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

Energy

Obama’s second chance for a U.N. climate push
POLITICOPRO (Subscribe)
Andrew Restuccia
For the first time since the infamous 2009 climate flop, the president will join dozens of world leaders to talk about climate change at a key United Nations summit in New York on Tuesday. By all accounts, the president has a stronger hand this time around.

 

Rand Paul, Chuck Grassley shine a light on the nonprofit climate-change group NEON
WASHINGTON POST
Kimberly Kindy
Two senators are investigating whether the National Science Foundation and Defense Department auditors skirted federal laws by signing off on a nonprofit organization’s use of taxpayer money for “unallowable expenses,” including alcohol, lobbying and extravagant parties. … The Colorado-based National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) has received tens of millions of dollars in grant money from the NSF to build sites across the country for collecting climate-change data.

 

Keystone Pipeline Cost Expected to Double, TransCanada CEO Says
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Amy Harder
TransCanada Corp.’s chief executive said the cost to build the Keystone XL pipeline, currently estimated at $5.4 billion, is expected to double by the time the U.S. government completes its review of the largest part of the project.

 

LCV to spend $5 million in states, eyes GOP endorsements
POLITICOPRO (Subscribe)
Darren Goode
The League of Conservation Voters will devote $5 million to state and local races this year, focusing on drawing “drop-off” voters to the polls and issuing new endorsements of Republicans.

 

Frank Pallone builds support for Energy seat
POLITICO
John Bresnahan and Lauren French
Five months into a fierce fight for the top Democratic spot on the high-profile House Energy and Commerce Committee, Rep. Frank Pallone is looking to prove he has the support of a broad base of Democrats. The New Jersey Democrat released a letter Thursday afternoon signed by 50 Democrats — including a dozen freshmen — who are whipping votes for Pallone in his campaign against Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.).

 

With Eye on 2016, Christie Resists Climate Change Plan
NEW YORK TIMES
Coral Davenport
As Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey explores a 2016 presidential campaign, he is under growing pressure from his State Legislature to rejoin a regional cap-and-trade program that would limit New Jersey’s carbon emissions — and likely hurt his chances for the Republican nomination.

 

Oil-Price Quirk Sends Crude Out to Sea
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Christian Berthelsen and Cassie Werber
Big oil companies and traders are stashing millions of barrels of crude on massive tankers bobbing in the ocean, in a bid to profit from a quirk in oil markets. … In a rare split, crude is cheaper in the spot market than in the futures market, where bets are made on where prices will be in the months ahead. By buying physical stocks of oil and immediately selling futures, traders can lock in a profit.

 

Why Al Gore Is a Natural-Gas Skeptic
NATIONAL JOURNAL
Ben Geman
The U.S. natural-gas boom is a big reason why the nation’s carbon emissions have dropped by around 10 percent over the past decade. But don’t look for climate crusader Al Gore to cheer the rise of gas, even though gas produces just half the carbon-dioxide emissions of coal.

 

 

Technology

Alibaba’s Political Risk
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Editorial
Alibaba is thus a microcosm of today’s Chinese economy: Hundreds of millions of consumers and businesses are benefiting from rising opportunity, but the commanding heights remain opaque, politicized and shaky. Caveat investor.

 

Senate’s new overseas-email protection act gets mixed reviews
WASHINGTON POST
Nancy Scola
A bipartisan group of senators are backing the idea that emails held by U.S. services providers overseas need greater legal protection than they currently enjoy, but some are praising its existence and pointing out what they see as its significant flaws.

 

Net Neutrality Comments to F.C.C. Overwhelmingly One-Sided, Study Says
NEW YORK TIMES
Edward Wyatt
A study by the Sunlight Foundation, which advocates for government transparency, found that at least 60 percent of a set of 800,000 net neutrality comments released in bulk by the F.C.C. were form letters written by organized campaigns. The foundation said that was “actually a lower percentage than is common for high-volume regulatory dockets.”

 

Study: Cities with super fast Internet speeds are more productive
WASHINGTON POST
Brian Fung
[A] new study finds that access to next-generation Internet speeds may be connected to better economic growth. According to a report by the Boston-based Analysis Group, cities that offer broadband at 1 gigabit per second — roughly 100 times the national average of 10 megabits per second — report higher per-capita GDP compared to cities that lack those Internet speeds. Of course, all the normal caveats apply: It’s hard to draw a causal inference from the study, and it’s possible there’s something else about the 14 gigabit cities that made them better off to begin with.

 

 

Finance

Yellen charts a smooth course to normality
FINANCIAL TIMES (Subscribe)
Editorial
In addition to setting optimal interest rates, a central bank governor must avoid sowing confusion. On both counts Janet Yellen is doing an admirably dull job. At the Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee meeting this week, the US central bank’s chairwoman stuck to the line that the turn in the US interest rate cycle would depend on the pace and quality of growth in the coming months. As expected, the Fed confirmed that quantitative easing would taper off in October with its final $15bn in asset purchases. As the US economy picks up moderate speed, the Fed is inching back towards monetary normalisation. The fewer jitters along the way, the better.

