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About 1/5 of Americans live on the Northeast Corridor, from DC to Boston. It's an ideal stretch for high-speed rail, but could we build it? Amtrak says it'd cost more than $100 billion. What if Amtrak is wrong? statecraft.pub/p/how-cheaply-…

Chart comparing US and China on high-speed rail construction. China is the red bar. The US is there in blue...

Sad to see people like this stooping ever-lower Seeing Trump use Aaron's beloved permitting rules to destroy solar & wind, Aaron instead tries to blame the people *fighting these rules* It is in fact Aaron's fault—all permitting reform opponents' fault—that these powers exist

"So a case that was about PrEP turned into a case that was about every preventive service except PrEP—only to become, in a roundabout way, a case about PrEP again. And maybe also wearables." My take on the Supreme Court's decision in Braidwood, NEJM via Divided Argument:

New report by me and Anatoly Ivanov: The Procedural Hangover: How NEPA Litigation Obstructs Critical Projects NEPA litigation reshapes the process. Agencies pad the record, reports get longer, timelines slip, and projects are not built. Hence, the procedural hangover.

It’s hard to find a trend in the electricity system right now that *doesn’t* point to near-term price increases if not a broad affordability crisis. The setup is bad and getting worse. I wrote about it for Heatmap News:

This work benefitted radically from input from our review board Nicholas Bagley Jennifer Hernandez David Schleicher Arnab Datta James Coleman Chris Elmendorf. Shoutout to Nick in particular for his work on the "procedure fetish" that inspired our title.

Very helpful new NEPA database 🥳

Just discovered this David Roberts series on creating great cities, which anticipates so much of the piece that David Schleicher & I wrote for Niskanen Center. Check it out: grist.org/article/2011-0…

Three makes a trend: Wildtype approved to sell cultivated salmon, Mission Barns approved to sell cultivated pork fat, now believermeats has FDA green light to sell cultivated chicken. I didn’t expect RFK Jr. to let this happen and I’m glad I was wrong.

Is decarbonization dead? Jane Flegal & I join Ezra Klein to talk through how Trump just shredded America's most ambitious climate policy, what survived, and where we go from here. Listen The New York Times or wherever you get your podcasts. 🎁 link below.

Yes!

I will be honest, I did not have "pass the biggest cut to Medicaid in the program's history but also extend the enhanced marketplace subsidies" on my 2025 bingo card but who knows anything anymore

icymi

Everything David Broockman Josh Kalla is a must read. But this one particularly. Has huge implications for local elections too -- which are usually either formally non-partisan or where most action happens in primaries.

y'all gonna love this book, it's a total banger

Harmless error in administrative law! In the wild!

The Westerman-Golden NEPA reform bill is first out of the gate for bipartisan permitting negotiations! Most notable: judicial review provisions are getting more sophisticated — which is a good sign for future negotiations. 🧵👇 x.com/ThomasHochman/…

Here’s my plan for energy dominance: - punch solar, batteries, and electric motors while China dominates us - larp as pro nuclear but do little to nothing - classify coal as a critical mineral - claim we’ll help O&G even though production was already at absolute record levels

Good 🧵 on limits of what one can learn from "win rates" in corpus of reported NEPA cases. ⤵️ FWIW, I think/hope the main payoff from Breakthrough's effort to compile NEPA cases will be facilitating future studies of what judges *say*. Study the texts, not the outcomes.