China Jawbones Coal Markets With Meaningless “Market Intervention” Headlines As It Becomes Desperate
What’s wrong with communism? The latest example comes from China, where central planners told state-owned energy companies to panic buy coal which sent prices to the moon. Now the communist government is battling market forces with meaningless headlines to jawbone prices lower.
Communism explained in 30 words:
Sept 30: China orders energy firms to “secure supplies at all costs”
Oct 19: China freaks out after energy firms secure supplies at record costs, Beijing threatens to intervene in market, arrest “colluders” pic.twitter.com/ZHZEcPlrcb
Just as thermal coal futures on the Zhengzhou Commodity Exchange catapulted to new heights, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), China’s top economic planner, announced in the Tuesday overnight Asian session that it has a plan to intervene in coal markets to halt the rally, according to Bloomberg.
The headlines were empty and meaningless. It may suggest that Beijing is running out of options to stymie the price rally ahead of the Northern Hemisphere winter, where national stockpiles of fossil fuels are at extremely low seasonal levels. NDRC said it would examine various measures to intervene in markets. It said it had a “zero tolerance” for market participants spreading fake news or conspiring with others to push prices higher.
Here’s NDRC’s most desperate headline:
“The current price increase has completely deviated from the fundamentals of supply and demand,” NDRC said in a statement published on WeChat.
Seriously? The reason prices are sky-high is because of supply and demand dynamics. The agency went on to say it “will study-specific measures to intervene in coal prices and promote the return of coal prices to a reasonable range,” adding that it would increase coal output to 12 million per day and give coal transportation through ports and railroads the highest priority.
Beijing even sent Vice Premier Han Zheng on China National Radio Tuesday to praise the “powerful measures to curb speculation and hoarding in energy markets.” Still, we have no idea how the communist government plans to intervene in markets – just jawboning markets at this point.
What caused the latest leg up in coal prices was when Beijing’s state-asset regulator last month ordered state-owned energy companies to acquire coal supplies at all costs. This forced coal prices higher and resulted in more power blackouts across the country.
China derives 50% of its power from coal. If prices continue to rise, local authorities will have to continue shutting down energy-intensive industries to protect the grid. In return, this will weigh on not just the domestic economy but also the global economy.
Central planners have already told state-owned mines in Yulin, a major coal hub in Shaanxi province, to reduce coal prices by 100 yuan per ton less than spot.
An analyst with Daiwa Capital Markets told clients in a note that favorable supply and demand dynamics suggest elevated coal prices will remain through winter. More or less, whatever Beijing has up its sleeves, could be uneventful in reigning in coal prices back to normal levels.
China has also taken additional steps to alleviate the energy crunch by allowing coal-fired power prices to fluctuate by up to 20%, enabling power plants to pass on more of the high costs of generation to commercial and industrial end-users.
The bottom line is that Beijing is throwing the proverbial “kitchen sink” to reign in coal prices with meaningless statements that may fail to arrest prices in the months ahead as supply and demand dynamics show central planning is the wrong way to manage an economy.
Eugene and David have blogged about a recent fiasco at Yale Law School. Here, I will focus on one of the most disconcerting elements of the incident. An administrator told the student:
“You’re a law student, and there’s a bar you have to take. So we think it’s really important to give you a 360 view.”
The implication here was not too subtle: apologize, or we will report you to the Character & Fitness committee of the bar.
Later, the administrator insisted that the Yale would not make a referral to the bar:
“We would never get on our letterhead and write anything to the bar about you. You may have been confused.”
Uh-huh. Confused. After the Washington Free Beacon story, Yale issued a statement:
“At no time was any disciplinary investigation launched or disciplinary action taken in this matter. While any person may report concerns about a lawyers’ character and fitness to the bar, the law school has a longstanding policy of reporting only formal disciplinary action to the Bar Association.”
I admire the student here who refused to cave to the school’s demands, even in the face of a character and fitness referral. But not all students may be able to exhibit such fortitude. Indeed, in most cases, there is no need to follow through on the threat. Merely hinting at the possibility of a referral will be enough to force a student to self-flagellate.
What can be done here?
First, the administrator’s position seems akin to extortion: the school would get its way through the threat of making a complaint, especially where that threat would never actually be followed through. Indeed, it may even be unethical for administrators who are members of the bar to use the threat of a bar referral to induce a law student to abjure his constitutional rights. These administrators may themselves be subject to disciplinary proceedings!
Second, it may be necessary to seek advisory opinions from state supreme courts and disciplinary committees about whether character & fitness referrals are appropriate for protected speech. Speech protected by the First Amendment should not be the basis for excluding someone from the bar. But if some bureaucrat decides that discipline is warranted, then the bar should be sued.
