Month: July 2017

Categories
News

The CEO of the world’s second-largest energy company says he will drive a hybrid

The chief executive of the world’s second-largest energy company says his other car will soon be powered by a mix of gasoline and electricity in a sign that the world is going green.

Ben Van Beurden, CEO of Royal Dutch Shell, says he will switch this September to a plug-in Mercedes-Benz S550e hybrid from a diesel car, at least in part to reflect the reality of climate change and efforts such as the Paris climate agreement to combat it.

“The whole move to electrify the economy, electrify mobility in places like northwest Europe, in the U.S., even in China, is a good thing,” Van Beurden told Bloomberg TV. “We need to be at a much higher degree of electric vehicle penetration — or hydrogen vehicles or gas vehicles — if we want to stay within the 2-degrees Celsius outcome.”

Though symbolic, the announcement further cements a shift underway at Shell under Van Beurden’s leadership. In February 2016, the company acquired BG Group for $53 billion to create the world’s largest provider of liquefied natural gas. Two years earlier, Shell paid $5.4 billion for the LNG business of Repsol outside of North America.

Shell has estimated that worldwide demand for oil could peak as soon as a decade from now.

The International Energy Agency estimates that demand for oil will continue to grow worldwide until 2040, primarily because of a scarcity of substitutes that make economic sense in aviation, petrochemicals and trucking.

Still, demand for oil from passenger cars is expected to decline over the next quarter century despite a doubling in the number of vehicles, “thanks mainly to improvements in efficiency, but also biofuels and rising ownership of electric cars,” the IEA said in November.

Both the United Kingdom and France recently announced plans to ban the sale of new gasoline-powered cars by 2040.

Volvo in June became the first major automaker to say it will end reliance on internal-combustion engines. All the models Volvo brings to market starting in 2019 will either be hybrids or powered by batteries.

Categories
Politics

John McCain offers a lesson on legislating

Like many people, I reacted with cynicism to the news Tuesday that John McCain would return to Washington to vote on whether a push by Republicans to dismantle the Affordable Care Act (ACA) could proceed.

I presumed that McCain, who is being treated for an insidious form of brain cancer, would sound off about the need for his party to work with Democrats to shore up the health law only to vote in the end to repeal it anyway.

After voting in favor of taking up the bill, McCain admonished his party to end their habit of “trying to find a way to win without help from across the aisle.”

Exactly what I expected from the Arizona Republican.

The thought that McCain, who is being treated by doctors at the Mayo Clinic Hospital in Phoenix, might vote for a measure that would could leave 16 million people uninsured, offended me.

But in the end, I was wrong. Around 1:30 a.m. Friday, after a full-court press that included a last-minute plea from the vice president, McCain voted against the repeal. He was joined by two other Republicans: Lisa Murkowski, of Alaska; and Susan Collins, of Maine. The White House threatened Murkowski with payback that included blocking nominees from Alaska to jobs at the Interior Department and halting expansion of drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

In exchange for his vote to keep the repeal going, McCain reportedly sought assurances from Speaker Paul Ryan that the House would use a measure passed by the Senate as the basis to negotiate between the chambers, rather than simply pass the Senate bill and send it to the president for signature. Whatever Ryan conveyed failed to assure McCain that a compromise measure would ensue.

McCain said later he’d like to see the ACA replaced “with a solution that increases competition, lowers costs, and improves care for the American people,” but that the so-called skinny repeal that he killed did none of those things.

He called on lawmakers to “return to the correct way of legislating and send the bill back to committee, hold hearings, receive input from both sides of aisle, heed the recommendations of nation’s governors, and produce a bill that finally delivers affordable health care for the American people.”

Writing in The New Yorker, Mark Singer said McCain “chose to vote with his soul – in defiance of the bottomless soullessness that, when the ultimate moment arrived, he rejected.”

John McCain long ago earned the status of war hero. But Friday on the floor of the Senate may have marked his finest moment.

Categories
Film Movies New York City

Steven Spielberg conjures the Nixon era at Columbia

The Nixon era came to Columbia University on Wednesday. Or more precisely, Steven Spielberg recreated 1971 on the steps of Low Library.

The director brought with him cast and crew of “The Papers,” a movie about the Pentagon Papers that he is filming around the city this summer.

The film tells the story of a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court that rejected an effort by the Nixon administration to prevent the Times and Washington Post from publishing a secret history of the Vietnam War.

We passed the set around 8:45 a.m., in time to hear Spielberg arranging his actors. They include Meryl Streep as Kay Graham, publisher of the Post, and Tom Hanks, who plays former editor Ben Bradlee.

