Your daily briefing for all the top news in Energy, Technology, Finance, and Politics.

Energy

Liberals are violating their principles on Keystone XL
WASHINGTON POST
Charles Lane
Far from being “game over” for the planet, Keystone XL would not boost greenhouse gas emissions significantly, according to State Department experts. With or without Keystone XL, Canada’s oil sands will still be turned into crude oil and shipped, often by rail, to markets in the United States and elsewhere. The environmental movement’s energies — not to mention Steyer’s millions — would be far better spent elsewhere. In their tendentious effort to deny these realities, progressives risk violating yet another cherished principle that, in their view, distinguishes them from the right: that of letting facts and science, not ideology, determine policy. Campaigning for a symbolic victory over the fossil-fuel industry, they may end up with a pyrrhic one — if any.

 

The Tom Steyer Democrats
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Editorial
It looks as if Tom Steyer did get something for the $74 million he spent on the midterm elections. The billionaire environmentalist bought what is left of the Democratic Senate. That’s the story behind the remarkable display Tuesday night in which 41 Democrats voted to abandon a Senate seat rather than cross Mr. Steyer and the big green money machine.

 

Canadian Industry, Government Look to Future for Keystone XL Pipeline
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Chester Dawson
“[It’s] not particularly surprising,” Alex Pourbaix, TransCanada’s executive vice president in charge of development, said of the Senate vote. “It really doesn’t have an impact on our strategy,” he said Wednesday in a meeting with financial analysts, noting the company has already spent $2.4 billion on the project. … Government officials in Canada expressed frustration with the latest delay, but stressed their belief the project would eventually win approval in the U.S. “We’re disappointed, but we’re not surprised,” Canadian Minister of Natural Resources Greg Rickford told reporters Wednesday. “For me, this has never been a question of if, it is a question of when,” he said.

 

The Senate should revive a bipartisan energy efficiency bill
WASHINGTON POST
Editorial
Encouragingly, Mr. Portman on Wednesday talked up the possibility of the Senate considering it early next year. If Republican leaders are serious about governing over the next two years, they should bring up the Portman-Shaheen legislation and discourage poison pill amendments this time.

 

Harvard students sue to force divestment from fossil fuels
WASHINGTON TIMES
Valerie Richardson
A group of seven law, graduate and undergraduate students sued Wednesday to compel Harvard to withdraw its investments in oil, coal and natural gas, arguing that the college has a “legal obligation — and, more importantly, a moral duty — to stop profiting from human suffering and environmental destruction.”

 

 

Technology

Tech’s power play fails to move Democrats
THE HILL
Julian Hattem
House Democrats dealt a blow to Silicon Valley by rejecting the tech industry’s chosen candidate for a key leadership spot.  Lawmakers on Tuesday chose Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) over Rep, Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.) to serve as the ranking member of the powerful Energy and Commerce Committee, which oversees a broad swath of the American economy. … “It kind of feels like the dinosaurs won,” said one tech industry lobbyist.

 

NSA bill collapse a blow for tech
POLITICOPRO (Subscribe)
Kate Tummarello
Despite pressure from broad swaths of the tech industry and privacy groups to move and ultimately pass the bill, the Senate voted 58-42 Tuesday on a motion to proceed on the measure, falling just two votes short of the 60 needed.

 

House approves five-year extension of satellite TV bill
THE HILL
Mario Trujillo
A reauthorization of the Satellite Television Extension and Localism Act (STELA), which expires at the end of the year, was approved by voice vote with a few changes. House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.) introduced the bill Tuesday, along with ranking member Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.), ranking member of the committee’s subpanel on communications. The House passed a similar bill in July. But the legislation approved Wednesday was part of a bipartisan agreement with leaders on the Senate Commerce Committee.

 

Cellphone tracking: Find an address? Easy. But new devices can calculate your altitude.
WASHINGTON POST
Craig Timberg
Cellphone tracking is about to go vertical as the location-services industry, prodded by the U.S. government, solves the riddle of what experts call “the z vector.” Soon it will be possible to determine not only what building you and your phone are in but also whether you are on the first or 15th floor.

