Tag: newest

Russia deploying newest tank in Ukraine battlefield

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Moscow: Amid talk of a Ukrainian counter-offensive doing rounds, Russia has introduced its most advanced T-14 ‘Armata’ main battle tank to the battlefield after fitting it with additional protection, media reports said on Tuesday.
“The Russian forces have begun to use the newest Armata tanks to fire at Ukrainian positions but they haven’t participated in direct assault actions yet,” a source told RIA Novosti news agency, RT reported.
According to the source, the T-14s were fitted with additional protection from anti-tank munitions and tank crews have been training in one of “newly-incorporated” Donbass republics since 2022.

In February, a video was posted on social media that purportedly showed a T-14 firing its 125mm gun “in the zone of the special military operation([in Ukraine)”.
RT also reported Konstantin Sivkov, the Vice-President of the Russian Academy of Rocket and Artillery Sciences, telling news website URA.ru on Tuesday that the T-14 will be primarily pitted against the British Challenger 2 and German-made Leopard 2A6 models that were pledged to Kiev by NATO countries.
“The Armata surpasses both of these newest Western tanks in terms of technical characteristics,” he asserted. He added that the T-14 can operate as “a command (centre)” in a group of Russian T-90M tanks.
The T-14 was unveiled to the public in 2015 and first saw combat in Syria, where Russian forces are supporting President Bashar Assad’s fight against Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) and other Islamist militants.

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( With inputs from www.siasat.com )

April 25, 2023
The nerd’s guide to Biden’s newest electric vehicle push

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How big a deal is this really?
Potentially very big.
If Wednesday’s proposals work out the way Biden’s regulators envision, two out of every three new cars and light trucks sold in the U.S. in 2032 will be electric — more than 10 times the current national sales rate.
That figure includes a projection that 78 percent of sedans, 68 percent of pickups and 62 percent of crossovers and SUVs could be battery-powered just nine years from now.
Electric vehicle sales are rising already, of course. Some automakers, such as Ford and General Motors, have announced plans to stop making gasoline-powered cars entirely by 2035.
But without stricter regulations, the EPA says, electric vehicles would make up only 39 percent of new sales in 2032.
The agency also projects that half of new “vocational” vehicles — such as garbage trucks and school buses — will be electric that year under its proposals, as well as 25 percent of long-haul freight tractor trailers.
Aren’t electric vehicles more expensive than gasoline-powered ones?
Yes. And EPA estimated that its proposal would add an incremental cost of $844 for cars and $1,385 for trucks in 2032.
But it also contends that those upfront costs will be more than offset by consumers’ savings on fuel and maintenance (electric cars don’t need oil changes, for example), as well as purchasing incentives. The agency says the average buyer of a car or light-duty truck will save $12,000 over the vehicle’s lifetime.