Third, Yale and other schools should formally instruct their administrators not to dangle the threat of a bar referral as a way to force students to self-cancel. A character and fitness referral should only be entertained after the full disciplinary process is completed. This arrow should be permanently removed from the associate dean quiver.
Finally, this incident illustrates why ABA Model Rule 8.4(g) should be fought even more vigorously. Generally, law students are subject to the same sorts of rules attorneys are subject to. The bar should not be weaponized to punish the freedom of speech.
If students at other schools have been subjected to a character-and-fitness extortion, please email me.
from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3BZgcZh
via IFTTT
Video has emerged of a teacher at a high school in Ohio talking about books and themes closely associated with so called ‘critical race theory’, despite previous promises to parents from officials that it wasn’t happening in the district’s schools.
The footage, apparently secretly recorded by a student at Franklin Woods Intermediate School, appears to show a teacher lecturing children about how not engaging in anti-racism activism means that Americans are enabling racism.
The teacher admits to being an ‘activist’ and points to the book “Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You”written by Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi, key figures in the CRT movement.
The teacher says “Some people might call it racist. It’s actually three categories, if you read the book ‘Stamped’ you’ll hear that there’s three areas. There’s anti-racist which is a person who works to end racism. An activist, someone who is active, and that’s what I was trying to be. I was reading books, I was going to rallies, I was trying to be in that group.”
The teacher continues, “Then there’s the opposite which is someone who is racist, who discriminates against people of a certain group and that sort of thing.”
“But then there’s the middle group,” the teacher continues, adding “A middle group is what most people are. Most people don’t actively work to end racism, and most people don’t work to be in the racist group. So most people are in that middle group, called an ‘assimilationist.’ An assimilationist doesn’t actively work to end it, and doesn’t work to be in the racist group.”
Watch:
These sixth graders are being taught that being race neutral is “assimilationist” and thus racist. This is another “anti-racist” activist teacher.
As noted in the original Twitter post, Superintendent Bill Wise previously assured parents on a Zoom school board meeting that CRT wasn’t being taught in Ohio schools:
It was recently revealed that the Biden government planned to target angry parents who have spoken out against critical race theory being taught to their children with anti-terrorism policies.
In the age of mass Silicon Valley censorship It is crucial that we stay in touch. We need you to sign up for our free newsletter here. Support our sponsor – Turbo Force – a supercharged boost of clean energy without the comedown. Also, we urgently need your financial support here.
WTI Holds Gains After 4th Straight Weekly Crude Build, Product Draws
Oil prices managed to hold on to gains today as supply concerns continued and falling temperatures in China revived concerns over whether the world’s biggest energy consumer can meet domestic heating needs (and Russia suggesting that it may not provide additional natural gas to European consumers amid an energy crunch in the region didn’t help the bear case across the energy complex). The global benchmark Brent closed above $85 a barrel for the first time since October 2018.
“Crude price volatility is here to stay as demand uncertainty remains elevated over the short-term,” said Ed Moya, senior market analyst at Oanda Corp.
“There is a lot of noise in all this morning’s headlines, but given the relentless winning streak, oil prices are ripe for significant rounds of profit-taking.”
U.S. crude stockpiles likely rose last week (for the 4th straight week), while distillate and gasoline stocks were expected to fall according to Reuters’ survey.
API
Crude +3.294mm (+2.25mm exp)
Cushing -2.5mm
Gasoline -3.5mm (-2.2mm exp)
Distillates -3.0mm (-2.4mm exp)
Crude inventories rose for the 4th straight week (slightly more than expected)…
Source: Bloomberg
WTI traded up to just below $83 intraday but was hovering around $82.25 ahead of the print and inched higher despite the crude build as product draws dominated.
As National Post reports, with temperatures falling as the Northern Hemisphere winter approaches and heating demand increasing, prices of oil, coal and natural gas are likely to remain elevated, traders and analysts said.
“Supply-demand balances show that the market is experiencing a supply deficit, which is spurring deep inventory draws and driving prices upwards,” said Louise Dickson, senior oil markets analyst at Rystad Energy.
“This market tightness is expected to extend into most of 2022, and crude oil demand will only catch up with crude supply by the fourth quarter of next year.”
Colder weather already has started to grip China, with close to freezing temperatures forecast for northern areas, according to AccuWeather.com.
Eugene and David have blogged about a recent fiasco at Yale Law School. Here, I will focus on one of the most disconcerting elements of the incident. An administrator told the student:
“You’re a law student, and there’s a bar you have to take. So we think it’s really important to give you a 360 view.”
The implication here was not too subtle: apologize, or we will report you to the Character & Fitness committee of the bar.
