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REPUBLICA PRESS
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Brakes

Ukraine’s Donbas, Where Putin Sowed the Seeds of War

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CHASIV YAR, Ukraine — On a clear spring morning eight years ago, Oleksandr Khainus stepped outside his house to go to work at the town factory when he spotted new graffiti scrawled across his fence. “Glory to Russia,” vandals had written in angry black spray paint. “Putin,” another message said.

Mr. Khainus was perplexed. It was true that Chasiv Yar, the Rust Belt-like town where he has spent his entire life in a region called the Donbas, had long contained many conflicting opinions on its identity. Geographically, the Donbas was part of Ukraine, no question, but it was so close to Russia and so tied to it historically that many maintained that their true home really lay eastward.

“It was the type of stuff you’d argue about over the dinner table,” he said. “But nothing that anyone would get violent over.”

protests exploded. Armed separatists seized chunks of the Donbas right under the authorities’ noses. Two so-called People’s Republics were declared. Russian troops stormed in.

the most far-reaching war in generations. It was the Donbas that became Mr. Putin’s pretext for a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. And now it is heating up again.

masterful offensive in the Kharkiv region, in Ukraine’s northeast, where town after town fell without a shot. Now they are heading south. Columns of dark green military trucks and American-made rocket launchers are thundering down the long, straight highways into the Donbas. But they will have a much harder fight on their hands.

Wagner Group and close air cover because of the proximity to the Russian border. They can also rely on separatist fighters and a well-financed network of citizen-spies who relay secret information to the invaders, often with devastating consequences.

Viktor Yanukovych, Ukraine’s pro-Russia president, out of office. Mr. Yanukovych came from a Donbas steel town. In one stroke, Russia lost its ally and the Donbas elite its godfather. That is when the trouble started.

People flooded into the Donbas streets waving Russian flags. At first, said Alisa Sopova, a journalist for a Donbas newspaper at the time, “We were sure they were fake people brought in from Russia to pose for Russian TV.”

to speak so much Russian. A critical aspect of Ukrainian independence was reviving the Ukrainian language, marginalized during Soviet times. But those arguments were typically confined to social media posts or intellectual debates, until this moment.

“I’d go into the supermarket to buy some meat, and the shopkeeper tells me, ‘If you don’t speak Ukrainian, I’m not going to sell you any meat,’” Mr. Tsyhankov said. “I’ve been speaking Russian my whole life. How do you think that made me feel?”

done something similar in 2008 in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, two regions of Georgia, and before that the Russians had meddled in Moldova, backing the breakaway Transnistria region. The tools were generally the same: bankrolling pro-Russia political parties; deploying intelligence agents to foment protests; sowing disinformation through Russian TV.

Mr. Putin’s strategy was to turn strategic slices of the former Soviet Union into separatist hotbeds to hobble young nations like Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine, all struggling to break free from Moscow and move closer to Europe.

Under the Kremlin’s wing, Donbas’s separatists killed Ukrainian officials, took territory and declared the breakaway Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic. When Ukrainian forces rolled in to quell the rebellion, some residents saw them as occupiers. They spoke a different language, hailed from a different region, embraced a different culture — or so went the pro-Russia narrative. In some villages, babushkas lay down in the roads blocking Ukrainian tanks, officers said, and in one, an especially cunning babushka kept stealing the soldiers’ helmets.

“It was frustrating,” said Anatolii Mohyla, a Ukrainian military commander. “We’d come to liberate them and they’d give us the finger.”

Mr. Putin dispatched thousands of Russian troops to support the separatists, later saying he had been “forced to protect” the Russian-speaking population. Towns like Chasiv Yar were occupied by separatist fighters, then liberated by Ukrainian troops a few months later. By 2015, the heavy fighting had died down. But it was not like Mr. Putin forgot about the Donbas.

He upped the ante in 2021, saying, “Kyiv simply does not need the Donbas.” And on Feb. 21 of this year, three days before he invaded Ukraine, Mr. Putin accused the Ukrainian government of perpetrating a “genocide.” He justified the most cataclysmic war in decades by citing the very tensions he himself stoked.

In early April, the agricultural land around Chasiv Yar began to thaw. Mr. Khainus, the pro-Ukraine farmer, drove out to check a sunflower field. A Ukrainian military vehicle raced up. A soldier leaned out the window and fired an assault rifle, the bullets skipping up in the dirt. Mr. Khainus slammed on the brakes.

A Ukrainian commander he recognized, a man whom Mr. Khainus said he had complained about before, jumped out. The commander greeted him with a punch to the head, Mr. Khainus said, and then smashed him in the face with a rifle butt.

He does not remember much after that. He shared photographs of himself lying in a hospital bed with two black eyes. Military and law enforcement officials declined to comment.

