Tag: Bidens

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Politics

Biden’s Antitrust Group Indicators a Massive Swing at Company Titans

Biden’s Antitrust Team Signals a Big Swing at Corporate Titans

WASHINGTON – President Biden has assembled the most aggressive cartel team in decades, equipping his administration with three legal crusaders preparing to take on corporate consolidation and market power with efforts that could include blocking mergers and liquidating large corporations.

Mr Biden’s decision last week to appoint Jonathan Kanter to head the Justice Department’s antitrust division is the latest sign of his willingness to join forces with American businesses to foster more competition in the tech industry and across the economy. Mr. Kanter has spent years as a lawyer fighting giants like Facebook and Google on behalf of rival companies.

If the Senate confirms this, he will join Lina Khan, who reorganized the academic debate on antitrust law and now heads the Federal Trade Commission, and Tim Wu, a longtime advocate of the breakup of Facebook and other big companies, who is now the Special assistant from. is the President for Technology and Competition Policy.

The appointments show both renewed antitrust activism by the Democratic Party and the Biden government’s growing concern that the concentration of power in technology, as well as other industries such as pharmaceuticals, agriculture, healthcare, and finance, has harmed consumers and workers and slowed economic growth.

They also underscore that Mr Biden is ready to use the power of his office and not wait for tougher action from Congress, an approach that is both quicker and potentially riskier. That month it issued an order of 72 initiatives designed to increase competition in a variety of industries, strengthen control over mergers, and curb the widespread practice of forcing workers to sign non-compete agreements.

External groups and government ideological allies warn that if Mr Biden really hopes to follow in the footsteps of his antitrust idols, Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin D. Roosevelt, he must push for sweeping laws to give federal regulators new powers grant, especially in the technology area. The core federal antitrust laws, written more than a century ago, did not provide for the kind of trade that exists today, where large corporations may offer their customers low prices, but at the expense of competition.

The government has tacitly backed the legislation working its way through the House of Representatives, but it has not yet attempted an antitrust push by Congress in the way that Mr Biden did on infrastructure, childcare and other components of his $ 4 trillion economic agenda to advance.

This could prove problematic if judges continue to oppose action by the Department of Justice, the FTC, or other agencies.

Last month, a federal judge threw an FTC lawsuit against Facebook saying the agency had failed to make a convincing argument that the company was a monopoly and instructed it to better justify its claims. Ms. Khan faces her first major review when she re-files that lawsuit, and on Friday the agency asked the court for more time.

Mr Biden’s antitrust experts argue that Facebook, Google, and Amazon have monopoly power and have used their dominant positions in social media, search, and online retail to crush competitors, leaving consumers with fewer options, even if they haven’t leads to higher costs.

Businesses and some economists disagree. Facebook cites TikTok, Snap, and Twitter as examples of competitors, and Amazon argues that it makes only 5 percent of all retail sales in the United States, despite an eMarketer study showing 40 percent of all online retail sales are made on its platform.

The President and his staff have seen his adoption of a “trustbuster” mentality as a critical step in realigning the economy to not only lower prices, but also to encourage more competition and create high-paying jobs.

“I always thought the free market system wasn’t just competition between companies, but guess what: companies should have to compete for workers,” Biden told a CNN audience in Ohio on Wednesday, promoting his executive order. “Guess what – maybe they’ll pay more money.”

White House officials argue that putting stubborn regulators in positions of power can enable them to thrive in antitrust efforts in a way that President Donald J. Trump did, who also made an executive order on competition and talked about technology – and not to dissolve hospital mergers.

“We’re confident,” said Diana Moss, president of the American Antitrust Institute and advocate of stronger competition enforcement. “But when the rubber hits the streets, they have to juggle an aggressive agenda with the reality of the courts, Congress and outside pressure.”

Updated

July 23, 2021 at 5:42 p.m. ET

Some economists are warning that the staff Mr Biden appointed could go beyond efforts to break the focus that is really stifling competition and hurting consumers and getting into industries like restaurants or grocery stores. The entry of national players into local markets has in many cases opened up more opportunities for customers and created more jobs.

“I’m most concerned about rhetoric,” said Chang-Tai Hsieh, an economist at the University of Chicago whose research has shown that some corporate concentration in recent years has led to innovation that drives the economy. “You look at what you see in tech – and tech is different. And they extrapolate from the tech industry to all other industries. “

Corporate America is already fighting Mr. Biden’s efforts. Google, Facebook and Amazon have filled their legal teams with antitrust experts and have hired seasoned government antitrust officials in recent years. Facebook and Amazon have filed for Ms. Khan’s dismissal on antitrust matters related to their businesses. They say Ms. Khan, who worked on a House of Representatives antitrust investigation into digital platforms, comes with prejudice about her companies. Critics of Mr. Kanter, a private antitrust attorney, cite his previous representation for Microsoft and News Corp as a conflict of interest while the Justice Department leads its legal battle against Google.

Mr Biden’s moves reflect the growing influence of a movement to curb corporate power that has spread from progressive scholars and liberal leaders like Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren to some of the most conservative Republicans in Congress.

Thomas Philippon, an economist at New York University, concluded in 2019 that increasing market concentration had damaged the US economy and cost the typical US $ 5,000 a year. Administrative officials repeatedly cite these statistics in support of Mr Biden’s recent order.

Tackling market concentration and promoting competition “can change the lives of millions of people in this country tremendously,” Bharat Ramamurti, associate director of Mr. Biden’s National Economic Council and former employee of Ms. Warren, said in an interview.

Mr. Ramamurti cited potential benefits not only from company dissolution, but also from giving consumers more and cheaper checking account options, selling hearing aids without a prescription, and limiting the company’s restrictions on whether employees can work for a competitor.

