Month: June 2021

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Business

United will purchase 15 ultrafast airplanes from start-up Growth Supersonic

United will buy 15 ultrafast airplanes from start-up Boom Supersonic

United Airlines plans to transform the friendly sky into ultra-fast sky with supersonic jets.

The airline announced Thursday that it is buying 15 aircraft from Boom Supersonic with the option to buy 35 more at some point.

Boom’s first commercial supersonic jet, the Overture, has not yet been built or certified. It aims to launch passenger service in 2029 with an aircraft that could fly at Mach 1.7 and cut some flight times in half. This means that a flight from New York to London, which normally takes seven hours, would only take 3½ hours.

A rendering of a United Supersonic Jet

Source: United Airlines

“Boom’s vision for the future of commercial aviation, combined with the world’s strongest network in the industry, will give business and leisure travelers access to a great flying experience,” said Scott Kirby, United CEO, in a press release announcing the deal.

Although the terms of sale were not disclosed, the companies anticipate that the transaction will bring immediate benefits.

Since its inception in 2014, Denver-based Boom Supersonic has raised $ 270 million in capital and grown to 150 employees. For founder and CEO Blake Scholl, winning a firm contract with an old airline confirms his vision of bringing back supersonic flights.

The supersonic Concorde flew commercial flights from 1976 to October 2003.

“The world’s first purchase agreement for carbon-free supersonic aircraft is an important step towards our mission to create a more accessible world,” said Scholl in a statement.

For United, ordering boom supersonic jets fits in with the strategy Kirby has outlined since he took office a year ago.

United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby

Chip Somodevilla | Getty Images

Kirby is aggressively trying to develop opportunities for the airline. Earlier this year, United acquired a stake in eVTOL start-up Archer Aviation and worked with Mesa Airlines to order 200 short-haul electric aircraft. It did so after United announced a multi-million dollar investment in a carbon capture startup and pledged to be carbon neutral by 2050.

Part of what made buying supersonic jets attractive to United is Boom’s plan to power the planes with engines that run on sustainable aviation fuel.

A rendering of a United Supersonic Jet

Source: United Airlines

However, it remains to be seen whether Boom’s plan to bring back supersonic airliners will get underway.

The company plans to make its maiden flight with a demonstrator jet called the XB-1 later this year. If things go as planned, Boom will start producing the overture in 2023 and make its maiden flight in 2026. The ultimate hurdle will be certification from regulatory agencies, including the Federal Aviation Administration.

In this case, United expects to target long-haul international flights between major cities around the world such as San Francisco to Tokyo and New York to Paris.

Mike Leskinen, United’s vice president of corporate development, said the overture could dramatically change some of the airline’s busiest international routes. “If we can cut the time it takes to fly from the US east coast to certain cities in Europe and do it with lower emissions, we think it will be very attractive,” he said.

Categories
Politics

Why Are We All Speaking About U.F.O.s Proper Now?

Why Are We All Talking About U.F.O.s Right Now?

When spooky things appear in the sky, witnesses have often been reluctant to report them for fear of mockery by others, especially in the halls of government.

These days, fewer people are laughing.

Unidentified flying objects, or unidentified aerial phenomena as the government calls them, have been taken more seriously by U.S. officials in recent years, starting in 2007 with a small, secretly funded program that investigated reports of military encounters.

The program, whose existence was first reported by The New York Times in December 2017, was revived by the Defense Department last summer as the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force. The department said the task force’s mission was to “detect, analyze and catalog” sightings of strange objects in the sky “that could potentially pose a threat to U.S. national security.” Service members were newly encouraged to speak up if they saw something, with the idea being that removing the stigma behind reporting something weird would provide authorities with a better idea of what’s out there.

Then, late last year, President Donald J. Trump signed a $2.3 trillion appropriations package that included a provision inserted by lawmakers: They asked the secretary of defense and director of national intelligence to submit an unclassified report on what the government knows about U.F.O.s. That report is due this month.

With the public asking more questions about U.F.O.s, more officials appear willing to answer them.