Later, the administrator insisted that the Yale would not make a referral to the bar:
“We would never get on our letterhead and write anything to the bar about you. You may have been confused.”
Uh-huh. Confused. After the Washington Free Beacon story, Yale issued a statement:
“At no time was any disciplinary investigation launched or disciplinary action taken in this matter. While any person may report concerns about a lawyers’ character and fitness to the bar, the law school has a longstanding policy of reporting only formal disciplinary action to the Bar Association.”
I admire the student here who refused to cave to the school’s demands, even in the face of a character and fitness referral. But not all students may be able to exhibit such fortitude. Indeed, in most cases, there is no need to follow through on the threat. Merely hinting at the possibility of a referral will be enough to force a student to self-flagellate.
What can be done here?
First, the administrator’s position seems akin to extortion: the school would get its way through the threat of making a complaint, especially where that threat would never actually be followed through. Indeed, it may even be unethical for administrators who are members of the bar to use the threat of a bar referral to induce a law student to abjure his constitutional rights. These administrators may themselves be subject to disciplinary proceedings!
Second, it may be necessary to seek advisory opinions from state supreme courts and disciplinary committees about whether character & fitness referrals are appropriate for protected speech. Speech protected by the First Amendment should not be the basis for excluding someone from the bar. But if some bureaucrat decides that discipline is warranted, then the bar should be sued.
Third, Yale and other schools should formally instruct their administrators not to dangle the threat of a bar referral as a way to force students to self-cancel. A character and fitness referral should only be entertained after the full disciplinary process is completed. This arrow should be permanently removed from the associate dean quiver.
Finally, this incident illustrates why ABA Model Rule 8.4(g) should be fought even more vigorously. Generally, law students are subject to the same sorts of rules attorneys are subject to. The bar should not be weaponized to punish the freedom of speech.
If students at other schools have been subjected to a character-and-fitness extortion, please email me.
from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3BZgcZh
via IFTTT
If you want insight into how challenging life has become for reporters in the Trump era, take a glance at the author’s note for The Bidens, the controversial new book about the president and his family by Politico reporter Ben Schreckinger.
No journalism is apolitical, but Schreckinger’s approach to investigating the first family is as close as you’ll find in the “moral clarity” era to old-school aspirations to objectivity. This book initially won love from the conservative press because Schreckinger brought the mainstream imprimatur of Politico to confirmation of some of the key emails in the infamous Hunter Biden laptop story. But that enthusiasm may have tailed off when reporters for those outlets read the book, which is also brutal in its treatment of figures like Rudy Giuliani, Lev Parnas, and Donald Trump; Schreckinger is an equal-opportunity offender.
In the author’s note, however, it’s clear Schreckinger is concerned about how the mere act of publishing damaging information about Joe Biden and his family members will be received. “We live in an age of distrust and of coordinated campaigns to manipulate public opinion,” he writes, adding: “Readers have every right to wonder whether an extended inquiry into the Biden family, emphasizing its finances, is just some instrument of a broader effort to create a political narrative.”
He goes on to reassure readers that that’s not what he’s up to, that he just believes “the best way to understand people in power, and subjects of international controversy, is to attempt a thorough, timely examination.” He then adds, in a note that reads like he’s saying, “You may be more receptive to these disquieting facts in a few years”:
Too often people interpret the news of the day through the lens of their own political sympathies, and a more nuanced understanding of our leaders emerges only much later, when political pressures have eased.
For these reasons, he has hope the reader can accept his “holistic” telling of the Bidens’ story, which turns out to be a far darker and freakier tale than conventional wisdom has yet conceded.
Schreckinger is young, and The Bidens was clearly written in a bit of a hurry, but he’s a skilled storyteller. The initial framing is clever, with a first first chapter titled, “Chekhov’s Laptop,” a reference to Russian playwright’s famous dictum that “if in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired.”
Having primed the reader to look for that metaphorical gun on the wall, he opens with a scene that’s bananas even by the outré standards of first son Hunter Biden’s “tumultuous” life. Hunter in October of 2018 had gotten in an argument with his then-girlfriend, Hallie, who according to the funhouse physics of the first family was of course the widow of his late brother Beau. In the course of that dispute, Hallie had taken his .38 revolver and thrown it out of Hunter’s pickup truck (a pickup truck?) into a trash can outside “Janssen’s, a high-end grocery store near Wilmington the family had long frequented.”