Mr. Khainus remains a supporter of the military, saying, “One stupid person doesn’t represent the army.”

But, he added wryly: “It’s one thing to be a patriot in Kyiv. It’s another to be a patriot in the Donbas.”

At 9 p.m. on July 9, four cruise missiles slammed into a dormitory at the old ceramic plant. The buildings crumbled as if they were made out of sand. Viacheslav Boitsov, an emergency services official, said there were “no military facilities nearby.”

But according to Mr. Mohyla and Oleksandr Nevydomskyi, another Ukrainian military officer, Ukrainian soldiers were staying in that building. The night before, they said, a mysterious man was seen standing outside flashing light signals, most likely pinpointing the position.

The military calls such spies “correctors,” and they relay navigational information to the Russians to make missile and artillery strikes more precise. Ukrainian officials have arrested more than 20 and say correctors are often paid several hundred dollars after a target is hit. The strike in Chasiv Yar was one of the deadliest: 48 killed, including 18 soldiers, the officers said.

“For sure there are Russian agents in this town,” Mr. Mohyla said. “There might even be spies in our unit.”

Few in Chasiv Yar are confident that the town will stay in government hands.

Mr. Khainus said the Russians were steadily moving closer to his sunflower fields. About a week ago, a friend’s house was shelled. A day later, in an online messaging channel, separatist supporters said Mr. Khainus should be next, calling him a “hero” — adding an epithet.

Is he scared?

“Why should I be?” he said. “They’re nobodies.”

Mr. Tsyhankov, the retired dump truck driver nostalgic for the Soviet times, seemed pained by all of the bloodshed but did not blame the Russians or the separatists. “They’re doing the right thing,” he said. “They’re fighting for the Russian language and their territory.”

As he said goodbye, insisting that his guests take with them a jug of his homemade apple juice and some fresh green grapes, he shook his head at the enormity of it. “Why can’t we be friends with you guys, the Americans?” he asked. “Politics are keeping all of us hostage.”

Every night, the horizon in Chasiv Yar lights up with explosions. Ukrainian soldiers operate here almost as if they are on enemy territory, hiving themselves off from the public, watching their backs, traveling by night in long convoys of cars with the lights blacked out, the drivers wearing night vision goggles. According to separatist messaging channels, the Wagner mercenaries have reached the outskirts of Bakhmut, a major Donbas town. As for Soledar, it is now off limits to journalists, but volunteers there trying to rescue civilians say it is as deadly as ever.

People here used to describe the Donbas in simple terms like “beautiful,” “honest,” “unbreakable” and “free.”

Now it is destroyed, depopulated, sad and empty.

“It’s like the Rust Belt,” Ms. Sopova said. “It’s not needed anymore. All that industry is obsolete.”

Countless communities have risen in the Donbas. Many are now falling. Ms. Sopova glimpses a perhaps not so faraway future where the Donbas goes back to what it once was: a wild field.

Oleksandra Mykolyshyn contributed reporting.

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Stocks Drift Mostly Lower On Wall Street, Extending Losses

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By Associated Press
September 6, 2022

The S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average were down 0.3% in afternoon trading on Tuesday, while the Nasdaq fell 0.4%.

Stocks drifted mostly lower on Wall Street, extending the market’s losses into a holiday-shortened week.

The S&P 500 fell 0.3% as of 12:28 p.m. Eastern. It has bounced between a gain of 0.5% and a loss of 1% throughout the day and is coming off its third losing week in a row. Markets in the U.S. were closed on Monday for the Labor Day holiday.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 99 points, or 0.3%, to 31,218 and the Nasdaq fell 0.4%.

Health care stocks were among the biggest gainers. Eli Lilly rose 2.4%. Communication stocks fell broadly and tempered gains elsewhere in the market. Netflix slipped 3.5%.

Bed Bath & Beyond fell 16.6% following the death of its chief financial officer. The company has been suffering from a prolonged sales slump and executive turnover.

The company that wants to take Trump Media public, Digital World Acquisition, plunged 14.7% following reports it didn’t receive enough shareholder support for an extension to close the deal.

ADT jumped 13.5% after State Farm said it was taking a 15% stake in the home security company.

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Markets have been slipping in recent weeks and shedding much of the gains made in July and early August as inflation remains hot and the Federal Reserve stays on track to continue raising interest rates to try and tame stubbornly persistent high prices. The big concern is that the Fed might go too far in raising rates and slam the brakes too hard on an already slowing economy, potentially causing a recession.

Wall Street has been closely watching economic data for clues that inflation might be easing, which traders hope will give the Fed a reason to ease up on rate hikes. The Fed has already raised interest rates four times this year and is expected to raise short-term rates by another 0.75 percentage points at its next meeting later this month, according to CME Group.