 

Franken on Uber: ‘Serious concerns’
THE HILL
Julian Hattem
Ride-hailing application Uber is taking heat from Sen. Al Franken. The Minnesota Democrat on Wednesday accused the company of showing “a troubling disregard for customers’ privacy,” after a series of reports that a top executive supported investigating journalists and monitoring people’s rides.  Franken has “serious concerns … about the scope, transparency and enforceability of Uber’s policies,” he wrote to CEO Travis Kalanick.

 

Obama Makes Pitch to Expand High-Speed Internet Access to Schools
NEW YORK TIMES
Peter Baker
In a conference in the East Room of the White House, Mr. Obama gathered superintendents from across the country to bolster his initiative to bring more schools into the digital age. With fewer than half of American public schools connected to high-speed Internet in their classrooms, Mr. Obama led the superintendents in signing pledges — on iPads and other electronic tablets to spread technology in the classroom.

 

$3B fed cybersecurity plan stalls
POLITICO
David Perera
The latest phase of a $3 billion Homeland Security program designed to protect federal computer networks from hackers is stalled because of a dispute about who will be legally liable if the system goes wrong. For two years, negotiations between DHS and AT&T over the telecom firm’s implementation of the program have been at a standstill, said the department’s former acting Undersecretary for Management Chris Cummiskey.

 

 

Finance

Senate probes banks’ commodity activities
USA TODAY
Kevin McCoy
Capping a two-year investigation, the report by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations highlighted a continuing erosion that has weakened the nation’s traditional boundary between banking and commerce. Largely unnoticed by many U.S. consumers, the change has enabled bank holding companies, which own banks and other businesses, to trade uranium, run coal mines and metal storage warehouses, operate oil and gas pipelines and stockpile billions of dollars of aluminum and copper, the report said. Those activities have the potential to affect prices in commodities markets — and generate non-public market data that can provide a secret advantage to bank financial trading in those markets, the report said.

 

‘Audit the Fed’ to make comeback next year
POLITICO
MJ Lee
The movement to bring greater transparency to the Federal Reserve will be in full force in the new Congress, with Republican lawmakers in both the House and the Senate eager to reintroduce legislation in early 2015 requiring a full “audit” of the central bank. In the House, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) is taking the torch from outgoing Rep. Paul Broun (R-Ga.), whose “Audit the Fed” bill sailed through the House this year with bipartisan support. Across the Capitol, another Kentucky Republican — Sen. Rand Paul — is vowing to introduce the bill again, with renewed hope that the GOP takeover of the Senate will boost its chances of getting a floor vote in the next Congress.

 

Unions to Oppose Lew Nomination
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Editorial
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka sent letters on Wednesday to several giant banks asking about the way they reward executives who leave to work for the government. Almost two years too late, Democrats are starting to focus on the disturbing questions that surrounded Treasury Secretary Jack Lew ’s ascension to the most powerful job in American finance as Treasury Secretary. In his Wednesday letters, Mr. Trumka is specifically seeking disclosure on accelerated vesting of equity awards that may be available to executives who leave giant banks for government jobs.

 

FHFA Won’t Rule Out Ending Fannie, Freddie Oversight Without Congress
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Joe Light
Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Melvin Watt said during a hearing of the Senate Banking Committee on Wednesday that overhauling the housing-finance system should be left to Congress. He expressed hesitation at giving his own thoughts on how Congress should proceed. After the hearing, he told reporters that any effort by federal authorities to end the conservatorship would need to be begun by the Treasury Department. “It’s something that would have to be initiated by Treasury, not by me,” Mr. Watt said. “In the short term I would rule it out, in the long term, I might not rule it out.”

 

Principal reduction for underwater homeowners not off table, official testifies
WASHINGTON POST
Dina ElBoghdady
Mel Watt, the director, said he has been trying to figure out whether there is a way to responsibly help struggling underwater borrowers by reducing the size of their loans, a type of relief known as “principal reduction.” But he said the issue is a tough one, “perhaps the most” difficult he has faced since becoming the overseer of the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in January. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) challenged him. “You’ve been in office for nearly a year now,” she said, “and you haven’t helped a single family, not even one, by agreeing to a principal reduction, so I want to know why this hasn’t been a priority for you.”

