and say Hello, and a few of my talks will be live-streamed and/or recorded. In addition, I’ll be posting on some of my lectures.
Today, I share some great essays that have crossed my desk this week. After that I share the full text of my first energy piece for The Dispatch which synthesizes for a broader audience the ongoing turn to climate pragmatism and energy realism around the world.
Recommended Good Long Reads
As some may recall, I have edited an anthology of the career work of science policy scholar Dan Sarewitz and we just shipped off the final text to the publisher. Yay! The book — How Good is Science? Truth and Progress in a Quarrelsome World — will be out in 2026, and I’ll be discussing it more next year.
Meantime, Dan has a pull-no-punches new essay out at The New Atlantis, The Party of Science Is Over: Democrats became so caught up appealing to experts that they forgot to appeal to voters. Here is an excerpt:
“The scientific community, to the extent such a thing exists, embraced the alliance with the Democrats. Shortly after Obama took office, the weekly editorial in Science magazine declared: “The Enlightenment Returns.” In 2012, a letter from 68 Nobel-winning scientists supporting Obama’s re-election stated — almost certainly incorrectly — that his Republican opponent, Mitt Romney, would “devastate a long tradition of support for public research and investment in science.” The letter said nothing about the political affiliation of the signatories, as if that were an irrelevance, but, writing for Nature magazine at the time, I found that of 43 who had made political donations, only five had ever contributed to a Republican candidate.”
Over at SCOTUSBlog my AEI colleague Adam White, one of the nation’s most astute observers of the Supreme Court, has an excellent analysis of the potentially landmark case to be heard tomorrow over President Trump’s use of emergency powers to set tariffs — President Trump’s tariffs v. the Supreme Court’s duties.
This excerpt is provided for preview purposes. Full article content is available on the original publication.