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

 

Energy

A Climate Activist Bags Himself
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Holman W. Jenkins
Our political system is adept at making use of people like Mr. Steyer. Democrats will gladly spend his $100 million, then go back to their real environmental business, which is green cronyism. Happily Mr. Steyer’s fate won’t be that of the Hemingway character—who finally got to prove his merit while accidentally being shot in the head by his wife. But like Al Gore before him, Mr. Steyer will be able to say of his impact on the climate debate: I softened up the public to be milked for green handouts that did nothing for climate change.

 

Blueprints for Taming the Climate Crisis
NEW YORK TIMES
Eduardo Porter
Within about 15 years every new car sold in the United States will be electric. In fact, by midcentury more than half of the American economy will run on electricity. Up to 60 percent of power might come from nuclear sources. And coal’s footprint will shrink drastically, perhaps even disappear from the power supply. This course, created by a team of energy experts, was unveiled on Tuesday in a report for the United Nations that explores the technological paths available for the world’s 15 main economies to both maintain reasonable rates of growth and cut their carbon emissions enough by 2050 to prevent climatic havoc.

 

Confessions of a Computer Modeler
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Robert J. Caprara
Was the EPA official asking me to lie? I have to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he believed in the value of continuing the program. (Congress ended the grants in 1990.) He certainly didn’t give any indications otherwise. I also assume he understood the inherent inaccuracies of these types of models. There are no exact values for the coefficients in models such as these. There are only ranges of potential values. By moving a bunch of these parameters to one side or the other you can usually get very different results, often (surprise) in line with your initial beliefs.

 

The Environmental Protection Agency is swimming in murky water
WASHINGTON POST
Editorial
LAWMAKERS, MOSTLY but not only Republicans , are seeking to undermine the twin foundations of Environmental Protection Agency authority: the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act . In both cases, Congress should back off.

 

Obama to Pick Defense Aide for Energy Post
NEW YORK TIMES
David E. Sanger
President Obama announced Tuesday that he would nominate Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, the National Security Council’s top nuclear proliferation and defense policy official, to be deputy secretary of energy.

 

Congress could overturn Obama’s ban on funding coal plants abroad
VOX
Brad Plumer
At issue here is the Export-Import Bank, a government-backed lender that guarantees loans to foreign companies buying American products. The 80-year-old bank is currently up for reauthorization in Congress, and many conservatives would prefer to kill it altogether. So, in order to rally support from conservatives, the bank’s backers are circulating proposals that would allow the Export-Import Bank to fund coal plants overseas once again.

 

Tighter oil train rules could hurt Keystone push
POLITICOPRO (Subscribe)
Talia Buford
The rail industry says tighter safety rules could choke off their shipments of Canadian oil — a scenario that Keystone opponents say would make TransCanada’s proposed pipeline a crucial artery for the crude, undermining the State Department’s view that the pipeline would cause only modest environmental damage.

 

 

Technology

Internet freedom: Let’s get smart about updating the Communications Act
FOX NEWS
Valentin Mircea
Should the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) import European-style utility regulations on the Internet, unnecessary government intrusion into a thriving economic sector may soon become a reality. Instead of focusing their attention on a singular issue with dubious prospects for success, American lawmakers and regulators would be better served taking a holistic view of technology policy and look at updating the overarching laws that govern this important industry.

 

Silicon Valley Sharknado
NEW YORK TIMES
Maureen Dowd
In a digital update of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” Silicon Valley is siphoning and pilfering human intelligence to feed Mr. Roboto to replace us. That’s the scary bravado of real sharks.

 

Senate cyber bill advances despite privacy worries
POLITICOPRO (Subscribe)
Tal Kopan
The Senate Intelligence Committee advanced its cybersecurity information-sharing bill Tuesday over objections from privacy advocates, but the future of the lightning-rod legislation on the Senate floor was unclear, even to its authors.

 

Postmortem on the ‘Patent Troll’ Bill: Leahy Says Reid Killed It
ROLL CALL
Anne L. Kim
When Sen. Patrick J. Leahy abruptly shelved legislation targeted at companies that file abusive patent infringement lawsuits back in May, the Vermont Democrat said it was because of a lack of consensus from stakeholders. But in an an interview with a home-state newspaper Leahy said he was “furious” that  Majority Leader Harry Reid effectively shelved the bill.