That’s on top of the rule’s projected benefits in reduced oil imports, reductions in diseases related to air pollution and a lessening of planet-warming greenhouse gases.
How would the EPA’s rule work?
The first and most sweeping rule, Reg. 2060-AV49, covers light-duty cars and trucks as well as medium-duty vehicles, a class that includes larger SUVs and passenger vans.
It seeks to prod automakers to produce more electric vehicles by slashing the amount of greenhouse gases allowed to come out of tailpipes.
For light-duty vehicles, the new target would be an average of 82 grams of carbon dioxide per mile traveled in 2032. That’s down roughly half from the administration’s existing target for 2026.
The target is a “fleet average” that the EPA calculates for each auto manufacturer. That means that an automaker’s sales of zero-carbon electric vehicles can offset the pollution from its fossil-fuel cars and trucks, though automakers may pursue more efficiencies in gasoline-powered models as well.
The final real-world figures can also vary depending on how automakers choose to comply with the rule.
The rule also strengthens limits on vehicles’ conventional air pollutants — a step that would also increase the incentives for carmakers to go electric.
For acid-rain-causing nitrogen oxides and other organic gases, the standard would be reduced to 12 milligrams per mile in 2032, down 60 percent from an Obama-era requirement. EPA also proposed a standard for “particulate matter” (i.e., soot) that’s down as much as 92 percent from current standards.
In addition to the primary proposal, Alejandra Nunez, EPA’s deputy assistant administrator for mobile sources, said the agency is soliciting comments on several alternative regulatory options of varying stringency for light-duty vehicles. The least stringent would achieve 64 percent electric vehicle penetration in 2032, Nunez said, while the most would reach 69 percent.
Is that all?
No! The proposal also includes several tweaks to a compliance program that EPA has been using to help automakers meet its requirements.
The agency is maintaining a system in which companies that produce less-polluting vehicles can earn “credits” that they can then sell to their more-polluting rivals. (These credits have been a revenue source for companies like Toyota and Tesla.)
On the other hand, EPA wants to phase out a bonus credits program that rewarded companies for adopting technologies such as solar roof panels and high-efficiency headlights.
EPA also wants to stop giving credits to electric vehicle manufacturers for using more efficient air conditioning.
EPA’s second proposed rule, Reg. 2060-AV50, would cover heavy-duty vehicles such as tractor-trailers and vocational vehicles — the source of a quarter of the transportation sector’s greenhouse gas emissions. The rule follows two prior rounds of greenhouse gas regulations for heavy-duty trucks that manufacturers largely accepted.
That proposal also creates warranty requirements for batteries on zero-emissions trucks and would require automakers to install “state of health” battery monitors accessible to customers.
The light-duty proposal will be open for 60 days of public comment and the heavy-duty proposal for 50 days of comment once published in the Federal Register in the coming weeks.
But wait — didn’t Biden just make it harder to get tax breaks for electric vehicles?
Yes, less than two weeks ago: Under a Treasury Department proposal announced March 31, fewer of the electric cars and trucks now on the market will qualify for the $7,500-per-vehicle tax breaks intended to make EVs more affordable for consumers.
The aim, as mandated by Congress, is to ensure that vehicles receiving the credits are made in the U.S., and that their critical parts and minerals come from either the United States or its closest trading partners. Even tighter restrictions from Treasury — aimed at boxing out countries like China — are due later this year.
So which vehicles will qualify for the tax credits?
Stay tuned: By Tuesday, automakers are supposed to confirm which of their models meet the new Treasury requirements. (They’ll have to swear this under penalty of perjury.)
But when POLITICO questioned the car companies last week, they said just five of the 91 electric car models now sold in the U.S. clearly qualified for the full tax break. Those all came from American automakers, with General Motors, Ford and Tesla leading the pack.
What other obstacles could complicate Biden’s goals?
The U.S. still doesn’t have nearly enough chargers for all the electric vehicles that the EPA wants to see on the highways. And many of the chargers that exist suffer from malfunctions, slow charging and other woes, as David Ferris recently documented for POLITICO’s E&E News.
Questions linger about whether the U.S. electric grid can stand up to the load of charging so many vehicles, and whether domestic manufacturing and mining can ramp up fast enough to make sure EVs are produced domestically.
The administration’s hope is that the prodding from the EPA, the availability of tax breaks and other incentives for technologies such as charging stations will speed up a transformation to electric vehicles that market forces are already pushing to bring about. That’s a work in progress, of course.
What do people say about the rule?
Many environmental groups welcomed Wednesday’s news. Dan Lashof, U.S. director for the World Resources Institute, said in a statement that EPA’s proposals will “speed the United States’ auto industry toward an all-electric future faster than any regulation has before.”
But Dan Becker, director of the Center for Biological Diversity’s Safe Climate Transport Campaign, argued that the proposal isn’t stringent enough. He called on the EPA to write a regulation that achieves 67 percent electric vehicle sales in 2030 — two years earlier than the agency’s timeline.
“Biden shouldn’t let automakers’ can’t-do attitude sabotage his best shot at cutting carbon emissions,” Becker said in a statement.
Republicans were, notably, less thrilled. Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) accused Biden of trying “to ban the cars we drive,” a common refrain from GOP critics of the new rule.
“The ‘electrification of everything’ is not a solution,” Barrasso said Wednesday. “It’s a road to higher prices and fewer choices.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

April 12, 2023
McCarthy’s newest challenge: Keeping the House GOP peace on war powers

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“I’m going to try to make the argument that it should be repealed,” Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), one of McCarthy’s chief antagonists in the January speakership race, said in a brief interview about the upcoming debate.
McCarthy gave a symbolic boost to conservatives like Gaetz this week by saying that he’s willing to repeal the 2002 war powers measure, known as an authorization for the use of military force. Yet that comment came with a big caveat: The California Republican doesn’t plan to fast-track a war powers bill to the floor any time soon.
“Just because a bill passes in the Senate,” McCarthy told reporters on Tuesday, “doesn’t mean it comes directly to the floor.”
Such a delay may stall, but wouldn’t alleviate, a major headache for McCarthy’s team. Conservatives and Democrats, if they align on repealing both the 2002 and 1991 military force authorizations, have a coalition big enough to overpower Republican strategy on the floor.
McCarthy is leaning on some of his biggest national security hawks to craft a workable alternate war powers plan, including Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Michael McCaul (R-Texas), a longtime skeptic of repealing the 2002 Iraq War authorization. And as he gears up to lobby his libertarian-leaning colleagues, McCaul is reviving an infamous GOP phrase from its anti-Obamacare days: Repeal and replace.
“I would prefer if we’re going to repeal it, to replace it,” McCaul said. “We’re having discussions with the speaker’s office on that, just to update it.”
That decision won’t be in McCarthy’s hands forever. The House Armed Services Committee, which takes the lead on a massive defense policy bill every year, likely has a slim majority of votes to nix the 2002 war powers authorization. And McCarthy’s earlier vows to allow “open season” on amendments to big spending bills would allow Republicans — or Democrats — on either side of the war powers debate to force their own floor votes on the matter.
Should a standalone war powers repeal bill come up, only a handful of Republicans would need to vote in favor of repeal in order for it to pass, since virtually every Democrat is on board. (If that happens, however, it would break a longtime House Republican principle that states no bill should pass without a “majority of the majority” on board.)