The approach is in stark contrast to the views of regulators during the Obama administration when Mr. Biden was vice president.

The number of hospitals that have merged has quadrupled during President Barack Obama’s first term, leaving millions of patients with fewer choices and higher health care prices.

In 2011, regulators cleared Comcast’s merger with NBCUniversal – the merger of a powerful cable and internet company with a media giant – on terms that the company’s own executive vice president, David Cohen, dismissed as not “particularly restrictive.”

Only one in three Democrats at the Federal Communications Commission turned down the deal, and Christine Varney, director of the Justice Department’s antitrust division, said the deal would “bring new and innovative products to market and give consumers more program choice.”

In 2016, Tom Vilsack, Mr Obama’s Secretary of Agriculture who has taken that role back for Mr Biden, downplayed the harms of agricultural mergers.

“I don’t think that just because some of the key players may merge or are considering some other type of arrangement, I don’t think farmers absolutely guarantee that farmers will have less choice in the long run,” Vilsack said in an interview with USA Today.

Mr Biden has directed federal regulators to consider a tougher line against corporate consolidation in hospitals, health insurance, meat processing and technology, which could include reviewing previous mergers that have been approved.

And its antitrust authorities are trying to reverse mergers that were approved during the Obama years. The Federal Trade Commission’s recent lawsuit to liquidate Facebook focuses on the company’s 2012 purchases from Instagram and WhatsApp in 2014. The agency did not block the mergers because it did not see enough evidence of harm to consumers and competition.

These decisions have come back to keep the FTC prosecuted. The federal judge, who dropped his Facebook complaint in June, questioned the U-turn and why the commission had waited so long to try to resolve these deals.

The courts have become more and more conservative in cartel cases and are more firmly convinced that higher prices are the strongest sign of competition violations.

Administration officials acknowledge this challenge and say they are reviewing the antitrust views of potential justice candidates in hopes of moving the courts to a more benevolent view of the government’s efforts to block mergers and dissolve monopolies.

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Health

Biden’s new Covid vaccine push focuses on employees, college students, delta variant

Biden's new Covid vaccine push focuses on workers, students, delta variant

President Joe Biden on Tuesday once again pushed for all eligible Americans to get Covid vaccinations, stressing the importance of being protected against the highly transmissible delta variant.

Despite the U.S. being on track to hit 160 million people fully vaccinated in the coming days, Biden said, millions remain unvaccinated against Covid, “and because of that, their communities are at risk, their friends are at risk, the people they care about are at risk.”

“This is an even bigger concern because of the delta variant,” the president said.

“It seems to me, this should cause everybody to think twice,” Biden said. But “the good news is that our vaccinations are highly effective,” including against the delta variant, he added.

Biden detailed his administration’s latest push to increase vaccination rates two days after failing to reach his Covid vaccination goal for the Fourth of July.

His team is now training its focus on boosting vaccination availability in places such as doctor’s offices and work settings. They are also ramping up efforts to get vaccines to pediatricians and other child health-care providers, Biden said, with the goal of getting more adolescents ages 12 to 18 inoculated before they head back to school in the fall.

The team also aims to expand mobile clinic efforts and will work to refine door-to-door outreach efforts to get information about vaccines to Americans who have yet to get their shots, the president said.

“Our focus now is on doubling down on our efforts” to get more people vaccinated, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said at a briefing earlier Tuesday afternoon.

“There’s still more work to be done,” Psaki said, before noting that “the vast, vast majority of people are safe from the virus” once they are vaccinated.

“If you are not vaccinated, you are not. That is also a message that we’re going to continue to clearly communicate,” she said.

Biden in his speech at the White House highlighted that nearly 160 million people in the U.S. will be fully vaccinated by the end of this week.

There are currently 157 million people in the U.S. who are fully vaccinated, which is less than half of the total population, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data. Among people in the U.S. ages 18 and up, the CDC’s percentage for those fully vaccinated rises to 58.2%, and it stands at 78.7% among those ages 65 or older, who face the greatest risk from Covid.

Biden in May had set the goal of having 70% of American adults vaccinated with at least one shot by Independence Day. On the holiday itself, roughly 67% of U.S. adults had received at least one dose, according to the CDC.

“The bottom line is, the virus is on the run and America’s coming back, coming back together,” Biden said. It’s “one of the greatest achievements in American history,” he said, “but our fight against the virus is not over.”

The delta variant, which was first observed in India, has now spread to at least 96 countries, including the U.S., according to the World Health Organization.

The variant, which the WHO says is about 55% more transmissible than another strain of the virus found in the United Kingdom, has threatened to derail some countries’ plans to lift social-distancing restrictions. About 25% of all new reported U.S. Covid cases are of the delta variant, according to the CDC, which predicts it will become the dominant variant.

White House chief medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci last month called delta the “greatest threat” to the nation’s fight against the pandemic.

Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, told CNBC last week that while the delta variant may cause an increase in cases, he doesn’t expect a massive surge in infections on the scale of those seen at earlier points in the pandemic.

“I don’t think it’s going to be a raging epidemic across the country like we saw last winter. I think that there’s going to be pockets of spread, and prevalence overall is going to pick up,” Gottlieb said on “Squawk Box.” 

The White House is deploying Covid-19 response teams across the nation focused on combatting the variant. The teams, composed of officials from the CDC and other federal agencies, will work with communities at higher risk of experiencing outbreaks.

There are still about 1,000 counties in the U.S. that have vaccination coverage of less than 30%, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky told reporters last week.

The counties are mostly located in the Southeast and Midwest and the agency is already seeing increasing rates of disease in these places due to further spread of the delta variant, she said.

— CNBC’s Ylan Mui contributed to this report.