When Hunter found out the gun was gone, he chivalrously sent Hallie back into the trash to get it. This turns out to be the first of many moments in The Bidens where despite a seemingly tireless instinct for indulgent selfishness, and a maximally unattractive profile as the coddled scion of political privilege, one somehow feels bad for Hunter Biden. He’s not just a wreck, but a wreck with spectacularly bad luck. In this case, not only has his dead brother’s widow taken advantage of his trusting nature and thrown away his pistol (the one a person with his recreational leanings probably shouldn’t have anyway, but does, and moreover has left unattended), she picked the one bin that’s both across the street from a high school and in a spot where an old man hunting for recyclables somehow finds it.
Now the thing is missing and poor Hunter, who if nothing else has a keen sense of his own potential for disaster, must be imagining the worst, which in his family is likely a headline: Boy, 13, Uses Gun Registered to Dickhead Senator’s Son to Kill Parents, Neighbor, Dog, Self. The Delaware State Police are called, the FBI for some instantly suspicious reason also shows up, the Secret Service also reportedly appears at the store where Hunter bought the gun (I say reportedly because the Secret Service denies this, the first of many details in The Bidens that ends up receding in a fog of conflicting accounts), and the ATF even makes an appearance.
The gun was eventually found after a few days, when the old man turned it in. By that point Hunter had already skipped town and begun setting in motion a preposterous chain of events that have ramifications in national politics to the present day. Again as would be expected in the hallucinogenic tabloid logic that seems to govern all events in the Biden family, Hunter follows up the gun mess by going up to Newburyport, Massachusetts to clean himself up in the care of Keith Ablow, a Fox News personality who is “recognizable by his clean-shaven head” and had once accused Joe Biden of being drunk during a vice presidential debate with Paul Ryan.
This turns out to be a home rehab job with all the respectability of the Dr. Sonderborg’s Bay City dopehouse in Farewell My Lovely. Hunter goes skiing at Wachusett Mountain, practices yoga, gets IV vitamin infusions, and, no joke at all, goes to see a play called Crippled Inside about a middle-aged man who reflects on teenage years when his father, a powerful Justice Department official, “bailed him out of scrapes while playing politics in Washington.” Moved, Hunter ends up deciding to try to pull his life back together, resolving to spend more time at his daughter’s lacrosse games, get Lasik surgery, and get his finances under control (Schreckinger doesn’t specify the order of these resolutions). However, there’s a problem:
He had something on the order of twenty bank accounts, but his life was in such disarray that he did not have the log-in credentials to access many of them…
Hunter Biden’s life is one long accident, and he’s constantly leaving the scene of it. In one episode recounted later on, he follows up a crack rampage in L.A. by falling asleep at the wheel while driving east on I-10, leading him to jump a median strip at 80 m.p.h. and come to a halt facing oncoming traffic from the other direction. A tow truck leads him to a rental car, which he drives straight to Prescott, Arizona, leaving behind in the other vehicle a “crack pipe, a Delaware attorney general’s badge, and a Secret Service calling card.”
Similarly, Hunter ended up leaving Ablow’s care in such a rush that he left a laptop behind. It wasn’t that laptop, but this other laptop also ends up having a history, when the DEA raids Ablow a year later (people in Hunter Biden’s orbit end up arrested by federal agents with such uncanny predictability that his arrival in anyone’s life must be treated as divine warning). The feds seize that computer, only to turn it back over to Hunter “after a few weeks of haggling.” Schreckinger is careful to note the irony that a Donald Trump-controlled federal agency at one point both collected and surrendered one of Hunter’s laptops, unbeknownst to Steve Bannon, Rudy Giuliani and the other Trump agents who at the time were engaged in a ruthless private treasure-hunt for a different Hunter computer.
That latter story came about because, after leaving Newburyport, Hunter went on an “extended crack binge in Connecticut, holed up in seedy motels along I-95, in the company of prostitutes and drug dealers.” After this relapse, Hunter “briefly materialized” in Delaware, where in another Biden fog job he reportedly leaves three laptops with a man named John Paul Mac Isaac, and abandons those, too. It’s a few weeks after that, in May, 2019, that Joe Biden holds a kickoff rally for his presidential campaign in Philadelphia. Schreckinger writes: “Among the gathered Bidens, where Hunter should have been, sat a single, empty chair.”
That empty chair is the real Chekhovian gun. Hunter Biden’s absence, conspicuous enough that it’s mentioned in an ominous New Yorker article wonders in deadpan if the armed, cracksmoking Spaulding Smails of the Biden family might “jeopardize” his father’s run to the White House, ends up hanging over the campaign like a loaded weapon. According to literary convention, the gun must go off by the final chapter of The Bidens, and it does. As Schreckinger goes on to detail, the Hunter story isn’t an irrelevant subplot, either, but central to an important and deeply disturbing question America should be asking about who Joe Biden is.