Then there’s the likely long-shot Plan B to force floor debate on war powers: a so-called “discharge petition,” which allows rank-and-file members to force a bill past leadership and to a vote by collecting signatures from a majority of House members. McCarthy allies, though, are skeptical that a discharge petition would work.
But before all that, the Senate needs to act. The upper chamber is set to officially nullify the president’s blank-check powers in Iraq as soon as this week, marking nearly 20 years to the day since the U.S. invasion of Baghdad. The same vote would also formally end U.S. war powers related to the 1991 Gulf War and turn the spotlight across the Capitol.
“I am encouraged that in the House members from both sides of the aisle seem to be open to taking action once the Senate passes this resolution,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said Tuesday. “And there are members of the Senate Republican leadership who seem very strongly for the bill. That’s a very good sign.”
Nineteen Republican senators backed an initial procedural vote to repeal the war authorizations last week, an early sign of big bipartisan backing. Schumer on Tuesday promised a “reasonable amendment process” but said “AUMF repeal in the Senate is now a matter of when, not a matter of if.”
Some House Republicans said they couldn’t predict how their conference would treat the bill, given the uncertain status of amendments. And McCarthy is clearly trying to hit the brakes on a potential floor confrontation, saying he wants to “front load” the details of a potential deal through committee rather than in a free-for-all on the floor.
That’s where McCaul comes in. He’s currently pitching a repeal of the 2002 law packaged with a simultaneous replacement in the form of a new military authorization for terrorist groups that are not country-specific as well as Shiite militias inside of Iraq. (He argues a broader 2001 “war on terror” authorization doesn’t do that, though not every lawmaker agrees with him. And Democrats are also skeptical of the Texas Republican over concerns he’ll try to drag the 2001 authorization into any war powers discussion, setting a much higher bar to a deal.)
But McCaul is already trying to think of how to win over potential GOP detractors who might be worried about green-lighting another decades-long war power, planning to add a built-in expiration date to whatever might replace the 2002 law.
“I would really like to start working toward replacement, because I think people are just getting tired of these old authorizations. And I would also put a five-year sunset in these things, so that Congress is forced to take it back up,” he said.
Though McCaul is already privately suggesting his plan to McCarthy, he said its fate is in “leadership’s hands right now.”
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.), asked about how to bring up a bill without losing a majority of GOP members, signaled that Republicans are still squarely in the discussion phase about “this question of if it is time to revise or revisit” the war powers measures. He did not address the potential timing of House action.
“The threats of terrorism are still real, but the battlefields have changed,” Scalise said in an interview, adding that “all the committees of jurisdiction are starting to have that conversation.”
At least one of McCarthy’s close allies has been vocally pressing for repeal — and senses that the time could be ripe to finally unite Congress and the White House on the issue. President Joe Biden said recently that he would sign a repeal of the 2002 war powers.
“It sounds like opposition is softening, and certainly McCarthy seems more open to it,” said House Rules Committee Chair Tom Cole (R-Okla.), one of the leading sponsors of a 2002 war powers repeal.
Cole added there could be additional steps, such as attaching amendments to the Senate version and going to conference — a much longer process. Still, he sounded upbeat: “I’m just glad to see that opinion is beginning to coalesce around getting this done.”
Olivia Beavers, Anthony Adragna and Connor O’Brien contributed to this report. Ferris reported from Washington.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

