Your daily briefing for all the top news in Energy, Technology, Finance, and Politics.
Energy
A climate for change: America should not wait while the world warms
WASHINGTON POST
Editorial
Waiting to deal with carbon emissions until the effects are clearer or technology improves is not a wise strategy. The emissions humans put into the atmosphere now will affect the climate in the middle of the century and onward. Technological change, meanwhile, could make a future transition away from fossil fuels cheap — or it might not, leaving the world with a terrible choice between sharply reducing emissions at huge cost or suffering through the effects of unabated warming.
Grain Piles Up, Waiting for a Ride, as Trains Move North Dakota Oil
NEW YORK TIMES
Ron Nixon
The furious pace of energy exploration in North Dakota is creating a crisis for farmers whose grain shipments have been held up by a vast new movement of oil by rail, leading to millions of dollars in agricultural losses and slower production for breakfast cereal giants like General Mills.
GAO finds no fault with ‘social cost of carbon’
THE HILL
Benjamin Goad
A government probe into the metric used by federal agencies to measure the “social cost of carbon” found no evidence that it was improperly developed, investigators said Monday.
Can advanced ethanol finally take root?
POLITICOPRO (Subscribe)
Erica Martinson
After nearly a decade of disappointments, a handful of new plants is aiming to do what no company has succeeded at yet: turn the coarse waste from corn into huge amounts of ethanol.
Technology
The diversity issue in tech firms starts before the recruiting process
WASHINGTON POST
Catherine Rampell
In short, a lot can be done to encourage women and minorities to enter these lucrative occupations and firms. Companies certainly have a role to play, but interventions need to start long before the résumé-screening process begins.
Blacks, Latinos Dominate Silicon Valley’s ‘Invisible Workforce’
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Jeff Elder
Blacks and Latinos make up a sizable share of low-wage workers cleaning and guarding Silicon Valley tech companies, where the technical workforces are overwhelmingly white and Asian, according to a report scheduled to be released Tuesday.
Comcast, critics spar as comment deadline nears
POLITICOPRO (Subscribe)
Tony Romm
Comcast and its critics renewed their war of words over the company’s proposed purchase of Time Warner Cable, just hours before a Federal Communications Commission deadline for public comments on the $45 billion megadeal.
How Republicans Flip-Flopped on Government-Run Internet
NATIONAL JOURNAL
Brendan Sasso
Government-run Internet service is an abomination, a waste of taxpayer funds, and an assault on private industry. And if states want to ban it, the federal government should get out of their way. That’s what congressional Republicans are saying now, but just a few years ago, top GOP lawmakers were not only on board with municipal Internet—they were actively working to protect it.
A top net neutrality defender is trying to poke holes in Mozilla’s plan for the open Internet
WASHINGTON POST
Brian Fung
Mozilla’s proposal to federal regulators, in a nutshell, involves highlighting the relationship between Internet service providers (ISPs) and content companies like Amazon, YouTube and Xbox Live, and regulating that relationship more heavily than the relationship ISPs have with consumers. … But in a meeting with the FCC this month, [Barbara] van Schewick pointed out three tiny words that threaten to undermine Mozilla’s proposal to regulate ISPs — or a part of what they do, anyway — as telecommunications services.
California Governor Signs Law Requiring a ‘Kill Switch’ on Smartphones
NEW YORK TIMES
Brian Chen
Governor Jerry Brown of California on Monday signed into law a measure that requires smartphones sold in California to include smarter antitheft technology, a feature that lawmakers hope will help reduce phone theft.
Finance
Warren Buffett to Invest in Burger King’s Planned Deal for Tim Hortons
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Dana Mattioli, David Benoit and Julie Jargon
The investment would also thrust Mr. Buffett, known for championing American companies like Coca-Cola Co. and for advocating that wealthy individuals pay their fair share of taxes, into an uncomfortable position at the center of a spirited debate over U.S. tax policy. The deal is to be structured as a so-called inversion that would move the new company’s headquarters to Canada. Such deals, which can help companies sidestep taxes, have drawn stiff opposition in Washington.
How Would the Fed Raise Rates?
WALL STREET JOURNAL
George Melloan
So presumably “macroprudential” measures are now to become a more important part of the Fed’s money management. If the Fed can’t control interest rates, the dollar supply and inflation by any other means, maybe it hopes to do it by fiat. Well, the dollar is a fiat currency so perhaps its management by fiat was inevitable. But then the question arises: Is anyone at the Fed, even the estimable Mr. Fischer, smart enough to do that without precipitating some new financial disaster?
Jack Lew’s Next Conquest
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Editorial
The federal Financial Stability Oversight Council finished collecting evidence last week as it considers whether the insurance company MetLife is too big to fail. This pending Beltway judgment will have large consequences for taxpayers and consumers. And as remarkable is the way it is being decided. Businesses often dispute the judgments of their regulators, but here we have the rare spectacle of a company and its current regulators agreeing that a new policy is misguided and dangerous. And yet they are powerless to stop it, thanks to the Dodd-Frank law of 2010.