 

Bitcoin gets an industry-backed advocacy group
WASHINGTON POST
Nancy Scola
Jerry Brito, a law professor who was until recently the head of the technology policy program at George Mason’s Mercatus Center, announced in August that he was leaving for “a new adventure.” On Thursday, Brito announced that he will be heading an organization called Coin Center, what he describes as a “new non-profit research and advocacy center focused on the public policy issues facing cryptocurrency technologies.” … Board members will include innovator and entrepreneur Marc Andreessen, Andreessen Horowitz partner Balaji Srinivasan, bitcoin developer Jeff Garzik, Hudson River Trading partner Alex Morcos, and Stanford business professor Susan Athey.

 

The economy is improving, but not everyone is sharing in the better times
WASHINGTON POST
Editorial
Amid other good news about the U.S. economy — a declining unemployment rate, lower child poverty — the Federal Reserve has just reported that the net worth of U.S. households rose $1.4 trillion, to $81.5 trillion, during the second quarter of 2014. This means that families’ assets, such as homes and stocks, have risen roughly $23 trillion in value since the depths of the “Great Recession” in 2009. Credit the market on Wall Street and recovering real estate prices, both partly attributable to the Fed’s easy-money policies. Too bad this resurgent wealth was anything but equally shared.

 

Citigroup Tells Appeals Court of Its Argentina Quandary
NEW YORK TIMES
Alexandra Stevenson
Argentina is holding a gun to the head of Citigroup, a lawyer for the bank told a three-judge panel in Manhattan on Thursday. The bank has found itself in an awkward position: It must decide between defying a New York court order or a sovereign government, a move that it says would result in “grave sanctions” from Argentina. “We’re going to obey, and if we obey, we have a gun to our head and the gun will probably go off,” Karen Wagner, a lawyer representing Citigroup, said.

 

The Accidental Billionaire Activists
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Romain Hatchuel
There is no telling what the consequences of Messrs. Khodorkovsky, Singer and Dogan’s battles will be in those countries where democratically elected leaders tend to transform into would-be dictators. A diminished Argentina, whose currency is now under attack, may end up getting rid of the Kirchner dynasty and its Peronist clique. An already ostracized Russia now runs the risk of seeing some of its foreign assets seized by former Yukos shareholders, further weakening its economy and position on the global stage. President Erdogan can no longer be painted as an exemplary democrat. Adam Smith’s invisible hand may be at work, even when it is covered with gold.

 

 

Politics

Razor-Thin Lead For The GOP
NATIONAL JOURNAL
Charlie Cook
But if Republicans can just ensure that reliably Republican voters stay Republican in 2014, then the GOP doesn’t need to win a single state that is purple, or blue of any hue, to win the Senate. The bottom line is that the odds of Republicans scoring a net gain of seven, eight, or more seats  have gone down, but in my judgment a net gain of six—the minimum number they need for a Senate majority—remains pretty likely.

 

Rift widens between Obama, U.S. military over strategy to fight Islamic State
WASHINGTON POST
Craig Whitlock
Even as the administration has received congressional backing for its strategy, with the Senate voting Thursday to approve a plan to arm and train Syrian rebels, a series of military leaders have criticized the president’s approach against the Islamic State militant group.

 

Congress’s Inaction Could Be Legal Basis for Stronger Executive War Powers
NEW YORK TIMES
Charlie Savage
As lawmakers grapple with President Obama’s claim that he already has congressional authorization for airstrikes against the Islamic State, legal specialists are saying that even legislative inaction could create a precedent leaving the executive branch with greater war-making powers.

 

James Clapper: We underestimated the Islamic State’s ‘will to fight’
WASHINGTON POST
David Ignatius
CLAPPER: “What we didn’t do was predict the will to fight. That’s always a problem. We didn’t do it in Vietnam. We underestimated the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese and overestimated the will of the South Vietnamese. In this case, we underestimated ISIL [the Islamic State] and overestimated the fighting capability of the Iraqi army. . . . I didn’t see the collapse of the Iraqi security force in the north coming. I didn’t see that. It boils down to predicting the will to fight, which is an imponderable.”

 

One year after the shutdown, Republicans rally around Boehner
WASHINGTON POST
Robert Costa
House Republicans are not touting a national manifesto ahead of the midterm elections, as they did with 1994’s Contract with America. Their plan to offer a replacement for President Obama’s health-care law has fizzled. But they are now rallying behind a central, if low-key, figure: House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), who a year ago was weakened by the federal government shutdown, but has since recovered much of his once-diminished political capital.​​

 

GOP Pushes Early Voting
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Reid Epstein
Republicans are trying to boost their early-voting efforts after lagging behind Democrats in the past two election cycles, spending unprecedented sums at the state level and launching a national campaign to get GOP voters to cast ballots before Election Day.

 

GOTCHA! How oppo took over the midterms
POLITICO
Kenneth P. Vogel and Byron Tau
The risks of wading into the thorny major issues vexing the body politic are rising, while the rewards are diminishing. There’s the growing intensity of a media cycle fueled by the salacious and voyeuristic. And, while there is exponentially more information available online about politicians and anyone in public life, there are ever fewer traditional political journalists to process and report on it.

 

Court orders Democrat Chad Taylor off Kansas ballot, dealing blow to GOP
WASHINGTON POST
Sean Sullivan
The Kansas Supreme Court ruled Thursday that Democrat Chad Taylor’s name must be removed from the ballot for U.S. Senate, dealing a blow to Republicans in the battle for the Senate majority.