March 22, 2023
The GOP’s newest culture war target: College diversity programs

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“We are not going to back down to the woke mob, and we will expose the scams they are trying to push onto students across the country,” said DeSantis, who held a roundtable this month on what he called divisive concepts. “Florida students will receive an education, not a political indoctrination.”
Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott also stepped into this fight, issuing a directive last month instructing public universities across the state to stop considering DEI statements in their hiring practices. GOP-controlled statehouses in Iowa, Missouri and elsewhere are also scrutinizing higher education diversity initiatives, and legislation has been introduced in at least a dozen states aimed at cutting DEI spending and rewriting hiring guidelines at colleges and universities.
DEI programs have existed for decades across school and government with the goal of both increasing the share of people on campus or in the office from communities historically discriminated against, such as women and religious minorities, and making them feel accepted once they arrive.
“In American higher education, we have been working to make campuses diverse and inclusive for well over 100 years,” said Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, which represents the nation’s colleges and universities. “This is not about teaching white students to be ashamed or teaching Black students to hate white students. This is about making campuses inclusive communities where everybody can prosper.”
But after corporate and educational efforts to supercharge diversity, equity and inclusion programs following the public outrage over George Floyd’s police killing in 2020, many Republicans believe the initiatives promote exclusion and division based on race, a critique that has resonated with conservative voters. It’s a flurry of legislative and executive activity that is advancing as the U.S. Supreme Court also seems poised to ban the use of affirmative action in college admissions later this year.
“It’s good for universities to aspire to be welcoming places to people from many backgrounds, many different experiences, many different perspectives,” said Jay Greene, a senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy. “But that very good thing has mutated into something not good. … Simply because we like the word diversity and we like the word inclusion … doesn’t mean that DEI initiatives are good.”
According to Greene, GOP lawmakers are looking to dismantle DEI in at least three different ways: striking down the use of diversity statements used for hiring or promotions, ending required social curriculum, and eliminating what they call the “DEI bureaucracy” — practitioners on campus in charge of facilitating diversity efforts. But it does not mean conservatives are against diversity, he said.
Colleges and practitioners, however, argue that these measures could stifle academic freedom and halt diversity efforts needed to ensure a welcoming environment for students, especially those from marginalized backgrounds.

“I don’t use the acronym D-E-I any longer because it’s been conflated with something that has been weaponized against the breadth and the depth of the work that’s being done on campus communities,” said Paulette Granberry Russell, president of National Association Diversity Officers and Higher Education. “I don’t believe that there is a deep understanding of what this might mean to campuses.”
Granberry Russell, whose group is composed of diversity practitioners, scholars and researchers at universities, said her members are concerned about how the rollback of these initiatives will affect their jobs. They question what programming and professional development they could have, and what message these practices will send to prospective students and job applicants.
Abbott, who barred universities state agencies from using DEI statements, said in an interview with Hearst Newspapers: “Diversity is something that we support.”
But in a February letter first reported by the Texas Tribune, Abbott’s chief of staff Gardner Pate wrote that using the statements during the hiring process violates federal and state employment laws. Public colleges in the state were quick to abide by it.
Texas A&M University announced this month that it would no longer have diversity statements when hiring. University of Houston Chancellor Renu Khator soon followed, saying her institution “will not support or use DEI statements or factors in hiring or promotion anywhere in the University of Houston System” to stay in compliance with state law.
The University of Texas Board of Regents also paused any new policies that promote diversity, equity and inclusion and are seeking a report on current policies across their campuses. While UT still strives for diversity on campus, Board Chair Kevin Eltife said “certain DEI efforts have strayed from the original intent to now imposing requirements and actions that, rightfully so, has raised the concerns of our policymakers around those efforts on campuses across our entire state.”
Greene, of the Heritage Foundation, said using diversity statements in hiring, promotions or assessing faculty tenure “seems to bear a lot of resemblance to loyalty oaths that were required during the McCarthy era where people had to declare that they weren’t communists.”
In Georgia, Republicans lawmakers are also looking to ban DEI in education hiring practices through a bill dubbed the “End Political Litmus Tests In Education Act,” SB 261. The Missouri legislature is considering a similar measure to ban public colleges from requiring applicants to submit DEI statements.
This month, South Carolina lawmakers sparred over eliminating funding for DEI efforts from the state’s public colleges during its broader budget negotiations. In Iowa, the Board of Regents announced that it is taking on a comprehensive review of all DEI programs and efforts and pausing any new ones at the University of Iowa, Iowa State University and the University of Northern Iowa.
Meanwhile in Florida, lawmakers advanced the wide-ranging measure sought by DeSantis that would bar universities and colleges from spending on programs linked to diversity, equity and inclusion or critical race theory.
The legislation also calls on the state university system’s Board of Governors to direct schools to remove any major or minor of study that is “based on or otherwise utilizes pedagogical methodology” tied to critical race theory. This includes Critical Race Theory, Critical Race Studies, Critical Ethnic Studies, Radical Feminist Theory, Radical Gender Theory, Queer Theory, Critical Social Justice, or Intersectionality.
Critical race theory is an analytical framework for examining how racism has been systemic to American society and institutions after centuries of slavery and Jim Crow. Many conservatives use critical race theory as shorthand for a broader critique of how race and social issues are being taught in the K-12 education system.
The bill would also weaken or eliminate the roles created at institutions to support students. Recognizing the needs of students based on how they identify, and providing academic and social support is a key role diversity practitioners have long taken on in higher education, Granberry Russell said.
“If we go back to a time when those needs were ignored, not specifically addressed, not tailored to what those students’ needs are,” she said, “what does that represent? You’re not welcome here.”
Andrew Atterbury contributed to this report.

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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

March 19, 2023
Sonpal Kids Piano Keyboard, 37 Keys Dual-Speakers Electronic Piano for Kids, Newest Piano Keyboards Musical Educational Toys Gifts-Plastic, Multi Color(Pack of 1).