 

FCC Republican: Wi-Fi talks have broken down
THE HILL
Kate Tummarello
A Republican on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is accusing FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler of politicizing the agency’s program to boost Internet access in schools and libraries. In a statement on Tuesday, Commissioner Ajit Pai said negotiations over Wheeler’s plan to change the program have broken down because the chairman is “determined to pass this item on a party-line vote,” without the input of the FCC’s two Republicans.

 

 

Finance

Swiss Banks’ Tradition of Secrecy Clashes With Quests Abroad for Disclosure
NEW YORK TIMES
Doreen Carvajal
Even as the Swiss authorities have nodded at cooperation with frustrated governments abroad, at home laws on the books since 1934 make violating client confidentiality a crime and require bankers to guard secrecy like priests or lawyers. Bankers who cooperate with foreign officials and violate their “duty of absolute silence,” as it is known here, potentially face home raids, prison, fines for secrecy violations and industrial espionage, and the ostracism of colleagues and friends.

 

Bankers warn over rising US business lending
FINANCIAL TIMES (Subscribe)
US lending to businesses is reaching record levels but banks are privately warning that the activity should not be seen as evidence of an economic recovery. Much of the corporate lending is going to fund payouts to shareholders, finance acquisitions and fuel the domestic energy boom, bankers say, rather than to support companies’ organic growth.

 

Citigroup Nears Deal to Resolve Mortgage Probe
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Andrew Grossman, Christina Rexrode and Dan Fitzpatrick
The Justice Department and Citigroup Inc. are close to a deal for the bank to pay about $7 billion to settle allegations it sold shoddy mortgages in the run-up to the financial crisis, according to people familiar with the matter.

 

 

Politics

Faith Groups Seek Exclusion From Bias Rule
NEW YORK TIMES
Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Erik Eckholm
After a setback in the Supreme Court in the Hobby Lobby case, President Obama is facing mounting pressure from religious groups demanding to be excluded from his long-promised executive order that would bar discrimination against gay men and lesbians by companies that do government work. The president has yet to sign the executive order, but last week a group of major faith organizations, including some of Mr. Obama’s allies, said he should consider adding an exemption for groups whose religious beliefs oppose homosexuality.

 

White House requests $3.7 billion in emergency funds for border crisis
WASHINGTON POST
David Nakamura and Wesley Lowery
The White House on Tuesday formally requested $3.7 billion in emergency funding from Congress to deal with an influx of Central American minors along the southern border. … But GOP leaders, who have called on Obama to take stronger action, said they were reluctant to give the administration a “blank check” without ­more-detailed plans to ensure that the money would help stem the crisis at the border.

 

Highway Bill Gets Bogged Down in New Fight
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Siobhan Hughes and Kristina Peterson
But influential members of Congress, including Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, a Democrat from West Virginia, want to designate a portion of any revenues that come from pension smoothing to help shore up health and pension benefits for coal miners. “I want it to fund the mine workers’ pensions,” Mr. Rockefeller, also a member of the Senate Finance Committee, said of pension smoothing. He has made clear his position by offering an amendment to steer money to a coal-miner retiree fund to a highway bill up for a vote in the committee this week. Some Republicans, however, have objected, saying coal-miner retiree benefits have no place in a highway bill.

 

Cleveland to host 2016 GOP convention
POLITICO
Katie Glueck and Maggie Haberman
In choosing Cleveland, party organizers opted for a Democratic enclave in the pivotal battleground state of Ohio over the wealthier and more conservative Dallas area for their convention, which officials say could take place in late June or mid-July of 2016. Republican officials wanted an earlier convention in 2016, to allow the nominee to pivot more quickly to the general election.

 

What’s Obama’s Problem With School Choice?
POLITICO
Gov. Bobby Jindal and Gov. Scott Walker
We hope that President Obama and Attorney General Holder will work with us to expand educational opportunities to students—particularly students in failing schools who desperately need other options. America’s future depends on it.