Disclosure: Scott Gottlieb is a CNBC contributor and is a member of the boards of Pfizer, genetic testing start-up Tempus, health-care tech company Aetion Inc. and biotech company Illumina. He also serves as co-chair of Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings’ and Royal Caribbean’s “Healthy Sail Panel.”

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Health

Behind Biden’s Pledge to Share 80 Million Vaccine Doses

Behind Biden’s Pledge to Share 80 Million Vaccine Doses

WASHINGTON – When an airliner carrying 2.5 million doses of the coronavirus vaccine took off from Moderna from Dallas to Islamabad, Pakistan on Wednesday, federal officials had just gone through a dizzying bureaucratic back and forth getting them there.

The United States had a donation agreement with Moderna and Covax, the longstanding vaccine exchange initiative. Covax had previously entered into indemnity agreements with Moderna that protect the company from liability for possible damage caused by the vaccine. Officials at the American embassy in Islamabad had worked with regulators there to assess the Food and Drug Administration’s review of the vaccine; Pakistani regulators had to sift through tons of materials on the vaccine batches and the factory that made them before approving their use there.

Once signed, the result was what is known as a tripartite agreement: a type of agreement that increasingly engages the Biden government’s pandemic response efforts and underscores how the demand for vaccines in the United States is lagging as many countries seek help ask of those who have a surplus.

Amid criticism from some public health experts that President Biden’s vaccine diplomacy has been slow and inadequate, the White House plans to announce Thursday that it has fulfilled the president’s pledge to distribute 80 million doses by June 30 around 50 countries, the African Union and the Caribbean consortium of 20 nations have been officially offered, with around half already delivered and the rest planned in the coming weeks, said Natalie Quillian, the Biden government’s deputy Covid-19 response coordinator .

The dose-sharing effort has become an ongoing activity across the federal government, with alternate-level meetings several times a week and daily operational reviews. The White House can hold up to 15 country-specific calls a day, starting at 7 a.m., often to the National Security Council, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of State and Defense, and other agencies.

Approximately 75 percent of the doses are routed through Covax, which has delivered more than 91 million doses to both affluent and low-income countries. The rest is distributed through bilateral agreements that allow countries to retrieve and distribute cans more directly.

Researchers have estimated that 11 billion doses of vaccines are needed worldwide to potentially eradicate the coronavirus pandemic. In the past few months, tens of millions of doses of the three federally approved vaccines in the United States have gone unused, and more have come off the supply lines. White House officials said they wanted to ensure adequate supplies to Americans this spring before completing the overseas shipping overseas work.

To date, more than three billion vaccine doses have been administered worldwide, which is 40 doses per 100 people. Some countries have not yet reported a single dose, although the highly contagious Delta variant is spreading around the world, exposing other inequalities.

“If this is the pace at which it is continuing, then unfortunately it is much slower than necessary,” said Dr. Saad B. Omer, the director of the Yale Institute for Global Health, on the US effort.

Ms. Quillian said more doses would be shipped over the summer, in addition to the 500 million doses of the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine the Biden government promised this month to distribute to about 100 countries next year. She described this phase of vaccination diplomacy as procedurally more complex than the domestic vaccination program. Challenges with bilateral agreements, such as the three million doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine sent to Brazil last week, include: the recipient country is negotiating compensation agreements with the manufacturers.

When the cans destined for Pakistan were declared for shipping last week, attention shifted to packaging and transportation to the Dallas airport. The health authorities in Pakistan and an organization behind Covax – UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund – will deliver it, an effort the Biden government wants to oversee. Less than two percent of the Pakistani population are fully vaccinated.

Dr. Hilary D. Marston, a member of the government’s Covid-19 Response Team and a former National Security Council and National Institutes of Health official who helped coordinate supplies, said the State Department and Centers for Control of Disease and Prevention had also worked with Pakistani officials to find out how many doses the country could store.

Pakistan is an obvious candidate for a vaccine donation, Ms. Quillian said. As a neighbor of India, which faced a devastating spike in virus cases this spring, Pakistan has likely been affected by the spread of the Delta variant, which was first identified in India. But the wider list of countries the United States has sent vaccines to required more consideration.

Updated

June 30, 2021, 6:05 p.m. ET

Jake Sullivan, the White House national security adviser, said at a news conference earlier this month that the government was initially prioritizing neighbors of the United States and Asian countries with spikes in virus cases.

The sharing of cans can sometimes appear to be an international matchmaking scheme. Some countries have requested the vaccine from Johnson & Johnson due to simpler storage requirements and its attractiveness as a one shot shot. Others have already approved one or more of the vaccines used in the US, which speeds up the process.

“Any country we offered a vaccine to,” said Ms. Quillian, “if they asked for a specific type, we were able to accommodate that request.”

Officials can still face significant hurdles. Since the donated cans were manufactured and sold according to American legal and official procedures, they must be approved separately by the recipient countries. The process often involves working out kinks with overseas regulators.

The use of Covax doses can sometimes stall, as in South Sudan and Congo, both of which put some of the initiative back due to logistical problems and vaccine reluctance. There have been clearer successes in bilateral agreements that the US has already negotiated. South Korea, which received a million doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine from the United States, reported that it used up 99.8 percent of the doses in just a few weeks, White House officials said.

Dr. Omer said that because of the time it takes vaccines to elicit an immune response, targeting donations to countries with outbreaks is insufficient.

“It has been six months, even since the vaccination program started, that we had some substantial movement on this issue,” he said of the dose-sharing campaign.

Ms. Quillian defended the government’s timing. “It’s hard to remember three months, or even February or January. We didn’t have enough vaccine for this country, ”she said. “The president wanted to make sure that we can take care of ourselves first and show that it can work here, and then we always wanted to share when we have surpluses.”

The government of Biden, said Dr. Omer said he needed to rely more on the CDC’s expertise in global vaccination campaigns, including its success in organizing the distribution of polio vaccines.