“There are a lot more sightings than have been made public,” John Ratcliffe, the former director of national intelligence, told Fox News in March. Quite a few of them, he said, “are difficult to explain.”

John Brennan, the former director of the C.I.A., said in a podcast last year that some of the unexplained sightings might be “some type of phenomenon that is the result of something that we don’t yet understand and that could involve some type of activity that some might say constitutes a different form of life.”

The lead-up to the report’s expected release has seen quite a bit of mainstream media attention in recent weeks, including a 13,000-word article in The New Yorker in April, and a segment on CBS’s “60 Minutes.”

Even former President Barack Obama, in an appearance last month on “The Late Late Show With James Corden,” admitted there were “objects in the skies that we don’t know exactly what they are.” (President Biden deflected a question about U.F.O.s a few days later.)

The first thing to know is that “U.F.O.” doesn’t automatically mean “alien.” As its name indicates, U.F.O. refers to any aerial phenomenon with no immediate explanation. Though reported sightings take place frequently around the world, the vast majority of them turn out to be things like stars, satellites, planes, drones, weather balloons, birds or bats.

The modern history of U.F.O. sightings is generally considered to have started on June 24, 1947, when Kenneth Arnold, a private pilot from Idaho, reported seeing nine circular objects traveling at supersonic speeds near Mount Rainier. Newspapers described them as “flying saucers,” a term that captured the popular imagination. Though Mr. Arnold appeared to be a credible witness, government officials were skeptical.

Nonetheless, the government began a classified study, called Project Sign, out of concern that such objects could be advanced Soviet weapons. That was followed by Project Blue Book, which reviewed about 12,000 cases from 1952 to 1969, 701 of which could not be explained. It ended with a report saying U.F.O.s were not worth further study. As far as is publicly known, there were no more official government efforts to study U.F.O.s until the one established in 2007, called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program.

Sightings of unidentified objects in the United States have risen during the coronavirus pandemic, as people spending long days at home turned to sky gazing. Reports increased about 15 percent last year to more than 7,200, according to the National U.F.O. Reporting Center. As in other years, almost all of them had earthly explanations, the center said.

In November 2004, two Navy fighter jets from the U.S.S. Nimitz were off the coast of San Diego when they encountered a whitish, oval-shaped craft of similar size hovering above the sea, which was churning in an unusual way. As one of the jets began a circular descent to get a closer look, the object — which had no wings or obvious means of propulsion — ascended toward it, then zipped away.

“It accelerated like nothing I’ve ever seen,” Cmdr. David Fravor, one of the pilots, told The Times in 2017.

Commander Fravor told a fellow pilot that night that he had no idea what he had seen: “It had no plumes, wings or rotors and outran our F-18s.”

But, he added, “I want to fly one.”

Other cases include a spinning disk that was seen hovering above O’Hare Airport in Chicago in 2006, and two “sunlight-colored” objects reported by a professional pilot in England in 2007, as The New Yorker reported.

A video of the Nimitz incident, along with two from 2015, was officially released by the Defense Department last year. More recently, the department confirmed that video and images leaked to a documentary filmmaker had been taken by Navy personnel in 2019 and were being investigated by the task force.

It may not say much.

According to the provision in the appropriations package, the report should include a detailed analysis of U.F.O. data held by the task force and other government bodies. The report is also supposed to flag any unidentified aerial phenomena that could be considered threats to national security, including whether they “may be attributed to one or more foreign adversaries.” In addition, it must provide “a detailed description of an interagency process” for collecting and analyzing U.F.O. reports in the future, as well as recommendations for improving and funding data collection and research.

Although the report is to be made public, it may also come with a classified annex.

Calls for transparency are growing in Washington, including from a bipartisan political action committee that was launched last month.

One key backer of U.F.O. research efforts has been Harry Reid, the former Democratic senator from Nevada, who as Senate majority leader secured $22 million in funding to create the 2007 program.

