Get ready for gas prices to soar
Hippie
plainolamerican
I-think4me
Hippie
Where's Jackie?
Where's Jackie?
plainolamerican
Where's Jackie?
plainolamerican
the White House insisted that visit was not a “waste of time,” even as it sharply criticized the decision to cut production.
“The President is disappointed by the shortsighted decision by OPEC+ to cut production quotas while the global economy is dealing with the continued negative impact of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine,” said two of Biden’s top aides, national security adviser Jake Sullivan and National Economic Council Director Brian Deese, in a statement.
“At a time when maintaining a global supply of energy is of paramount importance, this decision will have the most negative impact on lower- and middle-income countries that are already reeling from elevated energy prices,” the two advisers wrote.
The administration will “consult with Congress on additional tools and authorities to reduce OPEC’s control over energy prices,” the statement read, without specifying which actions are under consideration dampen the oil cartel’s sway.
Slashing oil production just ahead of November’s midterm elections poses a potential political problem for the President, who has touted this summer’s decreasing gas prices as he works to promote his agenda. The average gas price has been rising nationally again in recent days, according to AAA.
Earlier this year, Biden announced a major release of barrels from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in an effort to alleviate pump prices. On Tuesday, the White House said it was not considering additional releases beyond the 180 million previously announced.
But after OPEC+ announced its decision on Wednesday, the White House said Biden would “continue to direct SPR releases as necessary,” apparently cracking open the door again to potential releases.
Departing the White House on Wednesday, Biden said he was concerned about the possibility of a significant cut to production.
“I need to see what the detail is. I am concerned, it is unnecessary,” he said in response to a question about the OPEC+ decision as he departed the White House for Florida, where he was set to tour storm damage.
The international cartel of oil producers held a critical meeting Wednesday, where energy ministers decided to slash production by 2 million barrels per day, the biggest cut since the start of the pandemic.
For the past several days, Biden’s senior-most energy, economic and foreign policy officials had been lobbying their foreign counterparts in Middle Eastern allied countries including Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to vote against cutting oil production.
When he visited Saudi Arabia in July, Biden sought to make clear it wasn’t solely to ask the oil-rich kingdom to increase its oil output. After decrying the regime’s human rights record as a candidate, Biden fist-bumped the powerful Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who US intelligence has said masterminded the murder of Saudi journalist and US resident Jamal Khashoggi.
Speaking on Fox News shortly after the decision was announced, National Security Council communications coordinator John Kirby said the oil cartel was “adjusting back their numbers down a little bit” after making a small increase after Biden’s visit.
“OPEC+ has been saying and telling the word they’re actually producing 3.5 million more barrels than they actually are. So in some ways this announced decrease really gets them back into more align with actual production,” Kirby said, noting there hadn’t yet been dramatic shifts in the price of oil.
“We have to see how it plays out over the long term,” he said.
Kirby said Biden’s visit to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, for a regional conference “was not about oil.”
“It was about larger national strategic and national interest goals throughout the region to try to foster more integrated cooperative region,” he said.
Lobo
We could have been further along if not for rightwing coal & oil baron Sen Joe Manchin, and the other Republican In All But Name Kyrsten Sinema, joining Republicans first to kill Build Back Better, and then to strip out most of the global warming-fighting parts of the Inflation Reduction Act. But if Democrats can just hold on to the House, and add two more senators, it will still be possible. (If they lose either House, America will lose democracy, and any chance to do anything at all to slow down global warming.)
The economic toll of deadly heat waves, crop-killing droughts and rising seas that each additional ton of carbon dioxide levies on society is much higher than the U.S. government tallies when considering new regulations, according to a new analysis published Thursday.
A sobering paper in the journal Nature on the damage caused by climate change brings into relief the threat that higher temperatures pose on the lives and livelihoods of millions of people at home and overseas.
The research team’s key finding: Each additional ton of carbon dioxide that cars, power plants and other sources add to the atmosphere costs society $185 — more than triple the federal government’s current figure.
The new study calculating climate change’s economic toll — known as the “social cost of carbon” — could renew pressure on President Biden to hike the federal government’s own estimate, a crucial number used by officials when assessing the potential costs and benefits of government regulations.