Dr. Michael H. Merson, professor of global health at Duke University and former director of the World Health Organization’s global program on AIDS, said a useful model for distributing vaccines overseas was the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Aid, or Pepfar. who worked with The Global Fund to provide, administer, and monitor the safety of antiretroviral drugs.

The CDC’s disease outbreak prediction operations recently received a financial boost from Mr Biden’s American rescue plan, which would enhance the White House’s efforts to identify potential virus hotspots overseas, White House officials said. A more organized program to do this work is underway, they said.

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The White Home publicly acknowledges the U.S. is prone to miss Biden’s July Four vaccination objective.

The White House publicly acknowledges the U.S. is likely to miss Biden’s July 4 vaccination goal.

The White House on Tuesday publicly acknowledged that President Biden does not expect to meet his goal of having 70 percent of adults at least partially vaccinated by July 4 and will reach that milestone only for those aged 27 and older.

It would be the first time that Mr. Biden has failed to meet a vaccination goal he has set. If the rate of adult vaccinations continues on the current seven-day average, the country will come in just shy of Mr. Biden’s target, with about 67 percent of adults partly vaccinated by July 4, according to a New York Times analysis.

White House officials have argued that falling short by a few percentage points is not significant, given all the progress the nation has made against Covid-19. “We have built an unparalleled, first of its kind nationwide vaccination program,” Jeff Zients, the White House pandemic response coordinator, said at a new briefing. “This is a remarkable achievement.”

In announcing the goal on May 4, Mr. Biden made a personal plea to the unvaccinated, saying getting a shot was a “life and death” choice. According to the latest figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 150 million Americans have been fully vaccinated and 177 million have received at least one dose.

But health experts warn that the falloff in the vaccination rate could mean renewed coronavirus outbreaks this winter when cold weather drives people indoors, with high daily death rates in areas where comparatively few people have protected themselves with shots.

“I give credit to the Biden administration for putting in place a mass vaccination program for adults that did not exist,” said Dr. Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “But now we’ve hit a wall.”

Unless tens of millions more Americans get vaccinated in the next few months, he said, “I think, come winter, we are going to again see a surge. And that surge is going to occur exactly where you would expect it to occur — in areas that are unvaccinated or under-vaccinated.”

Young adults aged 18 to 26 have so far proven particularly hard to persuade. “The reality is many younger Americans that felt like Covid-19 is not something that impacts them, and they’ve been less eager to get the shot,” Mr. Zients said.

He said it would take “a few extra weeks” to reach more of that group to achieve the goal of 70 percent of adults at least partially vaccinated.

Lazaro Gamio contributed reporting.

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Politics

Right here Are the Particulars of Biden’s Assembly With Putin

Here Are the Details of Biden's Meeting With Putin

President Biden’s meeting with Russian President Vladimir V. Putin on Wednesday will be tense and tightly choreographed, with no planned “bread-breaking” – a sharp departure from the collegial, unwritten, unsupervised interactions between Mr. Putin and President Donald J. Trump.

One of the main topics of the Geneva meeting will be the future of the New Start Treaty, which limits the United States and Russia to 1,550 nuclear missiles each, according to a senior administrative official who briefed reporters on the flight from Brussels.

Mr Biden plans to confront Putin, whom he has labeled a killer, about the recent ransomware attacks on US companies and government agencies, and he will demand that Moscow stop hosting criminal hacking groups operating on Russian soil. He will also outline responses in case the state or private hacks originating from Russia continue, the official said.

Mr Biden is also likely to bring up the imprisonment of Aleksei A. Navalny, the ailing opposition leader.

“Nothing is off the table,” said the official, who warned that the White House was “not expecting great results” from the meeting.

No meals are planned, so there will be “no bread breaking,” said the officer.

Mr Biden’s detailed itinerary – or even the very existence of a detailed public schedule at all – contrasts with Mr Trump’s undrawn talks with Mr Putin, which in 2017 included a long conversation with the Russian leader in Hamburg that was not disclosed was up after the fact.

On Monday, Mr Biden set a sober tone for the meeting, warning Mr Putin that the death of Mr Navalny, one of the Russian president’s fiercest opponents, would undermine Russia’s already strained relations with world leaders.

“Navalny’s death would be another indication that Russia has little or no intention of upholding basic human rights,” Biden said at a press conference after the NATO summit.

“That would be a tragedy,” he added. “I don’t think it would do anything other than hurt his relationships with the rest of the world and with me.”

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Offshore Wind Farms Present What Biden’s Local weather Plan Is Up Towards

Offshore Wind Farms Show What Biden’s Climate Plan Is Up Against

A constellation of 5,400 offshore wind turbines covers a growing part of Europe’s energy needs. The United States has exactly seven.

With more than 14,000 miles of coastline, the country offers plenty of places to tear down turbines. But legal, environmental, and economic obstacles and even vanity stood in the way.

President Biden wants to catch up quickly – in fact, his goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions depend on it. Still, there are many problems, including a shortage of boats big enough to take the huge equipment out to sea, fishermen worried for livelihoods, and wealthy people feared that the turbines would take the unspoiled view of theirs Clouding villas by the water. There is even a centuries-old, politically explosive federal law known as the Jones Act that prevents wind farm developers from using American ports to launch foreign construction ships.

Offshore turbines are useful because the winds at sea are stronger and more steady than on land. The turbines can be placed so far that they are not visible from land, but still close enough to cities and suburbs that they do not require hundreds of kilometers of expensive transmission lines.

The Biden administration wants up to 2,000 turbines in the water in the next eight and a half years. Officials recently approved a project near Martha’s Vineyard that languished during the Trump administration and announced support for large wind farms off the California coast in May. The $ 2 trillion infrastructure plan proposed by Mr Biden in March would also increase incentives for renewables.