Future of Export-Import Bank Is Wild Card in Key Senate Races
NEW YORK TIMES
Carl Hulse
In an election cycle where no single issue is animating voters, the relatively obscure lender, which provides loans and loan guarantees to foreign buyers of American products, has become an unlikely source of prominent campaign friction.
U.S. Factories Keep Losing Ground to Global Rivals
WALL STREET JOURNAL
James R. Hagerty, John W. Miller and Bob Tita
The U.S. deficit on trade in goods swelled in the first half to $371.59 billion from $354.64 a year earlier. Imports rose 3.3%, while exports increased 2.6%. Manufactured exports, excluding petroleum and coal, rose just 0.8%—far below last year’s modest 2.1% gain. Without a strong, sustainable increase in exports, U.S. factories are unlikely to have the kind of resurgence forecast by some pundits. But achieving that growth is difficult as China and other countries have pursued aggressive export strategies and the U.S. has lost manufacturing skills and suppliers after shifting production overseas.
Freddie Mac faulted by IG in $2 billion mortgage fraud loss
WASHINGTON TIMES
Patrice Hill
The federal government’s giant housing agencies could have saved taxpayers billions of dollars from mortgage fraud in a celebrated case involving Colonial Bank and Taylor, Bean and Whitaker, if they had shared more information with each other and conducted better audits. That was the conclusion of the inspector general for the Federal Housing Finance Agency being released Tuesday, which found that a massive fraud perpetrated by Taylor Bean’s chief executive, Lee Bentley Farkas, which landed him in prison in 2011 could have been detected earlier.
A New Reason to Question the Official Unemployment Rate
NEW YORK TIMES
David Leonhardt
A new academic paper suggests that the unemployment rate appears to have become less accurate over the last two decades, in part because of this rise in nonresponse. In particular, there seems to have been an increase in the number of people who once would have qualified as officially unemployed and today are considered out of the labor force, neither working nor looking for work.
Hedge Funds Sue to Get Argentine Bond Payment in London
NEW YORK TIMES
Alexandra Stevenson
A group of hedge funds, including George Soros’s Quantum Partners and J. Kyle Bass’s Hayman Capital, is seeking a 226 million euro interest payment on Argentine bonds from Bank of New York Mellon that was blocked by a United States judge last month. In a lawsuit filed in London against Bank of New York, the trustee handling Argentina’s bond payments, the hedge funds contend that the bank’s London unit must release money that was deposited by Argentina for its euro-denominated bondholders.
Politics
The Neo-Neocons
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Bret Stephens
Which brings us back to the questions confronting the Bush administration on Sept. 12, 2001. Are we going to fight terrorists over there—or are we going to wait for them to come here? Do we choose to confront terrorism by means of war—or as a criminal justice issue? Can we assume the cancer in the Middle East won’t spread so we can “pivot” to Asia and do some more “nation-building at home”? Can we win with a light-footprint approach against a heavy-footprint enemy? Say what you will about George W. Bush: He got every one of these questions right while Mr. Obama got every one of them wrong.
Surf’s Up
POLITICO
Larry J. Sabato, Kyle Kondik and Geoffrey Skelley
At the moment, there are 11 Senate contests (two seats held by Republicans, nine by Democrats) with polling margins of less than 10 points, so history suggests Democrats might be expected to win just three or four of those contests, with three victories giving Republicans a one-seat majority and four wins leaving Democrats in power via a 50-50 tie and Vice President Joe Biden’s tie-breaking vote.
Election Panel Enacts Policies by Not Acting
NEW YORK TIMES
Nicholas Confessore
The case was just one of the more than 200 times in the past six years that the commission has split votes, reflecting a deep ideological divide over how aggressively to regulate money in politics that mirrors the partisan gridlock in Congress. But instead of paralyzing the commission, the 3-to-3 votes have created a rapidly expanding universe of unofficial law, where Republican commissioners have loosened restrictions on candidates and outside groups simply by signaling what standards they are willing to enforce.
The 2014 digital ad juggernaut
POLITICO
Darren Samuelsohn
A leading ad research firm recently estimated that more than $270 million will be spent across the country this cycle on digital campaign efforts — an 1,825 percent increase from 2010, when the first generation of tablet computers was just hitting the market.
Going it alone: Obama may bypass Congress on Syria airstrikes
WASHINGTON TIMES
Dave Boyer
The White House said Monday that President Obama won’t necessarily seek congressional approval for airstrikes in Syria against militants of the Islamic State, while Syria warned the U.S. it would consider any unilateral attack an act of “aggression.”
Democrats Are (Slowly) Learning to Love Obamacare
NATIONAL JOURNAL
Sam Baker
Heading into the 2014 midterms, Republicans continue to hold a clear advantage in the politics of Obamacare. And even if the tide does ultimately shift for the law, it almost certainly won’t happen by November. Still, there are signs that Democrats are slowly becoming more confident talking about the health care law, or at least parts of it.
Lowering Interest Rates on Loans Isn’t the Best Way to Help College Students
NEW YORK TIMES
Susan Dynarski
If our goal is to increase college attendance, grants or lower tuition do the job more effectively than lower interest rates. If our goal is to reduce defaults, an income-based plan where payments flex automatically will do the job more cheaply than changing interest rates.