In an essay for The Times this month, Mr. Reid said he had been interested in U.F.O.s since attending a conference in 1996 (to the consternation of his staff, who told him to “stay the hell away” from the topic). He said the program was necessary because “an unofficial taboo regarding the frank discussion of encounters could harm our national security and stymie opportunities for technical advancement.”

There is support for U.F.O. research among current senators as well, including Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, who added the language to the appropriations package requesting the government report.

Mr. Rubio told “60 Minutes” that there should be a process by which reports of U.F.O.s are “cataloged and constantly analyzed, until we get some answers.”

“Maybe it has a simple answer,” he said on the program. “Maybe it doesn’t.”

Categories
Business

United Airways Desires to Carry Again Supersonic Air Journey

United Airlines Wants to Bring Back Supersonic Air Travel

The era of supersonic commercial flights came to an end when the Concorde completed its last trip between New York and London in 2003, but the allure of ultrafast air travel never quite died out.

President Biden mused about supersonic flights when discussing his infrastructure plan in April. And on Thursday, United Airlines said it was ordering 15 jets that can travel faster than the speed of sound from Boom Supersonic, a start-up in Denver. The airline said it had an option to increase its order by up to 35 planes.

Boom, which has raised $270 million from venture capital firms and other investors, said it planned to introduce aircraft in 2025 and start flight tests in 2026. It expects the plane, which it calls the Overture, to carry passengers before the end of the decade.

But the start-up’s plans have already slipped at least once, and it will have to overcome many obstacles, including securing approval from the Federal Aviation Administration and regulators in other countries. Even established manufacturers have stumbled when introducing new or redesigned planes. Boeing’s 737 Max was grounded for nearly two years after two crashes.

The deal is United’s latest attempt to position itself as a risk taker shaking up an industry that is just getting back on its feet after a devastating pandemic. The airline announced a $20 million investment in an electric air taxi start-up, Archer, in February, and it is working on a “steady drumbeat” of more such bets, said Michael Leskinen, who heads corporate development at United.

“We are really confident in the future,” Mr. Leskinen said. “Aerospace takes a long time to innovate. And so if you don’t start setting these opportunities out now, you will have missed them.”

United and Boom would not disclose financial details, including the cost of each plane, but Mr. Leskinen said the economics should be about the same as a new Boeing 787, a wide-body plane that airlines typically use on international routes. United has committed to buying the planes if Boom manages to produce them, secure regulatory approvals and hit other targets, like meeting its sustainability requirements.

Boom also plans to make planes for Japan Airlines, an investor in the company.

What is not clear is whether Boom has solved the problems that forced British Airways and Air France to stop using the Concorde on trans-Atlantic flights — high costs, safety concerns and flagging demand.

“There was no airline interest,” Henry Harteveldt, a travel industry analyst and consultant, said about why supersonic flights languished. “And a big part of the lack of airline interest was there were no engines that were commercially available that would allow a supersonic jet to be economically viable.”

Two decades later, some start-up companies, including Boom and Spike Aerospace, are pushing ahead with new designs and plans.

Today in Business

Updated 

June 2, 2021, 4:35 p.m. ET

Boom, which is working with Rolls-Royce, the British jet engine maker, said its plane would be more efficient than the Concorde; United estimates it will be 75 percent more efficient. Boom’s planes will not be as noisy as the Concorde because their engines will create a sonic boom only when flying over water “when there’s no one to hear it,” said Boom’s chief executive, Blake Scholl, who previously worked at Amazon and Groupon.

In recent years, many people have also grown increasingly concerned about air travel’s contribution to climate change. Supersonic jets are expected to use more fuel than regular jets per passenger per mile, according to experts.

Mr. Scholl said the engines on Boom’s planes would rely entirely on sustainable aviation fuel, which can be made from waste, plants and other organic matter. Experts say such fuel could reduce emissions, but its supply is limited, it is expensive and its use does not eliminate greenhouse gas emissions.

United said it was too early to know how much it would charge for the flights, which it would run out of its hubs in Newark and San Francisco to start. But another big question mark about the plane is how many people will be willing to spend the thousands of dollars that each ticket on a supersonic flight is likely to cost.