Schreckinger does an excellent job using the old show-don’t-tell method of revealing through the Biden tale the bipartisan nature of corruption and favoritism in America. For instance, it turns out even Joe Biden’s most fanatical enemy after Trump, Giuliani, had once done a favor for Joe, giving Biden’s niece Missy a job as a legislative affairs staffer in Giuliani’s administration. This happened at the same time Biden was ripping Giuliani’s own presidential campaign rhetoric as limited to “a noun, a verb, and 9/11.”
More to the point, Giuliani ended up in his post-mayoral life supporting himself by doing what many American ex-politicians stoop to: whoring himself out to wealthy foreigners with legal problems or lobbying needs. Giuliani in this respect has proved virtually without boundaries when it comes to his willingness to serve the most disreputable clients around the world, but as Schreckinger notes, he was not alone in this. In fact, he and Hunter Biden ended up feeding from the same trough:
Hunter, meanwhile, had grown into something of a competitor with Giuliani in the lucrative market of well-connected Americans selling their legal services and political help to deep-pocketed foreigners. In one instance, the men were more like indirect collaborators.
In 2015, a fabulously wealthy Romanian businessman had hired Hunter to help fend off corruption charges in his home country. Hunter then pulled Louis Freeh, a former FBI director, into the effort to defend the businessman, who was eventually convicted. Freeh later brought on Giuliani to work for the same oligarch as they pressured Romanian authorities to ease up on the man.
The Bidens grew out of plan by Schreckinger to do a single profile of Hunter Biden for Politico, but it evolved into a book-length account of an epic chase tale, in which Donald Trump’s dirty lawyers and dirty lobbyists set off in pursuit of a remarkably similar set of characters in Joe Biden’s orbit.
The Biden half of this story isn’t merely about one wayward son with a drug problem. Schreckinger correctly identifies family and Catholicism as primary bonding agents in this political dynasty, and while the Biden clan is incredibly tightly knit, so much so that voters can sense it and relate to Biden because of it, the family also has a schismatic, Jeykyll/Hyde character. On the side symbolized by Joe and prodigal son Beau, they appear modest, down-to-earth, perhaps even ethical. On the other side, symbolized by son Hunter, the entrepreneurial brothers Jim and Frank, and others, they appear almost fanatical in their efforts to take financial advantage of the Biden name, while also cursed by horrific luck and a propensity for decisions that are almost mathematically perfect in their disastrousness, all of which became more and more problematic as Joe Biden heads up the ranks of power.
Modern Washington is Rome, and once you have a figure with a hold on high office — the White House is the ultimate, but a House or Senate committee will do very nicely too thankyou — it’s common for satellites to set up “consultancies” where petitioners to the King may empty their purses. As Schreckinger notes, the modern template was “Black, Stone, Manafort and Kelly—as in Roger Stone and Paul Manafort,” which had “mainstreamed the business of peddling influence in Washington on behalf of foreign clients.” Manafort and Stone’s firm made headlines in the late eighties, when a Philippine political party paid them a $950,000 retainer the day after George H.W. Bush beat Mike Dukakis, and when Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA rebels in Angola signed them as Washington representatives, joining a list of clients from places like Peru, Kenya, and Somalia. Domestically, Manafort earned a spot in the New York Times “Quotations of the Day” in 1989, when he testified to the House, after he and some partners in a New Jersey real estate deal received $31 million in federal housing money, that “I would stipulate that for the purposes of today, you could characterize this as influence peddling.”
Everyone in Washington knows this game, and the basic premise is the same on both sides of the aisle. Companies with ties to big-time politicians exist to be paid, and what “services” they offer in return is more of a TBD-type thing. Schreckinger details how Jim Biden, Joe’s brother, labored repeatedly to set up just such an operation, hoping to be “a sort of Democratic answer” to Black, Stone, Manafort and Kelly. At one point he teamed up with former Mississippi State auditor Steve Patterson, who’d worked for Joe’s first presidential campaign, along with famed tobacco lawyer Dickie Scruggs and another attorney, Timothy Balducci. Although Jim wasn’t a lawyer, his wife Sara was, and, as The Bidens notes, she was to be a partner in the new enterprise.
As it happened, the firm never got off the ground because Patterson, Balducci, and Scruggs ended up convicted in a scheme to bribe a judge in a dispute over $26.5 million in legal fees over Hurricane Katrina litigation. They, too, were hit by the Biden Curse, an inerrant phenomenon that uses a gravity-like force to pull would-be Biden partners into federal custody.
The thing about this kind of business, however, is that it’s highly portable, and following the trail of the various efforts to open a cash register in front of Joe Biden’s political career is where Schreckinger does his best work. The Bidens earned early press mainly for a few passages about the Hunter Biden laptop story, but for my money its biggest score comes at the outset of a chapter called “The Bidens Go Global,” describing a scene involving another attempted family enterprise, a hedge fund called “Paradigm Global Advisors.”