 

Federal Reserve minutes show easy decision to end QE
FINANCIAL TIMES (Subscribe)
Robin Harding
It was an easy decision for the US Federal Reserve to end quantitative easing as minutes of October’s meeting showed little debate or dissent over the move to halt its history-making bond-buying programme.

 

New Scrutiny of Goldman’s Ties to the New York Fed After a Leak
NEW YORK TIMES
Jessica Silver-Greenberg, Ben Protess and Peter Eavis
From his desk in Lower Manhattan, a banker at Goldman Sachs thumbed through confidential documents — courtesy of a source inside the United States government. The banker came to Goldman through the so-called revolving door, the symbolic portal that connects financial regulators to Wall Street. He joined in July after spending seven years as a regulator at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the government’s front line in overseeing the financial industry. He received the confidential information, lawyers briefed on the matter suspect, from a former colleague who was still working at the New York Fed.

 

Can Banks Lend for Risky Deals? Depends Who You Ask
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Gillian Tan
At issue is a type of financing used by private-equity firms to take over corporations that could leave a company with a high level of debt that it may have trouble repaying. The divide in the SIG deal highlights how banks differ on how to interpret guidance meant to rein in risky lending, even after regulators issued additional clarification this month.

 

Raise Interest Rates, Make Grandma Smile
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Charles Schwab
U.S. households lost billions in interest income during the Fed’s near-zero interest rate experiment. Because they are often reliant on income from savings, seniors were hit the hardest. Households headed by seniors 65-74 years old lost on average $1,900 in annual income over the past six years, according to a November 2013 McKinsey Global Institute report. For households headed by seniors 75 and older, the loss was $2,700 annually.

 

 

Politics

Obama’s immigration order poses political challenges for both parties
WASHINGTON POST
Karen Tumulty
The political consequences of President Obama’s new immigration plan will probably depend on whether Americans focus on the merits of the policy or on the president’s audacious means of achieving it.

 

Poll: Voters want Congress to set the country’s agenda, not Obama
WASHINGTON POST
Zachary A. Goldfarb
Americans have always showed a preference for Congress to take the helm in setting the country’s agenda — perhaps distrustful that one man in the White House should be in charge. But by the widest margin of President Obama’s tenure, Americans believe that the nation’s representatives and senators should be in charge, not him. That’s a big finding in the new Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll released Wednesday night.

 

Immigration Has Republican Governors Seething and Facing Practical Challenges
NEW YORK TIMES
Michael Barbaro
The new legal protections that the president is poised to bestow on five million illegal immigrants Thursday will immediately thrust the issue back to the states, forcing dozens of governors who vigorously oppose the move to contemplate a raft of vexing new legal questions of their own, like whether to issue driver’s licenses or grant in-state college tuition to such people.

 

Few employers dropping health benefits, surveys find
WASHINGTON POST
Amy Goldstein
A year after the advent of new insurance marketplaces for individuals and small businesses under the health-care law, just 1 percent of employers said they have decided to stop offering health coverage for 2015, one survey said. There was relatively little difference between larger employers and those with fewer than 50 workers, which qualify for new small-business marketplaces, known as SHOPs, that are part of the health-care law.

 

Republicans and the Filibuster
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Editorial
Senate Republicans are debating whether to restore the 60-vote filibuster rule for confirming presidential nominees to the executive branch and lower courts. It’s nice to imagine a Kumbaya moment that would restore Senate comity, but this is a case when the GOP could do more political harm if it tries to undo Harry Reid ’s damage.

 

The Early Line on the GOP 2016 Presidential Field
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Karl Rove
With midterms over, let’s give political junkies a fix by surveying the emerging GOP presidential field. Twenty-three Republicans have publicly indicated interest (not including Mitt Romney , who says he has no plans to run). Here they are, with strengths and weaknesses.