In recent weeks, the market has wiped out much of the gains it made in July and early August as traders worried that the Fed would not let up anytime soon on raising interest rates to bring down the highest inflation in decades. The Fed has made clear that it intends to keep raising interest rates until it is sure that inflation is easing.

Bond yields rose. The yield on the 10-year Treasury, which influences interest rates on mortgages and other loans, rose to 3.34% from 3.19% late Thursday. The two-year Treasury yield, which tends to track expectations for Fed action, rose to 3.51% from 3.39%.

Markets in Asia were mostly higher. The Shanghai Composite Index rose 1.4% after China promised Monday to accelerate easier lending and other policies to shore up economic growth that sank to 2.5% over a year earlier in the first half of 2022, less than half the official annual target.

European markets were mostly lower.

Additional reporting by The Associated Press.

Source: newsy.com

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Judge Nixes No-Prison Deal In 2018 Limo Crash That Killed 20

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Wednesday’s turnabout drew applause and tears from victims’ relatives and plunged limo company boss Nauman Hussain into legal uncertainty.

A judge rejected a plea agreement that would have meant no prison time for the operator of a limousine company involved in a crash that killed 20 people in upstate New York. Wednesday’s turnabout drew applause and tears from victims’ relatives and plunged limo company boss Nauman Hussain into legal uncertainty.

State Supreme Court Justice Peter Lynch, who was not presiding over the case when the deal was reached a year ago in Hussain’s case, called the agreement “fundamentally flawed.”

It would have spared Hussain prison time, angering the families of the people killed when brake failure sent a stretch limo full of birthday revelers hurtling down a hill in 2018.

The judge’s rejection caught lawyers and relatives off-guard.

“I can’t even put into words how I feel. Totally unexpected. Thank God,” said Jill Richardson-Perez, the mother of limo crash victim Matthew Coons. “I’m in a better place now.”

Kevin Cushing, who lost his son Patrick in the crash, said the families “have a hope for a bit of justice to be served in the future, where we didn’t have any justice served in the past.”

Defense attorney Chad Seigel said they were “shocked” and that the judge’s move was “unheard of.”

Hussain, who operated Prestige Limousine, had been charged with 20 counts each of criminally negligent homicide and second-degree manslaughter in what was the deadliest U.S. transportation disaster in a decade.

The agreement had called for Hussain to plead guilty only to the homicide counts, resulting five years of probation and 1,000 hours of community service. Lawyers for both sides said last year the plea agreement assured a resolution in a case that would have faced an uncertain outcome if presented to a jury.

Lynch noted that a state Department of Transportation out-of-service sticker had been placed on the limousine a month before the crash. State police recovered the sticker from Hussain’s car after his arrest. Prosecutors have argued that Hussain took the sticker off the limo’s windshield so that he could use it for more jobs.

To the judge, Hussain’s actions showed he knew the risk of putting the limousine on the road the day of the crash, and a guilty plea to only criminally negligent homicide does not reflect that. Lynch called the deal “completely disingenuous and unacceptable to this court.”

Lynch gave Hussain’s lawyers the choice of accepting a sentence of 1 1/3 to four years in prison or withdrawing his guilty plea. They chose the latter.

Seigel said afterward that the DOT sticker had “absolutely nothing to do with defective brakes.”

“Collectively, we made a decision that it would be in the best of all all involved — not only our client but the members of the community — to put this matter behind them. A little monkey wrench was thrown in that,” Seigel said. “So the judge forced our hand and we’re ready for trial.”

District Attorney Susan Mallery left court without commenting.

Hussain, who sat with his head lowered for much of the proceeding, declined comment afterward.

While the National Transportation Safety Board concluded the crash was likely caused by Prestige Limousine’s “egregious disregard for safety” that resulted in brake failure, the board said ineffective state oversight contributed.

Attorneys for Hussain say he tried to maintain the limousine and relied on what he was told by state officials and a repair shop that inspected it.

Axel Steenburg rented the 2001 Ford Excursion limousine for wife Amy’s 30th birthday on Oct. 6, 2018. The party group, ranging in age from 24 to 34, included Axel’s brother, Amy’s three sisters and two of their husbands, and close friends.

En route to a brewery, the limo’s brakes failed on a downhill stretch of road in Schoharie, west of Albany. The vehicle blew through a stop sign at over 100 mph and crashed into a small ravine.

The crash killed the limo driver, 17 passengers, and two bystanders outside the store.

Mallery’s office has said Hussain allowed passengers to ride in the limo despite having received “multiple notices of violations” from the state and having been told repairs were inadequate. State police said the vehicle should have been taken out of service because of brake problems identified in an inspection a month before the crash.