Schreckinger quotes a former chief compliance officer for the firm, which had been sold to the Bidens by James Park, who naturally is the son of a former bigwig in the Unification Church of billionaire Sun Myung Moon. The officer recounts a day in 2006 when Jim and Hunter Biden showed up and began beating their chests about the future:
Jim had a plan. “Don’t worry about investors,” he told the executive that day. “We’ve got people all around the world who want to invest in Joe Biden.” In case the chief compliance officer did not get the picture, Jim painted it more vividly for him: “We’ve got investors lined up in a line of 747s filled with cash ready to invest in this company.”
This compliance officer also detailed declining offers of cocaine parties with Hunter and Park (“I figured that wasn’t right for a compliance officer to be doing”) and recounted an incident in which a “succession of firefighters” entered the office announcing, in a scene that sounds straight out of The Sopranos, “We’re friends of Joe, and we want to invest in the fund.” Schreckinger got a similar comment on the record from Chuck Provini, a more experienced investment professional the family reportedly wanted to bring in to serve as the non-Biden face of the firm.
“Joe Biden needs to distance himself from this,” Provini says Jim and Hunter told him, adding that, “I was told because of his relationships with the unions that they felt as though it would be favorably looked upon to invest in the fund.”
There’s also a scene in there when the compliance officer describes how, after balking when Hunter tries to take $21,000 out of the company’s coffers to make a mortgage payment, Hunter pleads, “But I’m going to lose my home.” Here again the Biden fog rolls in, however, as a lawyer representing Jim and Hunter Biden denies that this scene and some of the compliance officer’s other stories ever happened. Even the on-the-record source Provini ended up first suing, then settling with the Bidens over an allegation that he was stiffed out of salary, so that has to be taken into account. But a pattern over time emerges, and it’s hard to ignore, especially when it comes to the later, more successful family business, beginning with Rosemont Seneca Partners.
Rosemont Seneca was the brainchild of Hunter, John Kerry’s stepson Chris Heinz, and James Bulger, son of Billy Bulger, better known to Massholes like Schreckinger and myself as the Bulger Brother who wasn’t the Winter Hill Gang leader that inspired Jack Nicholson’s character in The Departed. (The more faithful screen depiction of the Bulger family saga is the set-in-Providence drama Brotherhood starring Jason Isaacs and Jason Clarke, but I digress). By the time you reach the part of the story where Hunter is trying to get into business with a Bulger, the humor factor has already gone past 11, as Biden’s son’s list of professional partners reads like an exhibit list for Madame Tussaud’s old “Chamber of Horrors.”
Hunter not only goes into business with a famed mobster’s namesake (Whitey’s given name was also James) and buys into a hedge fund whose chief investors are Moonies, he registers a new fund with the SEC with Allen Stanford, better known as the second most famous Ponzi schemer in modern American history. He also seeks out a partnership with financier John Burnham, because Hunter and pal Devon Archer had a dream — no joke — of resurrecting Burnham and Company, the remnant of the Drexel Burnham Lambert investment bank made infamous by junk bond king Mike Milken.
Archer, incidentally, will also end up nabbed by the Biden Curse, arrested after he and a financier named Jason Galanis cooked up a Jack Abramoff-esque scheme to finance the Drexel dream using bonds issued by the Oglala Sioux Native American tribe. “This is pure genius a la Mikey Milken! The native American bonds!” one participant in the affair wrote to Galanis, copying Archer on the email.
The pair ended up accused of defrauding the tribe out of $60 million. Archer was convicted, then had his conviction overturned by a judge named Ronnie Abrams, whom Schreckinger describes as “an Obama nominee and a trustee at Dalton, one of the nation’s most prestigious private schools.” Archer getting off prompted peeved prosecutors to take a second look at the whole case. They began then to be interested in some of Hunter Biden’s transactions, particularly “unrelated foreign payments” that looked like money laundering, only to learn that numerous authorities, from the IRS criminal division to the FBI, were already digging into Hunter for everything from the aforementioned “potential money laundering” to “FARA violations, tax violations, and counterintelligence concerns,” the latter among other things involving payments made to “eastern European women.”
Jim and Hunter’s dreams of a windfall from Chinese oil connections began to wilt when another would-be partner, Ye’s right-hand man Patrick Ho, was Biden-cursed, arrested under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, allegedly for passing bribes to officials in Chad and Uganda in exchange for oil rights. Ye’s first call after arrest was to Jim, his lawyer, and Hunter’s law firm, Owasco, was wired $1 million for Ho’s representation. Meanwhile, Ye vanished, reportedly detained by Chinese authorities, among other things after the Financial Times reported that his company, CEFC, had ties to Chinese military intelligence. As Schreckinger put it, “Hunter’s big Chinese score had gone up in smoke.”