Dozens of protestors, actors all, massed on the steps of the library, where they held signs that called for press freedom. Spielberg was audible through the din though we could not discern his instructions. And then, “Action!” he called. He sounded like he meant it, which we trust he did.

The publisher, the editor and their lawyers descended the stairs in a cluster, surrounded by a gaggle of reporters (again, actors), the way litigants do when they emerge from a courthouse. We can’t say whether the library served as stand-in for the Supreme Court.

The columns that front the library’s facade are Ionic; the ones in front of the court are Corinthian. But Cass Gilbert, who designed the Supreme Court building, began his career at McKim, Mead and White, which designed the library.

Around 1 p.m., the action broke. Protestors and reporters from 1971 emptied onto Broadway and turned left toward food trucks from 2017.

The film is slated for release later this year. The timing seems impeccable. While the filmmakers filmed, the president of the United States tweeted. This time to announce that transgender people will no longer be allowed to serve in the military.

The filming continued as we headed home later. Spielberg, it seemed, aimed to wring all he could from the light. The president offered only darkness.

Categories
Politics

Trump unloads via Twitter, aka Saturday

On the day after Labor Day in 1973, Elizabeth Drew, a reporter for The New Yorker, told her editor she had “an intuition” that within a year the U.S. would change president and vice president.

“At the time, this was a seemingly outlandish thought, but I go a lot on instinct and I just sensed it,” Drew writes in the introduction to “Washington Journal: Reporting Watergate and Richard Nixon’s Downfall," her book about that time.

The Watergate scandal had not yet snared Nixon, but “there was already plenty of evidence that serious wrongdoing had taken place” in the administration, Drew writes.

Saturday also felt like a day when the country might have a new president within a year.

The morning began with Donald Trump unleashing a fusillade of tweets in which he said that presidents have “complete power” to pardon aides (and, perhaps, themselves) and complained about an “intelligence leak” that allowed the Washington Post to report that Attorney General Jeff Sessions discussed the presidential campaign with Russia’s ambassador last year.

He also blasted the “fake news,” despite sitting for an hour-long interview on Wednesday with The New York Times. “Look, I think he loves the press,” said Maggie Haberman, one the reporters who interviewed Trump.

The frenzy of social media followed a week in which Trump lashed out at Sessions for recusing himself from the Russia investigation and hinted that White House aides are looking for ways to discredit prosecutors working for Robert Mueller, the special counsel who is leading the investigation.

Mueller is reportedly examining a broad range of transactions involving Trump’s businesses.

According to a Gallup poll published Friday, Trump held a job approval of 38.8% in the three months that ended June 19. That’s 23 points below the historical norm and the lowest such rating in a comparable period in the 72 years that Gallup has assessed job approval. (Trump’s rating in the first three months of his presidency also set a new low.)

The discovery on Saturday afternoon of old tweets by Anthony Scaramucci show there was a time when the new White House communications director thought two of his boss' rivals might make better presidents than would Trump.

“Odd guy, so smart, no judgment,” Scaramucci tweeted in February 2012 about Newt Gingrich after Trump said he would endorse the former House speaker for president.

Two months earlier, Scaramucci praised Mitt Romney via Twitter for a decision to “stay out of the Trump spectacle.”

Scaramucci deleted both tweets.

About an hour later, he deleted a tweet from April 2012 in which he called Hillary Clinton “incredibly competent” and expressed hope she might run for president in 2016. Scaramucci also erased tweets of support for “strong gun control laws.”

Scaramucci owned his decision to delete the tweets. “Past views evolved & shouldn’t be a distraction,” he wrote. “I serve [the president’s] agenda & that’s all that matters.”

So much for principles.

Still, in 118 characters, the communications director showed more openness than Trump has since announcing his run for the presidency.

Categories
Finance

Jamie Dimon can help fix the ‘stupid s*#t’ he says ails the US

The chief executive of the nation’s biggest bank is sounding off about what he says is holding back the U.S. economy, but he may want to redirect his fire.

Political gridlock, a tax code that sends investment overseas, a lack of investment in infrastructure and stupidity are all to blame, says Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase.

“The United States of America has to start to focus on policy which is good for all Americans, and that is infrastructure, regulation, taxation, education,” Dimon told reporters on a conference call Friday to discuss the bank’s earnings. “Why you guys don’t write about it every day is completely beyond me. And, like, who cares about fixed-income trading in the last two weeks of June? I mean, seriously.”

Putting aside Dimon’s pique – he seems to have become irritated by the temerity of a reporter who asked about revenue from bond trading, which fell 19 percent from a year earlier despite the bank’s record profitability in the quarter – the problem seems to lie less with the press (which writes all the time about policy) than it does with politicians.