Under New York law, second-degree manslaughter entails conduct that “creates or contributes to a substantial and unjustifiable risk that another person’s death will occur” — a risk that the perpetrator consciously disregards. Criminally negligent homicide, on the other hand, involves failing to perceive such a risk, the judge noted.

The next court date has been set for Sept. 14. Hussain, who had been on interim probation, will go out on bail and be subject to GPS monitoring.

Additional reporting by The Associated Press.

Source: newsy.com

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Greenland ‘Zombie Ice’ Threatens To Raise Global Sea Levels 10 Inches

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Zombie ice is part of Greenland’s massive ice sheet that is melting.

We’ve got a zombie problem. No, not the kind you see in movies.

This zombie problem is zombie ice. It’s part of the massive Greenland ice sheet. It’s also referred to as doomed ice, because it’s going to melt no matter what.

Several leading glaciologists studied the zombie ice and say it’s going to cause widespread global sea level rise.

Greenland has one of the two largest ice sheets on the planet. The other one is in the Antarctic, which has problems too.

The Greenland ice is not growing. It’s basically dead.

Ice grows when it snows. The snow piles up, gets squished down and adds new layers of ice to the ice sheet. The problem is, there’s been a lot less snow due to climate change, so the ice is not growing and replenishing what’s doomed to melt.   

“The Arctic is in crisis. It’s warming three times the rate of the global average,” said professor Gail Whiteman, founder of Arctic Basecamp — a team of scientists sounding the alarm and calling for action to prevent Arctic change. “What happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay there.” 

It doesn’t. And it won’t. When all 120 trillion tons of the zombie ice melts, it’s going to rush out to the oceans and they’re going to rise almost 11 inches. That’s twice the amount  the U.N. Climate Change Report predicted just last year.

If all that melted water gets piled up on top of the continental U.S., it would be 37 feet deep from coast to coast.

Even if we slammed the brakes on all greenhouse gas emissions around the world, the study says it’s too late.

It’s all going to melt, likely by the end of the century.  

Source: newsy.com

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The World’s Relationship With Nuclear Energy Is Changing

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By Newsy Staff
August 17, 2022

Though the idea of nuclear energy has historically been unpopular, the debate has now changed toward a push for more of it.

After decades of shutting down nuclear plants across the country, there is now a sudden growing political movement to hit the brakes, with much of it being led by environmental scientists.

A study from Pew Research Center found that nuclear power was barely more popular than coal and oil among the U.S. public, as vast majorities of respondents were instead in favor of increasing wind and solar energy intake. Despite this, the Biden administration announced $6 billion to keep current nuclear plants operational, and California Gov. Gavin Newsom is now pushing to keep the state’s last remaining nuclear plant, the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant, open. 

So, how has the debate around nuclear energy changed, and why are we seeing this sudden shift for a less popular energy source?

In the postwar period, nuclear power plants began springing up around the country, encouraged by President Dwight D. Eisenhower who famously made his “Atoms for Peace” speech at the U.N. But, that wasn’t enough to calm the fears of nuclear armament and attacks as the U.S. headed into the Cold War. 

Nuclear power plants depend on fuel rods where fission occurs, or in other words, the splitting of an atom. The rods are surrounded by water which helps keep them cool. The fission creates heat, which boils the surrounding water to make steam. The steam is what powers a turbine to make energy.

If, for some reason, the fuel rods get too hot, that can cause a meltdown.

In 1979, the first major accident happened at a U.S. power plant. The Three Mile Island incident was a partial meltdown of a plant in Pennsylvania, where cleanup took over 20 years. Conflicting studies haven’t conclusively determined whether the disaster led to health problems, such as a rise in cancer in the area, but the image was already set in the public’s mind. The number of nuclear plants being built and kept open plummeted.

Further high-profile disasters made a lasting impact worldwide: In 1986, the Chernobyl disaster in the Soviet Union had horrific and deadly consequences. Then in 2011, Fukushima plant meltdown only added to the list, even though there were no reported deaths. These disasters also reinforced national security concerns about plants being potential targets of terrorist groups or wartime enemies, like Russia in Ukraine.

There are a number of things that have changed in recent years: Safer technology is being developed for future facilities, and now that China and Russia have overtaken the U.S. in the number of nuclear plants, there are new concerns about being energy independent.

But, one of the biggest reasons for the recent shift is climate change.

Nuclear power is still crucial to the energy grid. It still generates about 20% of the U.S. electricity supply, and it’s the single largest non-fossil energy source in the U.S. and second globally. Advocates say nuclear is going to be essential in order to meet emission goals in the fight for climate change.