Hunter around this time was also fathering a child with a former Arkansas State basketball player named Alexis Lunden Roberts, who naturally was paying her way through grad school at George Washington University working as a stripper. By that time, he had also reached the stage of crack addiction where, to head off the possibility of supply ever running out, it becomes necessary to move in with one’s dealer, in this case a homeless woman named “Bicycles.”
Hunter at one point was trying to make payments on a $1.6 million home and fighting one of the most ravenous addictions in the history of crack while his father was Vice President, which admittedly can’t be easy. (Again, Schreckinger manages to tell Hunter Biden’s story in way that’s remorseless while also eliciting a curious sympathy). Where it gets weird is the question of how all of this intersects with Joe Biden. In a key section of the book, Schreckinger details the flirtation between the Bidens and a Chinese businessman named Ye Jianming and his CEFC oil conglomerate. Joe Biden is in Los Angeles to give a speech about his cancer initiative to the Milken conference, the creation of sort-of-rehabilitated Mike Milken:
The night before his appearance, Joe met with Hunter, Jim, and Tony Bobulinski, another partner in [a] planned LNG venture, according to Bobulinksi, who said that in the course of their conversation, Joe showed familiarity with his relatives’ business plans…
On May 13, another partner in the venture emailed Hunter, Bobulinski, and a fourth partner, outlining their plans for compensation. The partner wrote of “a provisional agreement that the equity will be distributed as follows.” The breakdown indicated that “H” and the three other partners would get 20 percent each, along with 10 for “Jim” and, finally, “10 held by H for the big guy?”
Schreckinger says “a person with independent access” to this email confirmed its authenticity to him, making it one of several ways he verified material in Hunter’s infamous laptop. In another portion of the book, Schreckinger discusses Hunter’s offices in Washington’s House of Sweden, which is owned by the Swedish government. “Hunter instructed the building manager to have keys to the office made up for both of his parents, for Jim, and for Gongwen Dong, an associate of Ye’s,” Schreckinger writes.
He explains that he verified the House of Sweden correspondence using the Swedish version of the Freedom of Information law, good thinking that leads to another good get. The correspondence yielded head-slapping exchanges showing the House of Sweden complaining about Roberts and a woman fitting the description of Bicycles bypassing security by using a back entrance, reminding Hunter that the building contains both the Swedish and Icelandic embassies.
Hunter somewhat hilariously responds both by playing the race card — “if [a Sweden House employee] has an issue with the race or dress of my visitors I think we should all sit down and discuss with an attorney present” — and by name-dropping, noting that Roberts “worked out with Maisy and Sasha Obama when they played in rec league together.” Of course, when Roberts sued Hunter Biden for paternity, he at first denied ever having sex with her, but lost the case after paternity was established. Moreover, the relevant House of Sweden correspondence came in September of 2017, and the child was born the following August. This demonstrates, as Schreckinger notes, that Hunter Biden’s story suggesting a single, forgotten meeting — “I had no recollection of our encounter” — can’t be correct, as the relationship had to have gone on for a few months at least.
None of this is particularly relevant to anything, except that Schreckinger’s success in landing the Swedish emails end up as important confirmation of emails on the infamous laptop. As noted in an interview on Useful Idiots, Schreckinger also never tried to verify a Hunter Biden email and got a negative response, though of course this is not proof that all of the laptop material is genuine.
When the laptop story first broke in the New York Post before the election last year, it was almost universally dismissed by credentialed mainstream reporters as Russian disinformation, including by Politico in a story by Natasha Bertrand. This continues to be underrated as was one of the more infamous episodes in the recent history of both the news media and the tech industry (both Facebook and Twitter initially blocked access to the story). The Biden White House continues, with impressive brazenness, to stick to last year’s narrative. White House spokesperson Jen Psaki recently offered a classically Ron Ziegleresque non-denial denial — “I think it’s broadly known and widely known that there was a broad range of Russian disinformation back in 2020” — in response to a question prompted by Schreckinger’s book about the laptop story’s accuracy.
However, other mainstream outlets have now mostly dropped the pretense that the emails are fake, and that’s in large part down to this one writer’s efforts to move the story forward, an accomplishment that may at some point prove important in helping restore some credibility for the press.
Schreckinger doesn’t try to punch above his evidence, and concedes in multiple places that he hasn’t produced smoking-gun evidence tying “the big guy” to Hunter’s myriad cash flows. However, he’s also sensitive enough to the weird rhythms of the Biden family to grasp that the overall circumstantial picture is damning.