“The bottom line is that our results show that when you fully update the social cost of carbon methodology to the state of the science, it suggests that the existing estimates that are in use by the federal government are vastly underestimating the harm,” said Kevin Rennert, a research fellow at the think tank Resources for the Future and a co-author of the paper.
Here’s more about what it all means:
With wildfires burning more ferociously, droughts lasting longer and hurricanes becoming more intense, scientists agree the monetary toll of climate change will be enormous. The social cost of carbon is an attempt to put a dollar figure on that destruction.
The idea for the metric came to fruition during President Barack Obama’s administration, which at one point settled on a cost of roughly $51 a ton when adjusted for inflation. With nations releasing billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the air every year, the toll adds up pretty quickly.
But many experts thought the Obama-era figure might be lowballing the actual costs. In early 2017, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) recommended a major update to the metric to make the calculation more transparent and scientifically sound.
Donald Trump became president a week after the release of the NAS report, and his administration wasted little time in disbanding the interagency working group on the carbon price. By excluding damages of climate change abroad, the Trump team slashed the estimated cost of each ton of carbon pollution to between $1 and $7 per ton.
After Joe Biden took office, the White House reestablished the working group and told federal agencies to return to using the Obama-era price of $51 per ton — at least temporarily, promising to update the cost. In May, the Supreme Court allowed Biden’s deputies to continue using that higher interim estimate.
Temperature-related mortality extracts a particularly high cost, according to the research group led by experts at Resources for the Future and the University of California at Berkeley.
In the United States, extreme heat is the most fatal form of weather disaster, with hundreds of Americans losing their lives last summer. Any additional hospitalization or death as temperatures rise is, of course, a tragedy — but it’s also one to which economists are able to assign a dollar value.
Another major concern is crop failure. Altered yields of rice, soy, maize and wheat as weather patterns shift could upend global trade and have a far worse economic impact than previously thought, according to the team.
In Thursday’s analysis, researchers also lowered the “discount rate” — a method of measuring future costs and benefits — on the dangers of sea level rise and other effects of climate change. A lower discount rate implies a higher cost to inaction.
Whatever number policymakers use, the idea is to provide them a metric by which to tally the ongoing costs and benefits of a regulation or infrastructure project years or decades into the future. Ideally, the calculations offer a worthwhile road map of whether implementing certain policies will pay off down the road.
To make the dizzying set of calculations behind Thursday’s paper, the researchers gathered specialists — including climate scientists, economists and statisticians — from a dozen institutions to assess the latest science.
“When we started this project, we knew that we would only succeed by assembling a team of leading researchers in each discipline to contribute their expertise,” said David Anthoff, an environmental economist at UC-Berkeley and another study co-author.
The team emphasized there is still a wide range of uncertainty in their estimate. And there are plenty of negative impacts they did not assess, including the potential decline of ecosystems, loss of labor productivity and outbreak of war.
You betcha.
For well over a decade, many elected officials and academics have debated how to properly quantify the economic costs of greenhouse gas emissions — and how much the government should rely on such estimates.
On one end of the spectrum are folks who reject the utility of such an approach altogether. When President Biden boosted the figure to $51, Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) called the move “a backdoor carbon tax.”
“Since the president can’t rationalize the crippling costs of his climate policies,” Barrasso said in a statement, “he needs to exaggerate the benefits.”
This summer, a group of conservative lawmakers on Capitol Hill introduced a bill that would prohibit the federal government from using the social cost of carbon in the rulemaking process.
Nick Loris, vice president of public policy at the Conservative Coalition for Climate Solutions, or C3 Solutions, has raised a more nuanced set of concerns.
“I do believe there’s a social cost of carbon and that increased carbon in the atmosphere increases costs to the economy and our ecology and the planet, and those damages will likely get worse in the future if we don’t mitigate emissions,” Loris said. He also said the team behind Thursday’s paper is rigorous and credible.
But the problem, he said, is that even peer-reviewed academic literature contains a range of different estimates for the true costs, depending on assumptions and methodologies and the possibilities of wild swings in policy between administration risks creating uncertainty among regulated industries.
It’s important to analyze the potential future economic damages posed by a warming planet and a worthwhile data point for policymakers and regulators, Loris said. But, he added, “it can’t be relied on as the singular number to justify a regulation or policy action.”