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Multi-function Musical Instrument -8 tones, including piano, organ, violin, trumpet, banjo, bell, music box, guitar. -8 rhythms, including rock, slow rock, twist, disco, march, waltz, samba, blues, encouraging kids to explore different sound combinations. -4 kinds of percussion sound, 6 demo, 37 Black and white keys, volume control and tempo control, Produces high quality sounds and effects.So ng Record and Playback, with Microphone -Record & playback function, professional and suitable for beginner to practice. Equipped with a small microphone, when children play this keyboard, they can not only play the piano, but also sing, help develop the children’s performance skills and make the children more confident.Safe for Your Kids Feaster kids keyboard piano made of ABS environmentally material, sturdy and non-toxic, safe and very kid friendly. Fine workmanship and smooth edge design, children will not hurt. 1.Advise you install 4 AA batteries or connect to DC cable and turn on the power button. 2. Piano material- Kids piano is ABS environmental material, smooth edge design to protect kids hands.
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March 12, 2023
‘We can’t find people to work’: The newest threat to Biden’s climate policies

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“Having the technicians and the engineers and skilled mechanics, that is going to be a challenge in the United States,” Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, a prominent Democratic clean energy proponent whose own 2020 presidential platform helped shape some of Biden’s policies, said in an interview.
Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act includes $369 billion in clean energy incentives that are meant to send a signal to U.S. businesses — encouraging them to build and deploy electric cars, carbon-free energy sources and less-wasteful appliances. And it appears to be working: More than 100,000 clean-energy job openings have sprung up across the U.S. since Biden signed the climate law six months ago, according to Climate Power, a coalition of environmental groups.
But another report cast a more ominous outlook: The U.S. construction industry was short 413,000 workers as of December, while 764,000 manufacturing sector jobs remained open, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And the consulting firm McKinsey & Co, expects 550,000 new energy transition jobs will become available by 2030, about 10 percent of which may be filled by people leaving the oil and gas industry.
“The first thing I heard from everyone was the same thing: We can’t find people to work,” said Rep. Bob Latta (R-Ohio), said of a recent visit to his manufacturing-heavy district in northern Ohio. “That’s inhibiting what they can do.”
Companies in the clean energy sector have raised alarms about labor shortages, said Dawn Lippert, CEO of Honolulu-based Elemental Excelerator, a group that helps clean energy start-ups.
“Our portfolio companies have two main concerns: capital and workforce. The need to grow the workforce is evident in all industries, from electricians to finance,” she said.
The climate law recognized the gap. It included incentives, such as more lucrative tax credits, for partnering with registered apprentice programs and broad funding that could be used for workforce development to train people to maintain clean heavy-duty vehicles and heat pumps and to install clean energy projects. Biden underscored the point by visiting a labor union training facility in Wisconsin, his first stop on a manufacturing tour after his State of the Union, where he called the law “a blue-collar blueprint to rebuild America.”

Those investments will help state leaders who have raised concerns about the pace of workforce development, said Casey Katims, executive director of the U.S. Climate Alliance, a bipartisan coalition of 24 governors. States could use those funds to reorient apprenticeship and community college programs, he said, much as they did in the 1990s and 2000s to prepare people for computer science jobs.