United has long focused on business travelers, including by adding flights to Israel, China and other destinations popular with executives and by offering more business class seats on its planes. Mr. Leskinen called the idea of supersonic travel a “really powerful tool for business.”

“You can have a business meeting and still be home to have dinner with your family,” he said.

But corporate and international travel is expected to rebound slowly from the pandemic, and some experts say it might not recover fully for years because companies have realized that they can be effective without as many in-person meetings.

“The key to the success of supersonic transportation is the overlooked, underappreciated corporate travel manager, who is probably relegated to one of the worst offices in his or her company — and his primary task is to minimize corporate spending on business travel,” said Mr. Harteveldt.

If flights save a third of the travel time but also cost a third more, travel managers may end up saying, “I don’t know if we can justify that,” he said.

Categories
Health

The Illness Detective – The New York Occasions

The Disease Detective - The New York Times

Meningitis itself is not a disease, just a description that means that the tissues around the brain and spinal cord have become inflamed. In the United States, bacterial infections can cause meningitis, as can enteroviruses, mumps, and herpes simplex. But a high percentage of cases, as doctors say, have no known etiology: Nobody knows why the patient’s brain and spinal cord swell.

This was the case with the Dhaka eruption. CHRF is one of the leading microbiology laboratories in Southeast Asia and is responsible for tracking meningitis in the country for the World Health Organization. “Every case of meningitis that comes in, we cultivate,” Saha told me. “We do antigen tests for pneumococci, Neisseria meningitidis, Haemophilus influenzae and GBS” or group B streptococci – the four infections most likely to cause meningitis. “Then we do a much more sensitive and specific test for Streptococcus pneumoniae bacteria as this causes the highest percentage of cases. And then we also do real-time PCR to look for DNA fragments from one of these pathogens. ”

When the outbreak began, the cause was thought to be bacterial again, but none of the tests could locate a pathogen. Over the next year, Saha worked to solve the puzzle, sometimes in collaboration with other laboratories. A partnership with an organization in China broke up when the group was unwilling to share their techniques. Another group of researchers in Canada did their own tests on the meningitis samples, but couldn’t figure out the cause either. Not long after, Saha was attending a conference at the British Museum where she gave a presentation entitled “The Dark Side of Meningitis”. “It was a negative conversation,” recalls Saha. “How: Why does everyone only talk about the successful cases? We have to talk about thousands of cases each year where we have no idea what is causing the disease. ”

Before meeting DeRisi, Saha was skeptical about further collaboration. But the two hit it off right away. Although DeRisi could be impatient, Saha liked that he was direct and appreciated that his “ethics are very strong. In his head he says: That’s right; that is wrong; I’ll do that. ”Still, she proceeded cautiously. “Because IDseq was new and I’m very meticulous, I built in a lot of controls,” she told me. Of the 97 cerebrospinal fluid samples, only 25 were from actual mystery meningitis cases. The remainder were either from cases for which Saha’s lab had already identified the cause or were not meningitis at all. Several were just water. “The idea was that all of this would be tested and the process dazzled,” says Saha. “Because I had to see whether the platform worked or not.”

However, when Saha and her team performed the mysterious meningitis testing through IDseq, the result was surprising. Rather than uncovering a bacterial cause as expected, a third of the samples showed signs of the Chikungunya virus – particularly a neuroinvasive strain that was thought to be extremely rare. “At first we thought: That can’t be true!” Saha remembers. “But when Joe and I realized it was Chikungunya, I went back and looked at the other 200 samples we had collected around the same time. And we also found the virus in some of these samples. ”

Until recently, chikungunya was a comparatively rare disease that occurs mainly in parts of central and east Africa. “Then it just exploded across the Caribbean and Africa and across Southeast Asia to India and Bangladesh,” DeRisi told me. No cases of chikungunya were reported in Latin America in 2011. In 2014 there were a million.

Common chikungunya can cause permanent neurological damage and lifelong joint pain. DeRisi called the disease “enormously devastating” and stated that chikungunya means “to be distorted” in the Kimakonde language spoken in Tanzania. But one neuroinvasive version that caused brain damage, particularly affecting children and infants, was particularly alarming.

