T. Boone Pickens is holding a town hall meeting on the Pickens Plan tomorrow at Rice University. His presentation, hosted by the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy, deserves some hard questions and frank answers. Here are some suggested questions. …

There are a lot of good reasons to be suspicious of regulators who claim to be guardians of the truth, but every now and then they get something right. The United Kingdom’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA, http://www.asa.org.uk) is that country’s equivalent of the Federal Trade Commission, with jurisdiction over false advertising. Last month, the ASA reached a settlement with the British Wind Energy Association acting as agent for the country’s wind generators. Two months earlier, a local anti-wind group filed a complaint at the ASA against Npower, a subsidiary of Germany’s RWE. Npower’s advertising claimed that every kilowatt-hour of wind power displaced 860 grams of CO2 emissions from fossil-fuel power plants. The ASA determined that the amount was badly overstated. …

I was invited to comment yesterday over at The New York Times on President Obama’s memorandum to the EPA to reconsider its earlier denial of a waiver requested by the state of California—a waiver that would allow that state to impose its own fuel efficiency standards for passenger vehicles and light trucks.  The simple point I wanted to make at the Times is that allowing this waiver to go through would largely allow that state to dictate fuel efficiency standards for the nation as a whole.  I argued that this is probably a bad thing. State action that imposes significant policy changes on the nation as a whole ought to be enjoined and those decisions ought to be left to Congress.

For those of you interested—and who have a strong stomach— read the comments on the board that follows. …

In 2007, U.S. electric power generators had roughly 1 million MW of installed capacity. Almost one third of that capacity was spread over 1,400 coal-fired plants, which in turn generated about half of our electricity.[1] More than 100,000 MW of these coal plants are greater than 30 years old.[2] These plants use about 20–25 percent more fuel and emit even more of the undesirable by-products of coal – sulphur, nitrogen, particulates – than do new plants with state of the art combustion technology and emission control.[3] Replacing these older plants as they are retired from service with newer coal-fired power plants represents the quickest and lowest-cost way to reduce the adverse environmental impacts of current coal-fired power generation. And it does so without government subsidies or any deterioration in the quality of electricity service.…