“It’s incumbent on all of us to make sure that our labor markets and our workforce development systems catch up to the shift and the huge opportunity that we’re seeing,” he said.
An emerging field of climate technology known as carbon management offers a warning.
The Biden administration and Congress want to grow the sector, which aims to capture greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel burning or pull them from the air. The suite of technologies would then pump the gas below ground, turn it into other products or use it as a source for lower-carbon hydrogen power. Scientists have said such innovations may be needed to keep the planet from reaching greenhouse gas concentrations that push the planet past the point of catastrophic warming.
McKinsey and the tech companies Alphabet, Meta, Stripe and Shopify bought into the promise, pledging last year to play a “catalytic role” in the carbon removal industry’s development. Under the banner Frontier Climate, they joined together to announce they would help the carbon removal industry grow, in part by promising to buy the climate credits generated by such projects.
Frontier Climate also built a searchable database to alert scientists, engineers and professionals in other fields to potential careers in carbon management. But when the database was published in November, it identified more than 100 technical issues that must be answered for the technology to scale up.
The exercise also revealed that many of the skills and workers needed to store and transport carbon dioxide, such as geologists and pipefitters, are similar to those employed by oil and gas industry — which could be a potential labor pool.
“Who knows the most about the subsurface and putting the CO2 underground? The oil and gas industry,” said Ryan Orbuch, a former Stripe employee who is now a partner at venture capital firm Lowercarbon Capital.
“We’re not going to do gigatons of carbon removal without employing the people who do gigatons of moving carbon around already,” he added. “Those people just currently work in oil and gas companies because those are the only companies that do this right now.”
Anu Khan, director of science and innovation at Carbon180, an advocacy firm that supports carbon removal, said to avoid a labor crunch in the future, cleantech industries must already begin informing workers with comparable skills in other industries about the opportunities available in clean energy. She said the industry needs trade union members’ skills, such as fitting pipelines to move carbon dioxide, drilling wells to store carbon dioxide and doing the engineering to build and operate machinery.
“We haven’t immediately fully run up against that challenge yet, but it’s on the horizon,” she said of the workforce gap.
Khan is trying to connect the industry with labor unions and tradespeople. The links are sometimes explicit: Roxanne Brown, the United Steelworkers’ vice president at large, is on Carbon180’s board of directors.
“These investments are going to be tremendously helpful to protect jobs in the industrial sector, and make it more sustainable and globally competitive,” Anna Fendley, director of regulatory and state policy with United Steelworkers, said of carbon management in a Jan. 26 call with reporters.
While it’s unclear how many jobs the carbon removal industry could generate, climate researchers have projected potentially major gains from one segment known as direct air capture. (This early-stage technology would pull greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, as opposed to a specific power plant or factory.)
For every megaton of carbon dioxide that a direct air plant can remove per year, the technology will create about 1,500 temporary jobs and then 500 permanent jobs for ongoing operations, climate research firm Rhodium Group estimated. That could translate to 1.5 million construction and 500,000 operation jobs for every gigaton. Direct-air capture at 0.5 gigaton of carbon dioxide removal annually would support a more modest 139,000 operations jobs, environmental non-profit World Resources Institute suggested.
Scientists project that the world will have to remove 10 gigatons annually by 2050 to keep the planet from heating 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the super-ambitious goal set by the Paris climate agreement.
“We’re talking about a trillion or trillions of dollars that this industry will make up when we’re talking about gigaton scale,” said Whitney Herndon, associate director at Rhodium, who authored the report. “A lot of times the gut reaction on our jobs projection is, ‘Whoa, that’s a lot of jobs.’ But I think that’s from a fundamental misunderstanding of how large this industry is going to be.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

February 28, 2023
GOP’s newest attack on Biden’s climate law: China

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To Democrats, such projects and the domestic manufacturing incentives included in Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act are the key to creating a homegrown clean energy industry that will end China’s dominance, while weaning the U.S. off fossil fuels. But Republicans contend that the president is recklessly pushing a quick transition away from coal, oil and natural gas — and toward green-energy sources that China dominates.
The GOP strategy plays off anger at China among lawmakers in both parties, which spiked again this month after a suspected Chinese spy balloon wafted across the U.S. before the Air Force shot it down.
“We want to stop the rush to green,” said Rep. Bill Johnson (R-Ohio), chair of the Energy and Commerce environment, manufacturing and critical materials subcommittee. Under Biden’s policies, he contended, “Energy costs are going to go higher. Quality of life for the American people is going to go down. America’s economy and energy independence is at stake. Let’s harvest those resources as much as we can here at home.”
Energy experts and members of both parties acknowledge that the U.S. cannot yet make a full break from China, which has had a decade-long head start in developing the supply chain for batteries, solar panels and other clean energy production.
But Democrats say their efforts are directed at replacing Chinese batteries and renewable equipment with U.S.-made parts. They say the attacks from Republicans, who unanimously voted against the climate law, are a transparent attempt to undermine alternatives to fossil fuels.
“Republicans sat on the sidelines while we took these huge steps in the direction of being less dependent on China,” said Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) “So they have no high ground whatsoever on this.”
Supporters of Biden’s policies also warn that an immediate no-China approach would be a recipe for paralysis — slowing the U.S. transition to clean energy, leaving the country without crucial materials, and imperiling the fight to cut planet-warming pollution.
“We can’t make our emissions numbers without solar panels that can only come from China today,” said Rep. Scott Peters (D-Calif.), a former environmental lawyer who serves on the Energy and Commerce Committee.