The cost of offshore wind turbines has fallen by around 80 percent over the past two decades to as low as $ 50 per megawatt hour. Although they are more expensive per unit of energy than onshore solar and wind parks, offshore turbines are often economically viable due to their lower transmission costs.

“Solar in the east is a little trickier than in the desert west,” said Robert M. Blue, chairman and CEO of Dominion Energy, a major utility working on a wind farm with nearly 200 turbines off the coast of Virginia. “We have set ourselves a net zero target for our company by 2050. This project is essential to achieve these goals. “

The slow pace of offshore wind development underscores the trade-offs between urgently tackling climate change and Mr Biden’s other goals of creating well-paying jobs and protecting local habitats. The United States could push through more projects if it were willing, for example, to remove the Jones Act’s protection for domestic shipbuilding, but that would undermine the president’s promises of employment.

These difficult questions cannot be solved simply by federal spending. As a result, it could be difficult or impossible for Mr Biden to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions from the electricity sector by 2035 and achieve net zero emissions across the economy by 2050 as he would like.

“I think the clear fact that other places have jumped on us is important,” said Amanda Lefton, director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, the agency that rents federal waters to wind developers. “We won’t be able to build offshore wind power if we don’t have the right investments.”

Europe’s lead means it has built a thriving complex of turbine construction, shipbuilding and skilled labor. Therefore, the USA could be dependent on European components, suppliers and ships for years.

Installing huge offshore wind turbines – General Electric’s largest one is eight feet – is a difficult job. Ships with cranes that can lift more than a thousand tons transport large components out to sea. At their destination, legs are lowered into the water to raise the ships and make them stationary while they work. Few ships can handle the largest components, and that’s a big problem for the United States.

Lloyd Eley, a project manager, helped build nuclear submarines early in his career and has been with Dominion Energy for the past eight years. None of this prepared him properly to oversee the construction of two wind turbines off the Virginia coast.

Mr. Eley’s biggest problem was the Jones Act, which requires that ships sailing from a US port to any location within the country, including its waters, be manufactured and registered in the United States and owned by Americans and need to be occupied.

The largest ships built in the U.S. designed for offshore construction are roughly 185 feet long and can lift around 500 tons, according to a Government Accountability Office report released in December. This is far too small for the huge components that Mr. Eley’s team worked with.

So Dominion rented three European ships and operated them in the port of Halifax, Nova Scotia. One of them, the Vole au Vent from Luxembourg, is 140 meters long and can lift 1,654 tons.

Mr. Eley’s crew waited for weeks for the European ships to travel more than 800 miles each direction to the port. The installations took a year. In Europe it would be ready in a few weeks. “That was definitely a challenge,” he said.

The US shipping industry has not invested in the ships needed to transport large wind turbines because there have been so few projects here. The first five offshore turbines were installed near Block Island in 2016, with RI Dominion’s two turbines installed last year.

Had it not been for the Jones Act – it was passed after World War I to ensure the country had ships and crews that could be mobilized during war and emergencies – Dominion could have run European ships out of Virginia’s ports. The law is sacrosanct in Congress, and unions and other supporters argue that repealing it would cut thousands of jobs in shipyards and boats, and make the United States dependent on foreign companies.

Demand for large ships could increase significantly over the next decade as the US, Europe and China pursue ambitious offshore wind targets. According to Dominion, only eight ships worldwide can transport the largest turbine parts.

Dominion is spending $ 500 million on a ship built in Brownsville, Texas that can haul large wind turbines. Named after a sea monster from Greek mythology, Charybdis, the ship will be 144 meters long and lift 2,200 tons. It will be ready by the end of 2023. The company said the ship, which it will also rent to other developers, will have around 200 more turbines installed at low cost by 2026. Dominion spent $ 300 million on the first two but is hoping the others will cost $ 40 million apiece.

For the past 24 years, Tanger Island resident Tommy Eskridge has made a living catching clams and crabs off the coast of Virginia.

Among other things, he works where Dominion wants to place its turbines. Federal regulators have adjusted the distance between turbines to one nautical mile to create wider lanes for fishermen and other boats, but Mr Eskridge, 54, fears the turbines could harm his catch.

The area has produced up to 7,000 pounds of mussels a day, although Mr Eskridge said a typical day produced about half that amount. A pound can make 2 to 3 dollars, he said.

Mr Eskridge said the company and regulators had not done enough to show that installing turbines would not harm his catch. “We just don’t know what it’s going to do.”

Annie Hawkins, executive director of the Responsible Offshore Development Alliance, which includes hundreds of fishing groups and companies, fears the government will not study the proposals and plan appropriately.

“What they do is say, ‘Take what we’ve really never done here, let’s move all in, the opponents are damned,'” said Ms. Hawkins. “From a fisheries point of view, we know that there will be massive displacement. You can’t just go fishing elsewhere. “

Fishing groups refer to recent problems in Europe to justify their concerns. For example, Orsted, the world’s largest offshore wind developer, has filed for an injunction to keep fishermen and their equipment out of an area of ​​the North Sea designed for new turbines while it is exploring the area.

Orsted said it tried to “work with fishermen” but asked for the contract because its job was made difficult by equipment that a fisherman had left in the area that he could not identify. “In order to conduct the survey work safely and only as a last resort, we had no choice but to secure the right to remove this device,” the company said in a statement.

When developers first applied for approval for Cape Wind, a project between Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, in 2001, opposition was fierce. Opponents included Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat who died in 2009, and William I. Koch, an industrialist.

Nobody wanted the turbines to block the view of the coast from their resorts. They also argued that the project would block 16 historical sites, disrupt fishermen, and clog waterways used by humpback whales, pilot whales, and other whales.