Nuclear is what’s known as a “firm” energy source, meaning it’s always able to meet demand and produce energy. Renewables, like wind and solar may also be clean, but they are limited by things like the weather or time of year. 

So, the infrastructure needed for solar and wind energy to match nuclear’s output just can’t be built fast enough to quickly replace both fossil fuels and nuclear. As a result, nuclear often just gets replaced by fossil fuels, which can be seen in cases from plant closures in New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and more.

There’s no easy solution when it comes to nuclear power. And as the country races to meet its emissions goals, it seems clear that existing nuclear power plants will be part of the strategy in some way.

Back in California at the Diablo Canyon plant, the governor announced last week plans to keep the plant open for another five to 10 years. The plant’s scheduled closing date was 2025. Gov. Newsom plans to use federal funds as a loan to The Pacific Gas & Electric company, which provides energy to millions of households in California, to keep the facility running.

The U.S. isn’t alone in rethinking the plant closures. Many parts of Europe are also rethinking nuclear energy — both as countries race to meet climate goals, and as they struggle with an energy crisis spurred on by the Russian invasion in Ukraine.

Some of these major sudden policy reversals could unfold as early as this fall.

Source: newsy.com

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Stocks Slip On Wall Street, Erasing Weekly Gains For S&P 500

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By Associated Press

and Newsy Staff
August 17, 2022

Pricey technology companies and retailers had some of the biggest losses. Utilities and energy stocks held up better than the broader market.

Stocks are moving broadly lower on Wall Street in afternoon trading Wednesday, led by drops in big technology companies and erasing the S&P 500’s gains for the week.

The S&P 500 fell 0.6% as of 2:07 p.m. Eastern. Trading has been choppy throughout the week as the benchmark index comes off a four-week winning streak.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 124 points, or 0.4%, to 34,025 and the Nasdaq fell 1.1%.

Small-company stocks fell more sharply than the rest of the market. The Russell 2000 fell 1.6%.

Pricey technology companies and retailers had some of the biggest losses. Utilities and energy stocks held up better than the broader market.

Wall Street was absorbing a mix of retail updates that showed inflation pressure continues to affect businesses and consumers, but also shows that spending remains strong.

Target fell 2.3% after reporting a nearly 90% plunge in second quarter profits as it was forced to slash prices to clear unwanted inventories. The retailer warned earlier this summer that it was canceling orders from suppliers and aggressively cutting prices because of a pronounced spending shift by Americans as the pandemic eased.

Children’s clothing and accessories chain Children’s Place fell 12.4% after reporting a surprise second-quarter loss as it faced supply chain problems and pressure from inflation.

Bond yields rose significantly. The yield on the 10-year Treasury rose to 2.89% from 2.81% late Tuesday.

Sales at U.S. retailers were unchanged last month, according to the Commerce Department, and economists had expected a slight increase in July. Part of the weakness came from a 1.8% drop in gas sales, reflecting lower prices at the pump.

Wall Street has been closely reviewing the latest economic data and corporate updates to get a better sense of how inflation is affecting businesses and consumers and whether the hottest inflation in 40 years is peaking or beginning to cool. Investors are also monitoring inflation to determine how much further central banks have to go in their fight against higher prices.

Britain’s inflation rate rose to a new 40-year high of 10.1% in July, a faster pace than in the U.S. and Europe as climbing food prices in the United Kingdom tightened a cost-of-living squeeze fueled by the soaring cost of energy. Inflation pressures prompted the Bank of England to boost its key interest rate by half a percentage point this month, the biggest of six consecutive increases since December.

The Federal Reserve has been raising interest rates in order to slow the economy and temper inflation, but investors remain concerned that it could hit the brakes too hard and send the economy into a recession. The Fed in July raised its benchmark interest rate by three-quarters of a point for a second-straight time. Wall Street will get more details on the process behind that decision when the Fed releases minutes from that meeting later Wednesday.

Additional reporting by The Associated Press.

Source: newsy.com

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Electric Cars Are Too Costly for Many, Even With Aid in Climate Bill

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Policymakers in Washington are promoting electric vehicles as a solution to climate change. But an uncomfortable truth remains: Battery-powered cars are much too expensive for a vast majority of Americans.

Congress has begun trying to address that problem. The climate and energy package passed on Sunday by the Senate, the Inflation Reduction Act, would give buyers of used electric cars a tax credit.

But automakers have complained that the credit would apply to only a narrow slice of vehicles, at least initially, largely because of domestic sourcing requirements. And experts say broader steps are needed to make electric cars more affordable and to get enough of them on the road to put a serious dent in greenhouse gas emissions.

would eliminate this cap and extend the tax credit until 2032; used cars would also qualify for a credit of up to $4,000.