“Being wary of them is really important, but the notion that you can just flush your contact with China is not possible,” he added. “You have to manage China. There’s going to be a period of transition. They are still going to be a very large economy.”
The flight of the balloon has only worsened U.S.-China acrimony. Beijing also temporarily cut off climate talks and other contacts with the U.S. last year after then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan, while China’s growing ties to the Russian energy sector have provoked consternation in Washington since Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine a year ago.
China’s starring role in clean energy is undeniable, however.
On top of its world-leading position in processing critical minerals and manufacturing solar cells, wafers and modules, China dominates the production of the batteries needed for electric vehicles at every stage of the supply chain, according to a 2022 report from the International Energy Agency.
“We are still in a tight coupling with China, and it isn’t rational or responsible to talk about that relationship like we can turn it off,” said Kevin Book, managing director at ClearView Energy Partners, a research group.
China hosts about three-quarters of the global production capacity for battery cells, along with more than half the global raw material processing of lithium, cobalt and graphite, the IEA said.
Its stranglehold on the polysilicon wafers that turn sunlight into electricity in solar panels is even greater, accounting for 97 percent of the global manufacturing capacity. Lawmakers last year also enacted a federal law that prohibits the importation of goods that include polysilicon from China’s Xinjiang unless an importer can prove the product was not made with forced labor.
Since Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act in August, companies have announced plans for tens of billions of dollars of green manufacturing projects across the United States, seeking a slice of the law’s $369 billion in incentives for domestically sourced clean energy.
But those projects are also drawing scrutiny from GOP lawmakers. They’ve promised a lengthy oversight process of the green energy spending bonanza bankrolled through the climate law, as well as investments stemming from Biden’s 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law.
“I won’t use the phrase this is the tip of the iceberg, but I would say this is the start of a long and methodical and hopefully sterile process of oversight,” said House Science Chair Frank Lucas (R-Okla.).
Lucas, and other lawmakers from both parties, have raised questions about China’s influence over a Texas-based battery company, Microvast, which has received initial approval for a $200 million federal grant through the infrastructure law to build a facility in Tennessee.
Microvast is a publicly traded U.S. company with a subsidiary in China, but with no ownership by the Chinese government, said Shane Smith, the company’s chief operating officer. The Energy Department has said no taxpayer funds have gone to the company yet, and that DOE is conducting a due-diligence review of the award.
Smith said the company, which has worked with DOE since the Trump administration, is now being used to score political points — though he acknowledged that some companies with links to China are worth investigating.
“Frankly, we’re just the wrong company,” he said. “Are there companies out there that are blatantly acknowledged that are Chinese-owned, that could get actual federal dollars? Yes. Why are those not the examples in what they’re trying to communicate rather than an American company?”
Conservatives and GOP state lawmakers have also begun drawing links between China and investments in their states. Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin announced last month that he had halted efforts to bring a proposed Ford battery plant to Virginia over concerns about its links to a Chinese company and its technology. The U.S.-based auto giant said Monday that it would locate the project in Michigan instead.
In West Virginia, a Republican state delegate has questioned whether investors in a proposed battery plant there have connections to China and Saudi Arabia.
One solar energy industry executive pointed to conservative ire over a recent announcement that JA Solar, a China-based company that is one of the world’s largest solar manufacturers, will build a factory in Arizona. “The suggestion there is that IRA funds could potentially be going to companies linked to the Communist Party,” said the person, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly about the industry’s concerns. The person added, “Our concern is that any link to China is going to be a problem.”
But the person saw a potential bright spot: Because anti-China sentiment on the Hill is bipartisan, an opportunity could exist to channel that energy to advance manufacturing investments — if lawmakers were open to having a meaningful discussion.
Republicans, meanwhile, say Biden’s actions are undermining his stated support for developing domestic sources of critical clean-energy minerals. They point to a recent Interior Department order protecting a swath of lakes and wilderness in Minnesota, which effectively halted a proposed copper mine.
Less than a week later, EPA used a rarely employed veto authority to stop Pebble Mine in Alaska, a contentious metals project that would have extracted significant amounts of copper, gold and molybdenum but risked damaging one of the world’s largest salmon habitats
“The fact they would shut those down demonstrates the phoniness of the conviction of all this, especially with regards to [reducing dependence on] China,” said Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.).
Republicans also warn that Democrats’ subsidies to clean energy developers can’t keep up with China’s government support of its own green industries, and that the U.S. won’t be able to quickly build energy and mining projects unless Congress passes legislation to streamline lengthy permitting reviews.
“You can’t compete with a nonmarket behemoth economy in a game of subsidies,” said George David Banks, a former international climate adviser in the Trump administration who now advises Republicans in Congress. “You can throw all the subsidies and still not be able to solve the problem because you can’t build anything.”
Democrats counter that Republicans have not offered a comprehensive plan of their own. They say the GOP’s focus on boosting domestic mining overlooks other aspects of the supply chain reliant on China, such as processing of metals used in batteries.
And they say the GOP’s emphasis on easing fossil fuel production and exports risks setting back U.S efforts to compete with China.
“[Republicans] need a plan, and the plan needs to be a real plan not a political plan — a nuts and bolts, how do we continue to onshore manufacturing here,” said Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.). “And right now we have the only real tool to do that, which is the industrial policy which was embedded in the IRA.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

February 14, 2023
Republicans launch newest fight against Biden’s oil drawdowns

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Both measures are typical examples of the not-gonna-pass messaging bills that a party offers when it takes over a chamber of Congress, although the China bill picked up significant Democratic support. Senate Republicans led by Energy Committee ranking member John Barrasso of Wyoming have released similar legislation on the oil reserve this week, as the GOP uses the issue to express frustration with Biden’s broader efforts to wean the economy off fossil fuels to combat climate change.
But Republicans are casting their latest proposal in national security terms — accusing Biden of recklessly making politically timed sales from an emergency reserve created in response to the Arab oil embargo of the 1970s.

