The Foundry

Posts by ‘Nick Loris’

Nick Loris

Nicolas Loris is a Research Assistant at The Heritage Foundation's Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies. Loris studies energy, environment and regulation issues such as the economic impacts of climate change legislation, a free market approach to nuclear energy and the effects of environmental policy on energy prices and the economy.

Follow Nick Loris on Twitter: @NicolasLoris311

• Does the Government Pose a Bigger Threat to Toyota Than its Sticky Pedals?

  Posted February 5th, 2010 at 9:40am in Enterprise and Free Markets with 38 comments

  Toyota’s bad press has been for its sticky pedal incident certainly isn’t surprising, but is all the negative attention warranted? When asked about the Toyota recalls, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood responded by saying, “My advice to anyone who owns one of these vehicles is stop driving it, and take it to the Toyota dealership because [...] More

• Climate Change Scientific Consensus Cloudy as Ever

  Posted February 4th, 2010 at 12:55pm in Energy and Environment with 5 comments

  We’re a few days before a massive snowstorm whitewashes the District of Columbia, but the Climategate and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change storms are already here and as fierce as ever. Earlier this week, The Guardian shed a little more light on the flawed and hidden data from University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit: The [...] More

• Obama’s Enthusiasm to Nuclear Energy is Encouraging, But…

  Posted February 3rd, 2010 at 3:47pm in Energy and Environment with 4 comments

  President Obama reaffirmed his willingness to expand the commercial nuclear energy in the United States when he said in his State of the Union address that we should be “building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country.” He backed it up by including an additional $36 billion in loan guarantees [...] More

• School Choice Bad for the Environment?

  Posted February 2nd, 2010 at 2:18pm in Energy and Environment with 1 comments

  No, it’s not a joke. It’s the finding from a new paper published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology. The argument is school choice leads to more driving which results in more vehicle emissions. The abstract says, “that eliminating district-wide school choice (i.e., returning to a system with neighborhood schools only) would have significant [...] More

• Wind Mills: Not Spinning, Not Creating Jobs

  Posted February 2nd, 2010 at 12:21pm in Energy and Environment with 9 comments

  The cold weather is creating a number of unintended consequences for new energy designs. First, snow accumulating on LED traffic light bulbs wouldn’t melt because the lights failed to heat up resulting in car accidents, and in some instances, death. In Minnesota, the weather resulted in wind turbines freezing and thus not turning even if [...] More

• Budget 2011: Obama’s Energy Budget: A Revenue Neutral Cap and Trade System?

  Posted February 1st, 2010 at 4:16pm in Energy and Environment with 3 comments

  President Obama released his fiscal year 2011 budget this morning; his budget provides $28.4 billion for the Department of Energy (DOE) and $10 billion for Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Both sections in the budget reflect the president’s message in the State of the Union address delivered last week: a government attempt to facilitate America’s transition [...] More

• Government Gone Green: Obama Sets Federal GHG Emission Cuts

  Posted January 29th, 2010 at 4:27pm in Energy and Environment with 7 comments

  President Obama called on the federal government, the nation’s largest energy consumer, to its increase energy efficiency and to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions 28 percent by 2020. According to the White House if the targets are met they “would reduce federal energy consumption by the equivalent of 646 trillion BTUs, equal to 205 million [...] More

• Obama’s Attempt to Revive Cap and Trade

  Posted January 28th, 2010 at 5:33pm in Energy and Environment with 10 comments

  President Obama gave his first State of the Union speech last night and while his delivery reminded many Americans of the man they saw on the campaign trail, his rhetoric was much of the same. Although the president did call for offshore drilling and an expansion of nuclear, his focus was clean energy jobs. He [...] More

• Get Out of Your SUV and Take the Green Bus

  Posted January 27th, 2010 at 11:54am in Energy and Environment with 1 comments

  Over 2,500 business leaders are flying in from around the world on carbon-spewing planes to the Swiss ski resort Davos for the World Economic Forum (WEF). If they were planning on taking a sports utility vehicle (SUV) or a limousine from the airport to the resort, they better think again: Conference organisers have asked the business [...] More

• New Year, Same Story: Global Warming Dead Last on America’s Priority List

  Posted January 26th, 2010 at 11:55am in Energy and Environment with 2 comments

  The wheels have been falling off the global warming bandwagon well before Climategate and the recent hole-poking of the much trumpeted Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) report. In a national survey last January by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, global warming ranked 20th out of 20 as far as [...] More