With so much demand, carmakers have little reason to target budget-minded buyers. Economy car stalwarts like Toyota and Honda are not yet selling significant numbers of all-electric models in the United States. Scarcity has been good for Ford, Mercedes-Benz and other carmakers that are selling fewer cars than before the pandemic but recording fat profits.

Automakers are “not giving any more discounts because demand is higher than the supply,” said Axel Schmidt, a senior managing director at Accenture who oversees the consulting firm’s automotive division. “The general trend currently is no one is interested in low prices.”

Advertised prices for electric vehicles tend to start around $40,000, not including a federal tax credit of $7,500. Good luck finding an electric car at that semi-affordable price.

Ford has stopped taking orders for Lightning electric pickups, with an advertised starting price of about $40,000, because it can’t make them fast enough. Hyundai advertises that its electric Ioniq 5 starts at about $40,000. But the cheapest models available from dealers in the New York area, based on a search of the company’s website, were around $49,000 before taxes.

Tesla’s Model 3, which the company began producing in 2017, was supposed to be an electric car for average folks, with a base price of $35,000. But Tesla has since raised the price for the cheapest version to $47,000.

pass the House, would give buyers of used cars a tax credit of up to $4,000. The used-car market is twice the size of the new-car market and is where most people get their rides.

But the tax credit for used cars would apply only to those sold for $25,000 or less. Less than 20 percent of used electric vehicles fit that category, said Scott Case, chief executive of Recurrent, a research firm focused on the used-vehicle market.

The supply of secondhand vehicles will grow over time, Mr. Case said. He noted that the Model 3, which has sold more than any other electric car, became widely available only in 2018. New-car buyers typically keep their vehicles three or four years before trading them in.

SAIC’s MG unit sells an electric S.U.V. in Europe for about $31,000 before incentives.

New battery designs offer hope for cheaper electric cars but will take years to appear in lower-priced models. Predictably, next-generation batteries that charge faster and go farther are likely to appear first in luxury cars, like those from Porsche and Mercedes.

Companies working on these advanced technologies argue that they will ultimately reduce costs for everyone by packing more energy into smaller packages. A smaller battery saves weight and cuts the cost of cooling systems, brakes and other components because they can be designed for a lighter car.

“You can actually decrease everything else,” said Justin Mirro, chief executive of Kensington Capital Acquisition, which helped the battery maker QuantumScape go public and is preparing a stock market listing for the fledgling battery maker Amprius Technologies. “It just has this multiplier effect.”

$45 million in grants to firms or researchers working on batteries that, among other things, would last longer, to create a bigger supply of used vehicles.

“We also need cheaper batteries, and batteries that charge faster and work better in the winter,” said Halle Cheeseman, a program director who focuses on batteries at the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, part of the Department of Energy.

Gene Berdichevsky, chief executive of Sila Nanotechnologies, a California company working on next-generation battery technology, argues that prices are following a curve like the one solar cells did. Prices for solar panels ticked up when demand began to take off, but soon resumed a steady decline.

The first car to use Sila’s technology will be a Mercedes luxury S.U.V. But Mr. Berdichevsky said: “I’m not in this to make toys for the rich. I’m here to make all cars go electric.” 

A few manufacturers offer cars aimed at the less wealthy. A Chevrolet Bolt, a utilitarian hatchback, lists for $25,600 before incentives. Volkswagen said this month that the entry-level version of its 2023 ID.4 electric sport utility vehicle, which the German carmaker has begun manufacturing at its factory in Chattanooga, Tenn., will start at $37,500, or around $30,000 if it qualifies for the federal tax credit.

Then there is the Wuling Hongguang Mini EV, produced in China by a joint venture of General Motors and the Chinese automakers SAIC and Wuling. The car reportedly outsells the Tesla Model 3 in China. While the $4,500 price tag is unbeatable, it is unlikely that many Americans would buy a car with a top speed of barely 60 miles per hour and a range slightly over 100 miles. There is no sign that the car will be exported to the United States.

Eventually, Ms. Bailo of the Center for Automotive Research said, carmakers will run out of well-heeled buyers and aim at the other 95 percent.

“They listen to their customers,” she said. “Eventually that demand from high-income earners is going to abate.”

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Solving the Housing Crisis Means Building When No One Is Buying

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Last year, Freddie Mac estimated the nation’s housing supply deficit at 3.8 million units, up from 2.5 million in 2018. Other analysts come up with different figures, but pretty much everyone agrees that the country hasn’t been building nearly enough homes to keep up with demand, especially for middle and lower-income families. The failure to build those units is the single biggest contributor to the affordability crisis that in recent years has spread from a few coastal cities to a much larger swath of the country.