The value is an essential input in a lot of federal policymaking — whether to drill for oil, to boost the energy efficiency of appliances, to allow a power plant to continue burning coal. Setting the cost of carbon high would encourage clean energy projects, deter new coal leasing on federal acreage and influence the type of steel used in taxpayer-funded infrastructure.
“Getting the number right is critical,” Tamma Carleton said in an email. Carleton is an assistant professor of economics at the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
“A value that is too low means that we face excessive climate change risks, but a value that is too high imposes unwarranted emissions mitigation costs on the economy.”
She said Thursday’s paper includes the most up-to-date science and “marks a substantial improvement” upon estimates previously developed by the U.S. government.
The Biden administration “remains committed to accounting for the costs of greenhouse gas emissions as accurately as possible,” said a spokeswoman for the White House’s Office of Management and Budget. But the office did not say when it would make an update to the figure.
Even as the Trump administration was drastically reducing the social cost of carbon, Democratic-leaning states have pressed ahead with their own policies.
In late 2020, for instance, New York adopted a “value of carbon guidance” ranging between $79 and $125 that it will apply to policies and programs going forward. And other states, such as Illinois, Colorado, Washington and Minnesota, use the metric for various types of policy analysis or implementation, including in the electricity sector.
The city of Minneapolis also voted to impose a $42 per ton estimate for the costs of climate change several years back, though as Mayor Jacob Frey told The Washington Post in an interview last year, “Carbon does not respect borders.”
The emissions that come from Phoenix or Baltimore or Texas, he said, impact life in Minneapolis and other places. That is why a federal standard that factors in the true costs of climate change is essential, he said.
“It really should be baked into every decision.”
Hippie
Herman Adler
rivcuban
rivcuban
rivcuban
Exposeposers
Thomas Argo
Where's Jackie?
plainolamerican
Thomas Argo
American-made cell phones: Which are the smartphones that are made in America?
Apple is an American company, but its iPhone models are not manufactured in the USA. The same holds for Google Pixel phones. Like Apple, Google handles the design, but the manufacturing happens in China. So, neither Apple nor Google have their cell phones made in the USA.
What of CAT, BLU, and NUU Mobile? Like the big two dogs, their phones are not made in America either. BLU does all the designing in their Florida base, but all manufacturing is done in China. CAT phones are made by Bullitt, which has its manufacturing done in China. The same goes for NUU Mobile.
Once upon a time, tech brands like HP, Compaq, Dell, and Motorola used to have their cell phones manufactured in the USA. But that was another lifetime. All of them, except Motorola, have exited the mobile market. Motorola, once an American company, was acquired by Chinese smartphone company, Lenovo, in 2014, and so is now Chinese.
Herman Adler
Lobo
Susiejoe
Susiejoe
Susiejoe
Herman Adler
Thomas Argo
Kitchenaid mixer made here too looking about. Ok, i see more but not much.
Susiejoe
Susiejoe
Lobo
After the United States established diplomatic relations with the Beijing government, or People's Republic of China (PRC), under the Communist Party of China's rule as "China" in 1979, Taiwan–United States relations became unofficial and informal. Until March 16, 2018, informal relations between the two states were governed by the U.S. Taiwan Relations Act (TRA), which allows the United States to have relations with the "people on Taiwan" and their government, whose name is not specified. U.S.–Taiwan relations were further informally grounded in the "Six Assurances" in response to the third communiqué on the establishment of US–PRC relations. Following the passage of the Taiwan Travel Act by the U.S. Congress on March 16, 2018, relations between the United States and Taiwan have since maneuvered to an official and high-level basis.[2] Both sides have since signed a consular agreement formalizing their existent consular relations on September 13, 2019.[3] The United States removed self-imposed restrictions on executive branch contacts with Taiwan on January 9, 2021.[4]
The policy of deliberate ambiguity of US foreign policy to Taiwan is important to stabilize cross-strait relations and to assist Taiwan from an invasion by the PRC if possible, whereas a policy of strategic clarity on Taiwan would likely induce PRC opposition and challenges to US legitimacy in East Asia or beyond.[5][6][7] As stipulated by the TRA, the United States continues to be the main provider of arms to Taiwan, which is often a source of tension with the PRC.[8] Both states maintain representative offices functioning as de facto embassies. Taiwan is represented by the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office in the United States (TECRO),[9] and the United States by the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT).[10]