After years of legal and political disputes, the developer of Cape Wind gave up in 2017. But long before that happened, Cape Wind’s problems terrified energy managers considering offshore wind.

Projects along the east coast are in similar struggles. Residents of the Hamptons, the affluent enclave, opposed two wind development areas and the federal government put the project on hold. On the New Jersey coast, some homeowners and businesses are opposed to offshore wind because they fear it could increase their electricity prices, disrupt whales and affect the area’s leech fisheries.

Energy managers want the Biden government to mediate such conflicts and expedite permit approval.

“It was artificial, incrementally slow because of some inefficiencies on the federal approval side,” said David Hardy, CEO of Orsted North America.

Renewable energy advocates said they were hopeful because the country added many wind turbines onshore – 66,000 in 41 states. They provided more than 8 percent of the country’s electricity last year.

Ms. Lefton, the federal water lease regulator, said future offshore projects would move faster as more people realized the dangers of climate change.

“We have a climate crisis ahead of us,” she said. “We have to switch to clean energy. I think that will be a great motivation. “

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Politics

Biden’s price range proposal requires $36 billion to combat local weather change

Biden's budget proposal calls for $36 billion to fight climate change

U.S. President Joe Biden delivers remarks on tackling climate change prior to signing executive actions in the State Dining Room at the White House in Washington, January 27, 2021.

Kevin Lamarque | Reuters

President Joe Biden’s 2022 budget proposal calls for more than $36 billion to fight global climate change, an increase of more than $14 billion compared with 2021, with major new investments focused on clean energy, climate and sustainability research and improved water infrastructure.

The widespread funding for climate change issues would move forward the president’s vow to slash U.S. carbon emissions in half by 2030 and put the economy on a path to carbon neutrality by mid-century.

Biden’s main spending areas on climate include:

  • $10 billion for clean energy innovation
  • $7 billion for NOAA research
  • $6.5 billion for rural clean energy storage, transmission projects
  • $4 billion for advancing climate research
  • $3.6 billion for water infrastructure
  • $1.7 billion for retrofitting homes and federal buildings
  • $1.4 billion for environmental justice initiatives

Climate change is “an opportunity to create new industries and good-paying jobs with a free and fair choice to join a union, revitalize America’s energy communities and the economy, and position America as the world’s clean energy superpower,” the White House proposal released on Friday said.

In an effort to decarbonize the electricity sector by 2035, the budget calls for $2 billion to employ welders, electricians and other laborers on clean energy projects across the U.S. It also includes $580 million to remediate abandoned oil and gas wells and reclaim old mines.

The budget calls for $815 million to incorporate climate change risk in disaster planning and includes more than $1.2 billion above 2021 levels to boost U.S. resilience to more frequent and intense climate disasters like wildfires, floods and drought.

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The president’s budget is intended in part to fund his sweeping infrastructure package, called the American Jobs Plan. That proposal involves record spending on climate change mitigation and a nationwide clean energy transition, and if passed, would be one of the largest federal efforts ever to reduce emissions.

While Senate Republicans recently released an infrastructure counteroffer that slashed Biden’s electric vehicle and climate spending, the White House has so far not budged on its climate policies throughout negotiations.

The president’s budget request depends on Congress to pass it. But since Democrats control both chambers this year, Biden could have a good chance to enact major parts of it.

The budget and infrastructure proposals come as the U.S. rejoins international efforts to combat climate change after former President Donald Trump pulled out of the 2015 Paris climate agreement and halted all federal efforts to reduce emissions.

The budget also includes a $1.2 billion contribution to the Green Climate Fund, which aims to help developing countries lower their emissions and adapt to climate change.

The president’s target to reduce domestic emissions in half by 2030 more than doubles the country’s prior commitment under the Paris accord. The Obama administration set out to cut emissions 26% to 28% below 2005 levels by 2025. However, the U.S. is not yet halfway to meeting that goal.

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Politics

Biden’s Funds Has Racial Fairness Efforts Baked In

Biden’s Budget Has Racial Equity Efforts Baked In

WASHINGTON – Six days after his inauguration, President Biden vowed that his administration would see everything through the lens of racial equality and make it the “business of the entire government.”

On Friday, his $ 6 trillion budget began delivering on that promise.

Spread across the President’s enormous spending plan are tens of billions of dollars worth of programs specifically designed to strengthen the fortunes of blacks, Asians, tribal communities, and other historically underserved groups in the United States.

Mr Biden is not the first President to spend money on such programs. And civil rights activists said the budget released on Friday fell short on some critical areas like student loans, where they say more money is needed to address a longstanding lack of fairness and a one-sided burden on minorities.

“It’s going in the right direction, but it’s not a perfect document,” said Derrick Johnson, the NAACP president, who was disappointed that the president’s budget did not include the repayment of student loan debt, which falls disproportionately to black Americans.

But he added that his organization was pleased that the president “continued to meet one of his priorities”.

This idea of ​​paying special attention to the distribution of taxpayers’ money among racial groups has never been approached as methodically as this year, according to supporters of Mr Biden. When asked about the President’s equity agenda on Friday, Shalanda Young, acting President’s Budget Director, said her department “built” this into the overall spending plan by “giving our agencies” clear instructions that they should use this lens in their implementation these programs are supposed to. “

“This is not something we have to shout,” she said. “This is something that should be ubiquitous in how the government does its business.”

Much of the president’s huge budget goes into expenditures that aren’t explicitly split by race: health care, education, military, transportation, agriculture, retirement planning, and foreign affairs, among others.

However, across all of these programs, Mr. Biden’s team has suggested higher spending to ensure people with color and others who are often left behind get a bigger share of the total cake.

Among the large and small budget items determined by equity:

  • $ 3 Billion to Reduce Maternal Mortality and Eliminate Racial Disparity in Maternal Mortality.