Categories
Entertainment

Jerome Hellman, Producer of ‘Midnight Cowboy,’ Dies at 92

Jerome Hellman, Producer of ‘Midnight Cowboy,’ Dies at 92

Many critics found the film off-putting, and it did not do well at the box office. Pauline Kael of The New Yorker said it had “no emotional center.” Although Roger Ebert of The Chicago Sun-Times loved Mr. Sutherland’s performance, he found most of the characters too clearly doomed to care about.

But Mr. Canby wrote in The Times that the film was “in many ways remarkable,” declaring its subject a metaphor for the decline of Western civilization and “second-rateness as a way of life.”

Judith Crist, then the acclaimed founding movie critic for New York magazine, praised “The Day of the Locust” in a full-page review. “So brilliant is” this film, she began, “so dazzling and harrowing its impact, so impotent are the superlatives it evokes” that you almost want to avoid looking at it directly, like a solar eclipse. She concluded, “To call it the finest film of the past several years is to belittle it.”

The National Board of Review named it one of the year’s 10 best films.

Jerome Hellman was born on Sept. 4, 1928, in Manhattan, the second child of Abraham J. Hellman, a Romanian-born insurance broker, and Ethel (Greenstein) Hellman. After high school, he served two years in the Marine Corps, then began his working life as a messenger in the New York office of Ashley-Steiner, a talent agency.

He rose through the ranks and founded his own agency in 1957, before he was 30. But he sold that business in 1963 and became a full-time movie producer, beginning with George Roy Hill’s comedy “The World of Henry Orient” (1964). Peter Sellers played the title role, a New York concert pianist who is trying to initiate an affair with a married woman but is being stalked by two adoring adolescent girls. The film was both well reviewed and a hit.

His other films as producer were Irvin Kershner’s “A Fine Madness” (1966), starring Sean Connery as a poet with writer’s block, and “Promises in the Dark” (1979), starring Marsha Mason as a doctor treating a teenage cancer patient. It was the only film that Mr. Hellman ever directed, and only because Mr. Schlesinger, who was scheduled to do so, had dropped out.

Categories
Business

Investing in AMC, meme shares can really feel like a recreation. The best way to not lose

Investing in AMC, meme stocks can feel like a game. How to not lose

Mario Tama | Getty Images

AMC Entertainment stock continued its wild ride on Wednesday, with the price per share rising more than 100% and suspending trading multiple times.

AMC is one of several so-called meme stocks that, along with names like GameStop and BlackBerry, have seen strong interest from retail investors this year.

Financial advisors often warn against getting involved in such frenzies. But in a recent survey, 34% of consultants admitted their clients bought GameStop, while 20% of them bought the stock themselves, according to the Journal of Financial Planning and the Financial Planning Association.

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For retail investors, the challenge can be to place bets alongside professional investors such as short sellers, whose activity can also trigger large movements.

“Often you hear the narrative that they are only retailers, but that is not the case,” wrote JJ Kinahan, chief marketing strategist at TD Ameritrade, in a recent market update.

“The high volume suggests that there are a lot of big companies out there,” he said.

For example, the distressed investment firm Mudrick Capital bought and sold 8.5 million AMC shares on Tuesday.

Understandably, investors can get so caught up in profits that they forget to remember the potential to lose.

If you want to try your hand at meme stock names, it’s important to remember that you are really playing a game like musical chairs and behaving accordingly, according to Dan Egan, vice president of behavioral finance and investing at Betterment.

“Half of the game is figuring out how to sell before it crashes,” said Egan.

Be ready to lose money

When you pay for a ticket to a sporting event, you part with an amount of money but can still watch the game.

Investors in meme stocks should start with the same approach, Egan said.

When investing in a stock like AMC you should have some level of composure because it’s fun, and if you’re losing money that’s fine, Egan said.

Plan an exit strategy

Before or while investing in a stock, it is also beneficial to identify when you would sell it in advance.