“The SPR was created during a time of energy scarcity,” Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) said in an interview, adding that Biden should instead unleash production from the nation’s fracking hot spots. “You don’t need an emergency reserve to bail you out of high energy prices. You just need to use the Bakken or Permian Basin.”
Congress has also turned to the petroleum reserve for non-emergency reasons over the years, with lawmakers of both parties pushing oil sales to raise money for needs such as highway construction and drug approvals, and former President Donald Trump once proposed selling off half the SPR’s supplies to shrink the federal deficit. Now, though, Republicans argue that Biden has left the U.S. vulnerable to a severe supply disruption by ordering emergency drawdowns after gasoline prices spiked following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The GOP voiced similar complaints when then-President Barack Obama sold oil from the reserve in response to supply disruptions amid the Arab Spring.
Biden’s releases last year — including a massive release just before the election — totaled more than 200 million barrels of oil from the reserve, a network of underground salt caverns that now holds 372 million barrels. That’s down from 638 million barrels when Biden took office and the reserve’s lowest level since 1983.
The Treasury Department has estimated that the Biden administration’s releases reduced gasoline prices by up to 40 cents per gallon. The national average price was $3.446 a gallon Tuesday, down from an all-time high of $5.016 in June.
The Biden administration has initiated a plan to begin refilling the reserve, but Republicans accuse the president of failing to explain why Russia’s invasion and the subsequent spike in fuel prices qualified as an emergency. They also complain that he hasn’t tended to preserving the physical condition of the reserve’s infrastructure, saying its pipelines, pumps and caverns have been degraded from frequent drawdowns.

“What has caused this and why he [Biden] has had to use it [the SPR] is because of the war on fossil fuels this administration declared when they first went into office,” Rep. Buddy Carter (R-Ga.), a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said in an interview. “He is jeopardizing our energy security, which jeopardizes our national security.”
Democrats, meanwhile, are welcoming the GOP effort as an opportunity — to remind the public that gasoline prices have fallen on their watch.
The price drop is thanks in part to Biden’s appropriate use of the SPR, Democrats say.
The administration has “used it very reasonably for exactly the situation it should be used — for an emergency situation that is brought on by worldwide factors, whether it’s a war in the Middle East or a war in Ukraine,” said Sen. Angus King of Maine, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, in an interview.
Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm went to the White House on Monday to argue that the latest House bill “needlessly aims to weaken” the efficacy of the SPR as a tool to respond to crises, and would drive up gas prices during an oil shortage. (The bill would provide an exception “in the case of a severe energy supply interruption,” caused by hurricanes or other natural disasters).
Her comments were followed by a White House statement warning that Biden would veto the bill.
House Democrats led by Energy and Commerce Committee ranking member Frank Pallone of New Jersey are countering with their own bill that would create an “Economic Petroleum Reserve” within the SPR, allowing the Energy Department to buy oil when prices are low and sell it when they are high, essentially making the U.S. government an oil trader. They plan to offer the measure as an amendment to the GOP legislation.
“This is not serious legislating,” Pallone said of the GOP effort at a news conference Tuesday. “It’s just a giveaway to the fossil fuel industry that’s already profiting from high oil prices. And it’s hypocritical. Because releasing oil from the SPR has been done by presidents from both parties for decades.”
Democrats also say Republican calls for increasing fossil fuel production on federal lands as part of their legislative push is misplaced because only 10 percent of U.S. oil and natural gas production occurs on federal lands. And they say that while Biden has limited leasing of new federal acreage for oil and gas sales, his administration has issued permits to drill at a rate outpacing the early months of the Trump administration.
House Energy and Commerce Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) countered by noting that gasoline prices have increased over the past month by an average of 30 cents a gallon nationwide, offsetting much of the 40-cent price decrease the administration has been touting.
And Republicans say Pallone’s amendment would amount to anti-competitive government intervention in the global oil marketplace that would lead to higher prices over time.
“Republicans want durable, long-lasting relief at the pump,” McMorris Rodgers said in a statement Tuesday. “The best way to do this is by unleashing American energy, which is what H.R. 21 helps accomplish.”
The oil and gas industry is staying largely silent on the bill, instead placing a priority on issues such as easing permit rules for pipelines and natural gas export terminals.
“Industry generally wants the feds to stay out of markets,” an energy industry lobbyist told POLITICO, insisting on anonymity to speak candidly. “But they also like market stability, which SPR sales helped provide. This is all messaging.”
One exception was the American Exploration and Production Council, a trade group representing independent oil and gas producers, which came out in support of the GOP bill. The Biden administration “should not use our Strategic Petroleum Reserves as a tool to increase crude supply while simultaneously pursuing policies that suppress domestic production of crude and natural gas,” council CEO Anne Bradbury said in a statement.
Kelsey Tamborrino contributed to this report.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

January 25, 2023