Sam Khater, Freddie Mac’s chief economist, said there was an irony to what’s happening right now: The Federal Reserve is trying to snuff out inflation by increasing interest rates, which is leading to a pullback in construction, which will make housing even less affordable down the road. In a sense, policymakers are solving the immediate cost-of-living crisis (inflation) by making the longer-run cost-of-living crisis (housing) even worse.

“It’s an unintended consequence,” Mr. Khater said.

The housing market has responded so quickly to the Fed’s actions because it is built on debt, making it ultrasensitive to interest rates. Builders borrow money to build new homes, then sell them to buyers who, for the most part, borrow 80 percent or more of the home’s cost. When banks pull back on credit by raising monthly borrowing costs, it causes buyers and builders to retreat for different versions of the same reason, which is the fear they will be left with property they can no longer afford and might be worth less than they paid for it to boot.

The slowdown in homebuilding wouldn’t have such a significant effect on the nation’s overall housing supply if builders could quickly adjust to demand, making up for the recessionary shortages during boom times. But they can’t: Housing is a hugely fragmented industry of mostly independent companies that includes developers that spend decades turning raw land into parcels that can be built upon and subcontractors that hire laborers by the hour. The system works fine when demand is strong, but deteriorates with even a modest sign of trouble and can take years to restart, creating a backlog that gets deeper each time building slows.

“It’s much easier to turn it off than to turn it on,” Mr. Palacios said.

The collapse of the housing market during the Great Recession put many smaller home builders out of business, and left the ones that survived extremely cautious. Housing starts cratered to 554,000 in 2009 from 2.1 million in 2005, then barely recovered, even as demand steadily grew. Only in the past couple years did developers finally start building at something close to their pre-bubble pace — only to slam on the brakes now that rates are rising.

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Pres. Biden Is Holding Off On Climate Emergency Declaration For Now

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On Wednesday, the president will announce other climate actions in Somerset, Massachusetts, but declaring an emergency won’t happen as of now.

President Joe Biden will travel to Massachusetts on Wednesday to promote new efforts to combat climate change, although he will not declare an emergency that would unlock federal resources to deal with the issue despite increasing pressure from climate activists and Democratic lawmakers.

The White House said Tuesday it has not ruled out issuing such a declaration later, which would allow the president to reroute funds to climate efforts without congressional approval. On Wednesday, President Biden will announce other new climate actions when he visits a former coal-fired power plant in Somerset, Massachusetts, which shuttered in 2017 but has since been reborn as an offshore wind power facility.

But since Sen. Joe Manchin hit pause on negotiations over climate spending and taxes last week, the public attention has shifted to a presidential emergency declaration and what the Biden administration could do with the newfound powers.

“It’s not on the table for this week,” Karine Jean-Pierre, White House press secretary, said of a climate emergency declaration. “We are still considering it. I don’t have the upsides or the downsides of it.”

The president has been trying to signal to Democratic voters that he’s aggressively tackling global warming at a time when some of his supporters have despaired about the lack of progress. He has pledged to push forward on his own in the absence of congressional action.

Declaration of a climate emergency would be similar to one issued by former President Donald Trump boosting construction of a southern border wall. It would allow Pres. Biden to redirect spending to accelerate renewable energy such as wind and solar power and speed the nation’s transition away from fossil fuels such as coal, oil and natural gas. The declaration also could be used as a legal basis to block oil and gas drilling or other projects, although such actions would likely be challenged in court by energy companies or Republican-led states.

The focus on climate action comes amid a heat wave that has seared swaths of Europe, with Britain reaching the highest temperature ever registered in a country ill-prepared for such weather extremes.

The typically temperate nation was just the latest to be walloped by unusually hot, dry weather that has triggered wildfires from Portugal to the Balkans and led to hundreds of heat-related deaths. Images of flames racing toward a French beach and Britons sweltering — even at the seaside — have driven home concerns about climate change.

The president vowed late last week to take robust executive action on climate after Sen. Manchin — who has wielded outsized influence on the president’s legislative agenda because of Democrats’ razor-thin majority in the Senate — hit the brakes on negotiations over proposals for new environmental programs and higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations.

One of the biggest backers of fossil fuels within the Democratic caucus, Sen. Manchin has blamed persistently high inflation for his hesitation to go along with another spending package. His resistance has enraged other congressional Democrats who have ramped up pressure on Pres. Biden to act on his own on climate.

“I think given the global crisis that we’re facing, given the inability of Congress to address this existential threat, I think the White House has got to use all of the resources and tools that they can,” Sen. Bernie Sanders, (I) VT, said. “That’s something that I’ve called for, a long time ago.”