And be sure you keep that promise, said Egan.

“What often happens to people emotionally is they hit that price point, but then they ask, ‘Wait, what if it goes higher?'” Egan said.

Anyone considering trading these should be aware of how volatile they can be.

JJ Kinahan

Chief Marketing Strategist at TD Ameritrade

To avoid this, it is beneficial to set up a way for the transaction to be carried out automatically so that your emotions are not disturbed in the moment.

“Anyone considering trading these should be aware of how volatile they can be and be prepared to be disciplined about the levels they want to get in and out of,” Kinahan said of stocks like AMC or GameStop.

Avoid a team mentality

It can be exciting to be part of an investment where your activity adds to price movement and you can empathize with fellow investors on message boards.

“The community aspect, the social aspect of it, is a really tough drug that you can try to get off of,” Egan said.

Additionally, this can prevent you from selling the stock, which would mean that you are no longer part of a team or movement.

It’s important to remember that you still need to put yourself first.

“Movement leaders won’t tell you until they sell,” Egan said.

Balance again along the way

Because of the wild swings trending stocks experience, your initial allotment could go from 5% to 20% of your portfolio while you’re not careful.

Try to rebalance if your position reaches sizes you wouldn’t have invested in, Egan said.

It’s also important to remember that stocks that have performed well will continue to fall and have more potential to lose, he said.

One way to keep making the headlines without as much risk is to put your money in investments like diversified exchange-traded funds instead, Egan said.

Categories
Health

Day by day U.S. information on June 2

Daily U.S. data on June 2

Medical assistant Odilest Guerrier administers a Moderna COVID-19 vaccine to Pasqual Cruz at a clinic established by Healthcare Network in Immokalee, Florida on May 20, 2021.

Joe Raedle | Getty Images

Twelve US states now have 70% of adult residents who have received at least one Covid shot, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, released on Tuesday.

California and Maryland most recently reported crossing the milestone, joining Vermont, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maine, New Jersey, Rhode Island, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire.

President Joe Biden’s goal is to have one or more vaccinations to 70% of those over 18 years of age by July 4th. On Wednesday he will talk about the status of the vaccination campaign and declare June the national month of action more people vaccinated.

The seven-day average of daily U.S. infections stayed below 20,000 for the second straight day on Tuesday, although many states did not release data and may be catching up with reporting during the Memorial Day holiday.

US percentage of vaccinated population population

CDC data shows that about 51% of Americans have received at least one dose and about 41% are fully vaccinated.

Of those over the age of 18, around 63% have received one dose or more.

US vaccine shots given

The US reports an average of 1.2 million vaccinations per day over the past week, according to the CDC.

White House Covid-19 data director Cyrus Shahpar wrote in a tweet on Tuesday that data coverage over the holiday weekend will be limited and will be supplemented in the coming days.

Covid cases in the USA

The most recent seven-day average of U.S. Covid cases is 17,289, data from Johns Hopkins University shows. Many states have not reported Memorial Day data, and cases could rise in the coming days to reflect residue depletions.

Before the bank holiday weekend, the number of cases had been falling for weeks.

Covid deaths in the US

Also affected by the slowdown in reporting over the holiday weekend, the current seven-day average of Covid deaths in the US is 589.

The latest trend in the daily death toll in the US is made even more complicated by data reviews by state health officials. In these scenarios, a batch of previously unreported cases or death dates are assigned to a single day, even if they occurred before the assigned date. Oklahoma and Maryland each added hundreds of deaths to their pandemic totals last week.

Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear announced Tuesday that an audit found 260 new Covid deaths, all currently attributed to June 1 in the Hopkins data, according to the Associated Press.

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World News

Commerce secretary on commerce, restoration from Covid

Commerce secretary on trade, recovery from Covid

Hong Kong’s economy has rebounded sharply after being hit by the Covid-19 pandemic — but it’s not out of the woods yet and some sectors are still reeling, said the city’s top trade official.