  • $ 15 billion for Highways to Neighborhoods, a program to reconnect neighborhoods that were cut off by infrastructure projects developed decades ago.

  • $ 900 million to fund tribal efforts to expand affordable housing.

  • $ 936 million for an initiative to accelerate environmental and economic justice for the Environmental Protection Agency.

  • $ 110 million for a Thriving Communities initiative to promote transportation equity through grants to underserved communities.

  • $ 39 billion in student grants for low- and middle-income students who historically attend black colleges and universities, as well as students who serve other minorities.

Mr Biden predicted these kinds of budget decisions in his early days in office. In a speech announcing his “justice agenda,” the president said he was determined to go further than his predecessors in addressing groups he said had been left behind too often.

“We have to open America’s promise to every American,” he said during the January 26 speech. “And that means that we don’t have to make the issue of racial justice an issue for just one government department.”

This approach has angered the Conservatives, who accuse the president and his advisors of pursuing a racist agenda against white Americans. Fox News hit the headlines accusing Mr. Biden of trying “to fuel the nationwide division with a ‘racial equity’ push”. And the New York Post published an editorial, “In Push for Woke ‘Equity’, Biden Abandon’s Equality,” accusing the president of being “un-American.”

A group called America First Legal, led by Stephen Miller and Mark Meadows, two top aides to former President Donald J. Trump, received an injunction from a Texas judge this week against Mr. Biden’s efforts by the Small Business Administration Prioritize grants from the $ 28.6 billion Restaurant Revitalization Fund to businesses that belong to minority or underserved groups.

Updated

May 28, 2021, 4:32 p.m. ET

“This ruling is another powerful blow to the Biden government’s unconstitutional decision to select winners and losers based on skin color,” the group said in a statement.

The President is unlikely to back down. Speaking days after his inauguration, he vowed that “every component of the White House and every agency will be involved in this work because promoting justice must be everyone’s business.”

Despite all of Mr. Biden’s energetic rhetoric – he once promised to “no longer allow a narrow, cramped view of this nation’s promise to fester” – his government made little effort on Friday to draw attention to this principle or to highlight details about it how a stock-driven approach would change the way the government spends its money.

Biden’s 2022 budget

    • A new year, a new budget: Fiscal year 2022 for the federal government begins October 1, and President Biden has announced what he plans to spend from that point on. However, all editions require the approval of both Congress Chambers.
    • Ambitious overall spending: President Biden wants the federal government to spend $ 6 trillion in fiscal 2022 and total spending to rise to $ 8.2 trillion by 2031. This would bring the United States to its highest sustainable federal spending level since World War II, while running deficits above $ 1.3 trillion for the next decade.
    • Infrastructure plan: The budget describes the President’s desired first year of investment in his US employment plan, which aims to fund improvements to roads, bridges, public transportation and more with a total of $ 2.3 billion over eight years.
    • Family plan: The budget also addresses the other major spending proposal that Biden has already put forward, his American family plan, which aims to strengthen the United States’ social safety net by expanding access to education, reducing childcare costs, and bringing women in the workforce are supported.
    • Compulsory programs: As usual, mandatory spending on programs like Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare is a significant part of the proposed budget. They grow as the American population ages.
    • Discretionary issues: Funding for each agency and executive program budget would reach approximately $ 1.5 trillion in 2022, a 16 percent increase from the previous budget.
    • How Biden would pay for it: The president would fund his agenda largely through tax hikes for businesses and high earners, which would lead to a decline in budget deficits in the 2030s. Administration officials said tax increases would fully offset plans for jobs and families over the course of 15 years, which the budget request confirms. In the meantime, the budget deficit would stay above $ 1.3 trillion each year.

During a press conference on the introduction of the budget on Friday, Ms. Young and Cecilia Rouse, the chairmen of the White House National Economic Council – both black women – did not mention the president’s equity agenda until a reporter asked about it.

And the budget itself does not seek to quantify the impact of following the presidential instructions in order to make decisions based on a sense of racial justice. There is no “Equity” section in the budget. Aides did not send newsletters to reporters on Friday promoting the “equity spending” in the president’s opening budget.

That left some outreach to civil rights groups and other advocates, who were quick to point out examples of spending that would benefit communities traditionally left behind by previous presidents.

Sara Chieffo, chief lobbyist for the League of Conservation Voters, an environmental group, referred to the Environmental Protection Agency’s $ 936 million initiative to accelerate environmental and economic justice, which aims to clean up the environment in underserved communities .

“The importance of this government’s proposal to make the largest ever investment in color communities and low-income communities that have been exposed to environmental racism for decades cannot be emphasized enough,” said Chieffo.

Marcela Howell, President of In Our Own Voice: National Reproductive Justice Agenda for Black Women, commended the president for investing in programs that specifically benefit black women.

“Kudos also go to President Biden for funding important programs to combat racial justice and economic security,” she said in a statement, adding that “we are making the proposed investments in infrastructure and job creation, affordable childcare and education of workers as well as education “. and more.

The Planned Parenthood Federation of America issued a statement thanking Mr. Biden for what the group called “important investments” that would help “address the maternal mortality crisis and its devastating effects on color communities.”

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Business

The Week in Enterprise: Biden’s Large Funds

The Week in Business: Biden’s Big Budget

Good morning and have a nice Memorial Day weekend. Here are the biggest business and tech stories you should know for the coming (short) week. – Charlotte Cowles

Exxon Mobil suffered a surprise defeat when climate activist investors won at least two seats on its 12-member board of directors on Wednesday. The investors are part of a small new hedge fund called Engine No. 1, which aims to lead businesses to greener initiatives and away from fossil fuels. The campaign faces an uphill battle in the energy industry, but this latest victory could lead more Wall Street investment firms to face climate change. In addition to the momentum, a Dutch court ruled that Royal Dutch Shell, Europe’s largest oil company, is not working fast enough to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and needs to redouble its efforts.