President Donald Trump campaigned on a pledge to rebuild the nation’s crumbling highways and bridges and change the tax code, among other things. He and his party control all three branches of government.

Which is why it’s strange that Trump began his punch list on infrastructure improvements with a push to privatize the nation’s system of directing air traffic.

Speaker Paul Ryan is scrambling to find the votes, which, not surprisingly, fall a few dozen short of a majority, Politico reported on Saturday. Even GOP lawmakers say privatizing the air system gets them nothing in their districts.

Lawmakers from rural states fear that privatization would lead to cutbacks in service to smaller airports. They thought that when the president said rebuilding infrastructure, he meant fixing crumbling roads, decaying bridges and other public works that create jobs.

There may be a need to update air traffic control as well, but it mostly involves installing a system that guides planes via satellite.

“I think fighting over this part of the infrastructure program [air traffic control] slows down progress we can make in getting a larger infrastructure plan in place,” Sen. Jerry Moran, a Republican from Kansas who serves on the committee that oversees the Federal Aviation Administration, told the Washington Examiner.

Meanwhile, a rewrite of the tax code appears to be going nowhere.

Dimon also cited education. The administration is discouraging states from including student performance in science as a priority, despite such coursework counting toward federal standards for student achievement, science teachers say.

To be fair, that comes from science teachers. And Trump is continuing a stance adopted by the Obama administration. But the Obama administration didn’t also abandon a global agreement on climate.

Dimon said it’s “an embarrassment being an American traveling around the world” and listening to the “stupid s*&t” Americans have to deal in connection with the country’s struggle to pass anything in Washington that might expand the economy greater than the one to two percent the US economy is growing at currently.

Dimon may not be alone in his frustration. Two-thirds of Americans disapprove of Trump’s performance, according to the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll.

But compared with most Americans, Dimon’s job makes him uniquely able to do something about it. JPMorgan Chase spent nearly $3 million on lobbying last year. (Financial firms overall contributed more than $1.2 billion to congressional campaigns in the most recent elections, more than twice the amount given by any other sector.)

He also serves on the White House Strategic and Policy Forum, a group of 17 top executives who advise the president on business.

Sounding off to reporters generates headlines. But rallying business leaders to back an economic policy that benefits all Americans might be a better place to begin.

Categories
Economy Environment

The US is yielding its leadership in the world

On Saturday, the world’s economic powers, with the exception of the U.S., affirmed their commitment to the Paris climate agreement and pledged to work together to tackle challenges in areas ranging from trade and terrorism to migration.

President Trump left the annual meeting of the G-20 without committing the U.S. to those shared goals. “We take note of the decision of the United States of America to withdraw from the Paris agreement,” the G-20 leaders wrote in a statement issued on Saturday. “The leaders of the other G-20 members state that the Paris agreement is irreversible.”

America may still have its military might and economic might, but influence comes from leadership. “Most presidents understand this intuitively,” Derek Chollet and Julie Smith noted on Friday in Foreign Policy. Most presidents includes presidents of both parties.

Of course, we are told the whole point of Trump is to deride the establishment, at home and abroad. By that measure, he has succeeded. But by any measure, we live in a many-sided world. And that’s not fake news.

Categories
U.S.

Bravery and beauty this Fourth of July

Last Sunday, feeling down about the debasement of the presidency and with July Fourth looming, I headed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in search of the American Wing.

Though I have visited the Met on at least six occasions over the past year, I tend to return each time to the modern and contemporary art, especially paintings by Picasso that I never tire of seeing. Thus, even with a map of the galleries, I asked twice for directions to the American Wing, a journey that took me across the building.

Once there, I entered the galleries and passed a series of portraits from the 18th century that led me to “Washington Crossing the Delaware,” the painting by Emanuel Leutze that anchors the wing. The massive panorama, which was restored several years ago, practically shimmers.

My gaze went to the armada of wooden boats filled with men, horses and guns that stretched a mile long like some 18th century D-Day, pushing through a river choked with ice on Christmas Day to dislodge Hessians camped on the other side. Being resolute under duress seems like something worth remembering nowadays.

Nearby hangs “Camp Fire” by Winslow Homer. The painting depicts two men camped in the high peaks of the Adirondacks. The scene captures the woodsmen seemingly lost in thought in the comfort of their camp.

http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/11112

I also liked gazing at “The Teton Range” by Thomas Moran. The jagged peaks of the mountains remind me of the natural beauty of the West and, for that matter, so much of America.

http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/11600