“The distribution of this rebound is rather uneven,” Edward Yau, Hong Kong’s secretary for commerce and economic development, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Asia” on Thursday.

Yau explained that imports and exports have been a “very strong catalyst” of growth in the last few months, with overall trade hitting record levels in some months. However, retail sales are moderating and tourism is still struggling to recover, he said.

Such uneven economic performance is also reflected in the jobs market, and will likely remain so as Hong Kong faces the “twin battle” of containing the spread of Covid and reviving the economy, added Yau.

The Hong Kong economy grew 7.9% in the first quarter of 2021 compared to a year ago. It was the city’s first economic expansion after six consecutive quarters of year-on-year contraction.

A man wearing a protective face mask stands on Kowloon’s Tsim Sha Tsui waterfront that faces Victoria Harbour in Hong Kong.

Anthony Wallace | AFP | Getty Images

Before the pandemic, Hong Kong — a Chinese-ruled semi-autonomous region — was rocked by widespread pro-democracy protests that turned violent at times. The unrest sent the economy into a recession in 2019 for the first time in a decade, driven by a steep decline in retail sales and tourist arrivals.

The Covid outbreak dealt another blow to the economy.

While retail sales have recovered since February this year, the pace of growth has slowed down. Meanwhile, visitor arrivals into Hong Kong have remained weak.

Yau said it’s encouraging that the number of daily Covid cases has fallen and stayed low in Hong Kong over the past month. That would allow more segments of the economy to recover, but fresh waves of infections could still occur, he added.

“The lesson we learned is try to shorten the time to suppress the outbreak,” said Yau, adding that the ability to do so will help instill confidence among individuals and businesses.

Categories
Business

Exxon Board to Get a Third Activist Pushing Cleaner Power

Exxon Board to Get a Third Activist Pushing Cleaner Energy

Activist investors who dealt a stunning defeat to Exxon Mobil last week secured a third seat on the company’s board on Wednesday when the oil giant announced updated results of a shareholder vote.

While the first two new dissident board members were oil company veterans, the newest member, Alexander A. Karsner, has strong environmental credentials and is expected to pose more of a challenge to senior management. Mr. Karsner’s election sharpened the investor rebuke of the company’s management, which has produced lackluster returns for about a decade.

Investor discontent with Exxon had been building because the company has invested in a number of projects, acquisitions and strategies that have not paid off, including Canadian oil sands and natural gas fields. Critics also believe that the company has been very slow to adapt to a changing energy industry and done too little to reduce carbon emissions even as many European oil companies began investing in wind turbines, solar farms and hydrogen.

The investors challenging Exxon were led by a small hedge fund called Engine No. 1. Last week the activists secured enough votes to put two people on the oil producer’s board, the first time candidates picked by the company’s management have lost an election, according to analysts. Engine No. 1 has sought to push Exxon to move toward cleaner energy and away from oil and gas.

Exxon said last week that it needed more time to determine who had won the last two of the 12 seats on its board. Engine No. 1 had put up four candidates. Exxon said that one of two remaining candidates did not secure enough votes but that Mr. Karsner was still in contention.

On Wednesday, the company said its latest results were preliminary and would be certified before being filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Having a third director on the board will give the activists greater say in big corporate decisions and Exxon’s strategy, though they will still be up against nine people picked by the company’s management, who will presumably be more likely to back executives on crucial questions.

“We are grateful for shareholders’ careful consideration of our nominees,” Engine No. 1 said in a statement, “and are excited that these three individuals will be working with the full board to help better Exxon Mobil for the long-term benefit of all shareholders.”

Mr. Karsner is a senior strategist at X, a division of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, and has been an executive at various energy, technology and investment businesses. Companies he has worked at have built solar plants in Morocco. Between 2006 and 2008, Mr. Karsner was an assistant secretary of energy for energy efficiency and renewable energy during the Bush administration.

In that role, he supervised the Energy Department’s applied science programs and helped negotiate the United States’ re-entry into the United Nations Convention on Climate Change, which eventually led to the 2015 Paris climate agreement. He has been a member of the board of Conservation International, an environmental group that works to protect forests that absorb climate-warming carbon.