For the past three weeks, Apple has been vigorously (and dearly) defending itself in federal court against an antitrust lawsuit from Epic Games, the maker of the popular video game Fortnite. The case focused on whether Apple abused its market power by receiving a 30 percent commission on sales from its iPhone app store – and penalizing Epic for trying to bypass Apple and Fortnite’s in-app purchases sell directly to customers. The verdict is now in the hands of the judge, who said she hoped to deliver a verdict by August. If Apple loses, it could lead to more antitrust proceedings against Big Tech.

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the 97-year-old film and television studio that once embodied a golden era in Hollywood, has sold itself to today’s epitome of modern commerce: Amazon. Many of MGM’s classics were sold years ago, but it brings a famous franchise – James Bond – that gives Amazon a new edge over streaming competitors like Netflix, HBO Max, and Apple TV +. That benefit cost Amazon $ 8.45 billion, about 40 percent more than other potential buyers, including Apple and Comcast, were willing to pay.

Google is working with hospital chain HCA Healthcare to develop algorithms for patient care by dismantling health records. The algorithms are designed to improve patient monitoring, guide doctors’ decisions for better outcomes, streamline operations, and even develop new treatments. But progress comes at a cost, of course: patient privacy. HCA said its patient records would no longer contain identifying information before Google data scientists were given access to it. However, the terms of the contract were not made public.

President Biden proposed a $ 6 trillion budget for fiscal 2022, which provides a map of long-term investments in his administration’s economic priorities – such as infrastructure, education, and green energy – for the next decade. The proposal, which is more of a wish-list at this point, would bring the United States to the highest sustainable federal spending level since World War II. Mr Biden has announced that he will pay for his agenda through tax hikes for businesses and high earners, but the plan also sees large budget deficits for at least a decade. The budget provides for unemployment below 4 percent and stable inflation.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen will meet with the Group of Seven Treasury Ministers in London later this week to discuss the nations’ next steps towards global economic recovery. Up to date: helping international access and spreading vaccines, improving public health to prevent future pandemics, and building more climate-friendly economies. Ms. Yellen has a similar agenda at home, and it’s a handful. Prior to leaving, she asked for more funds from the Treasury Department to oversee several key US economic recovery efforts.

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Business

This is One Factor Lacking from President Biden’s Price range: Booming Progress

Here's One Thing Missing from President Biden's Budget: Booming Growth

“We are a really big economy where really big forces are shaping what happens to G.D.P. growth,” said Wendy Edelberg, director of the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution and a former C.B.O. chief economist.

Even these moderate projections by the Biden administration imply that its policies will lift growth in economic activity by a few tenths of a percent each year over a decade. This is significant when comparing it with the growth that would be expected by simply looking at demographic factors and historical averages of productivity growth. The forecast is more inherently optimistic about Mr. Biden’s policies — and their potential to increase productivity and the size of the work force — than it might seem at first glance.

Biden’s 2022 Budget

    • A new year, a new budget: The 2022 fiscal year for the federal government begins on October 1, and President Biden has revealed what he’d like to spend, starting then. But any spending requires approval from both chambers of Congress.
    • Ambitious total spending: President Biden would like the federal government to spend $6 trillion in the 2022 fiscal year, and for total spending to rise to $8.2 trillion by 2031. That would take the United States to its highest sustained levels of federal spending since World War II, while running deficits above $1.3 trillion through the next decade.
    • Infrastructure plan: The budget outlines the president’s desired first year of investment in his American Jobs Plan, which seeks to fund improvements to roads, bridges, public transit and more with a total of $2.3 billion over eight years.
    • Families plan: The budget also addresses the other major spending proposal Biden has already rolled out, his American Families Plan, aimed at bolstering the United States’ social safety net by expanding access to education, reducing the cost of child care and supporting women in the work force.
    • Mandatory programs: As usual, mandatory spending on programs like Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare make up a significant portion of the proposed budget. They are growing as America’s population ages.
    • Discretionary spending: Funding for the individual budgets of the agencies and programs under the executive branch would reach around $1.5 trillion in 2022, a 16 percent increase from the previous budget.
    • How Biden would pay for it: The president would largely fund his agenda by raising taxes on corporations and high earners, which would begin to shrink budget deficits in the 2030s. Administration officials have said tax increases would fully offset the jobs and families plans over the course of 15 years, which the budget request backs up. In the meantime, the budget deficit would remain above $1.3 trillion each year.

“Making the claim that your fiscal policies will boost growth by four-tenths of a point seems optimistic, but I can see how they could get there,” she said.

Jason Furman, the Obama administration’s former top economist, said: “I think there’s a problem that people have in their head — more extravagant ideas about what economic policy can do and how quickly it can do it. When you’re talking about productivity enhancement, you’re talking about compounding that becomes a big deal for a long time.”

In other words, the difference of a few tenths of a percent of G.D.P. growth might not mean much for a single year, but a gap of that size that persists for many years has a big impact on living standards.

Some of the administration’s policies, by design, would focus on the very long-term impact on the nation’s economic potential. For example, additional money for community colleges might actually depress the size of the labor force, and thus G.D.P., in the short run if more adults go back to school. But it would then increase those workers’ productive potential, and thus contribution to growth, for the decades that follow.

Conservatives, for their part, view the Biden agenda as likely to restrain growth, particularly once tax increases and new regulatory action go into effect. Mr. Mulligan, the Trump adviser, said he believed the Biden agenda would reduce the nation’s growth path by around 0.8 percentage points a year compared with its Trump-era trajectory. Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum, said he thought Mr. Biden’s policies could create faster growth in the short term but slower growth in the long run because of taxes and spending.