Pres. Biden, who served in the Senate for more than three decades, “has been chained to the legislative process, thinking about his past as a senator,” Sen. Jeff Merkley, (D) OR, said at a news conference Monday night. “Now he’s unchained, and he has to go.”

John Podesta, board chairman of the liberal Center for American Progress and a former climate counselor for President Barack Obama, said environmental leaders met with senior White House officials on Friday to discuss policy ideas. Some proposals included ramping up regulations on vehicle emissions and power plants, reinstating a ban on crude oil exports and suspending new leases for oil drilling on federal lands and waters.

“If he’s going to make good on his commitments to do everything he can to bring emissions down, he’s got to pay attention to those critical regulatory issues that are facing him,” Podesta said.

Ben King, an associate director at independent research firm Rhodium Group, said the United States is “nowhere close” to meeting ambitious goals set by Pres. Biden for reducing emissions.

The president escalated the country’s emissions reduction target to at least 50% below 2005 levels by 2030. Under current policies in place at the federal and state level, the U.S. is on track to reach a reduction of 24% to 35%, according to the Rhodium Group’s latest analysis.

“Absent meaningful policy action, we’re far off track from meeting the goals that the U.S. is committed to under the Paris accord,” King said, referring to a 2015 global conference on addressing climate change.

Even as Democrats and environmental groups pushed the president to act on his own, some legal scholars questioned whether an emergency declaration on climate change is justified.

“Emergency powers are designed for events such as terrorist attacks, epidemics and natural disasters,’’ said Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the liberty and national security program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law.

Such powers “aren’t intended to address persistent problems, no matter how dire. And they aren’t meant to be an end-run around Congress,’’ Goitein wrote in a op-ed for The Washington Post last year.

Additional reporting by The Associated Press.

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Source: newsy.com

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High Inflation in June Puts Pressure on Interest Rates

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Prices surged 9.1 percent in June as consumers faced rapidly rising costs for gas, food and rent, a higher-than-expected reading and bad news for Americans at a moment when their wages are falling further behind the nation’s soaring cost of living.

The fresh Consumer Price Index report released on Wednesday contained particularly worrying signs for the Federal Reserve, providing evidence that price pressures are broad and stubborn in ways that may make them difficult to wrestle under control.

Overall, inflation is likely to moderate in July because gas prices have fallen this month — a gallon of regular gas hit an average of about $5 in June, and the cost is now hovering around $4.63. But fuel prices are volatile, making it impossible to know if today’s lower gas prices will last, and the report suggested that underlying inflation pressures remained intense.

raising interest rates since March in an effort to slow consumer and business demand, hoping to cool the economy and bring inflation back down. The central bank has sped up those rate moves as price increases have proved surprisingly stubborn, and the new inflation report spurred speculation that the Fed might turn even more aggressive.

Officials lifted rates by 0.75 percentage points in June, the biggest move since 1994, and had been expected to make a similarly sized move at its meeting in late July. But after the new inflation data, investors began to expect a percentage-point move, based on market pricing.

Fed officials themselves were hesitant to call for such a large move.

“My most likely posture is 0.75, because of the data I’ve seen,” Mary Daly, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, said in an interview Wednesday night. She explained that she had expected a high number, so the report did not sway her.

“I saw that data and thought: This wasn’t good news, wasn’t expecting good news,” she said.

Ms. Daly said she could see a situation in which a bigger, one-percentage-point increase would be possible should consumer inflation expectations move higher and consumer spending fail to slow down.

Loretta Mester, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, said on Bloomberg Television on Wednesday night that the new inflation report was “uniformly bad” and that there would be no reason to do less than the 0.75 points that the Fed approved in June. But she also suggested that she would watch incoming data and wait to see how the economy evolved before deciding whether an even larger move might be appropriate. The Fed’s next policy meeting is July 26-27.

Raphael Bostic, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, told reporters on Wednesday that “everything is in play,” but he, too, made it clear that he was “not wedded to any specific course of action.”

tipping the economy into a recession as it rapidly raises interest rates, because those increases might hit the brakes on the economy so hard that they jar businesses, prompting them to stop hiring and setting off a chain reaction in which households are left with less money to spend.

Stores including Target are already trying to sell off bloated inventories, which could allow retail prices to slow. Costs for goods including sporting equipment and televisions have already begun to cool.

But, for now, hints at and forecasts for a cool-down are likely to be insufficient comfort for economic policymakers when there is little sign in the data that any concerted pullback is kicking in.

“We have to be so humble about forecasting inflation,” said Blerina Uruci, an economist at T. Rowe Price, who does expect inflation pressures to fade. “We’ve just been so wrong, so consistently, in one direction.”

Reporting was contributed by Isabella Simonetti, Jim Tankersley, Emily Cochrane, Ana Swanson and Joe Rennison.

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