Today in Business

Updated 

June 2, 2021, 4:35 p.m. ET

Exxon Mobil announced the election results in a bland statement that thanked shareholders for “their ongoing support for our company.”

“We look forward to working with all of our directors to build on the progress we’ve made to grow long-term shareholder value and succeed in a lower-carbon future,” the company said.

Darren W. Woods, Exxon’s chairman and chief executive, was re-elected to the board. His answer to the challenge posed by climate change has been to build a business that captures carbon dioxide from industrial plants and buries it deep underground. Exxon recently proposed a $100 billion carbon capture project for plants along the Houston Ship Channel that could be a model for the world. But in order to be viable, the project will most likely require a carbon tax or another mechanism to put a price on carbon emissions. Lawmakers in Washington have been reluctant to embrace a carbon price.

The new activist-backed directors may support Exxon’s carbon-capture efforts, but probably will push for other clean energy initiatives, as well. Executives at Engine No. 1 have said the new directors need to get on the board and study company businesses before pushing for fundamental changes. The directors have declined requests for interviews.

The three directors nominated by Exxon’s management who were not elected are Samuel Palmisano, a former chief executive of IBM; Steven Kandarian, a former Met Life chief executive; and Wan Zulkiflee, chairman of Malaysia Airlines and the former chief executive of Petronas, Malaysia’s state-owned oil company.

The activist-backed directors who were declared winners last week are Gregory Goff, a former chief executive of the refiner Andeavor who had a long career at Conoco Phillips, and Kaisa Hietala, an environmental scientist who was a senior executive at Neste, a Finnish refiner. Both have experience in biofuels.

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Politics

Joe Biden and Shelley Moore Capito to fulfill Friday

Progress in talks with GOP senators

United States President Joe Biden gestures at Senator Shelley Capito (R-WV) during an infrastructure meeting with Republican Senators at the White House in Washington May 13, 2021.

Kevin Lamarque | Reuters

President Joe Biden and Republican Senator Shelley Moore Capito ended a meeting on a possible infrastructure compromise Wednesday and agreed to speak again in two days.

The president and senior GOP negotiator had a “constructive and frank conversation” about a massive proposal to invest in US infrastructure, a White House official said. Biden and the West Virginia senator started the day with differing views on what should go into a bill and how the government should pay for the plan.

During Wednesday’s meeting, Capito “emphasized their desire to work together to reach an infrastructure deal that can pass bipartisan to Congress,” said Capito spokeswoman Kelley Moore. The senator was “encouraged that negotiations continued” and will brief other Republicans before the next discussion with Biden, she added.

Friday’s discussion could be a last-ditch effort to get any closer to an infrastructure deal before the Democrats decide whether to try to pass laws themselves. The Biden administration has signaled that it wants to see progress in talks with Republicans by next week.

“There is a time limit for that … You won’t be playing this back and forth for much longer,” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Wednesday morning.

“There is definitely a deal,” she said.

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Talks continue a back-and-forth between the White House and the GOP as the parties seek a way forward on a plan to transform US transport, broadband, and utilities. Republicans did not support Biden’s proposals to invest in schools, homes, care facilities and green energy under a bill because they should focus on the infrastructure defined in the past.

The GOP sent Biden a counteroffer for $ 928 billion last week. The president had previously cut his proposal from $ 2.3 trillion to $ 1.7 trillion.

The parties must also resolve a dispute about how the expenses should be offset. Biden plans to raise the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to at least 25 percent, which was set under the 2017 Republican Tax Act. It also aims to reduce underpayments from both individuals and businesses.

Republicans have announced that they will not reconsider their tax legislation. Instead, they called for the coronavirus aid money approved earlier this year to be reused. The White House has signaled its opposition to the diversion of funds and has questioned how much of the aid will be left.

If they can’t reach an agreement with the Republicans, the Democrats can try to pass an infrastructure bill themselves by balancing the budget. It would require the support of every member of the Democratic Senate faction in an evenly divided chamber.

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