In particular, Biden’s insistence that “I have never discussed, with my son or my brother or with anyone else, anything having to do with their businesses,” is simply not believable after reading this book, not just because there is witness and documentary evidence directly contradicting him, but because the family does appear to be just as close as it claims. The fact that Biden participated, and continues to participate, in a shameless scheme to deflect attention and squelch inquiry by characterizing these true stories as Russian disinformation adds to the pile of evidence against him.
At minimum, Jim and Hunter Biden spent years setting up companies to be receptacles of “747s filled with cash” from people around the world they believed would be anxious to invest in the Biden name. The possibilities from there for Joe Biden range from merely dishonest acceptance of his family’s influence-peddling to things far worse. In a normal media environment, there would be dozens of journalists lining up to build on Schreckinger’s good start, to try to flesh out the part of this story that’s still lost in fog. However, there’s a cost of writing this sort of book now that comes in the form of not being invited to the usual Manhattan green-room publicity tour, and being frozen out of other opportunities. Will other reporters be willing to pay it?
I asked Schreckinger about these and other questions on Useful Idiots with Katie Halper. A few excerpts:
Matt Taibbi: How long did the book take to write, and what were you trying to accomplish?
Ben Schreckinger: As I put in the Author’s Note, this is not the end of the Biden story. This is not the Robert Caro treatment of Lyndon Baines Johnson. A lot of these episodes are ambiguous, there’s conflicting evidence. I’m expecting our understanding of a lot of these episodes, especially the more recent ones having to do with Hunter Biden to continue to evolve. That’s definitely a tricky and a treacherous thing to be doing, trying to write a book-length treatment of something as events are still unfolding. I wanted it to come out in a timely way, and I think that it has.
MT: The “747s full of cash” line is amazing. What was going through your head during that interview?
Ben Schreckinger: In the process of reporting out the Paradigm episode for the first time, for that first Politico story, one of the first people I was able to reach was an executive, the former chief compliance officer of the firm who’s cited at length. He said, “You know, yeah, Jimmy Biden showed up on the first day and said, ‘Don’t worry about investments. We got people around the world who want to put money behind Joe Biden.’” Joe Biden was then the ranking member on Senate Foreign Relations and the idea was, well, if you’re a deep-pocketed foreign interest, you can’t give money legally to a Joe Biden Senate or presidential campaign, but you could invest in this firm.
By all appearances, that didn’t end up working out. They don’t seem to actually succeed in landing these sorts of investments, but that was striking. To not have a deep understanding of the family’s business dealings and for one of the first people you reach to be an executive who says, “Oh yeah, this is what happened. This is what Jimmy Biden said on the first day.” It was like, wow.
MT: And this was one of the first people you’d called, correct?
Ben Schreckinger: At the outset of the reporting, it’s like, “What am I to make of this?” This is not some random crank who’s coming to me. It’s not someone who’s being shopped to me by some political operative. This is, let me look up who was at this firm 10 years ago, start calling the top executives, reaching out to them, and this was one of the first people I reached. You’d be much more wary of that if someone were approaching you with that information. When you approach someone else and that’s what they say, it puts you back on your back heels a little bit… Then having reported out 10 or so other episodes since that, it makes more sense.
MT: You have a chapter called the “Delaware Way.” What is the “Delaware Way”?
Ben Schreckinger: It’s sort of this double edged sword where Joe Biden and his aides are saying, “Yeah, the Delaware Way is what Joe Biden is offering to this country. It’s bipartisan, it’s less acrimonious. We’re all going to sit around a table and make a deal, and that’s what’s best for the country.”
But in Delaware for a lot of people, the Delaware Way has a very negative connotation, and essentially means cronyism. There’s a prosecutor, who happens to be the prosecutor who’s investigating Hunter Biden right now, who in a different case where he’s putting away a Biden campaign bumbler for making illegal straw man donations, he defines the Delaware Way as a form of soft corruption. It’s like a Rorschach, Rashomon thing: is the Delaware Way good or bad? I think it’s fascinating.
For more from our interview with Schreckinger, visit UsefulIdiots.Substack.Com and click here.
In the summer of 2019, a Georgia man overdosed and died. Over two years later, a different man has been convicted of felony murder and sentenced to life in prison for selling the drugs that led to that demise.
The conviction is the first of its kind for Gwinnett County, which covers part of Atlanta, with local prosecutors saying that they’re gunning for more after ensuring that Eric Denver Moore, who sold the deadly cocktail to Barth Moser, will face life in prison.
Moser purchased what he thought was heroin. He got something else: a concoction of heroin mixed with fentanyl, another opioid 50 times stronger than the former. Though Moser complained to Moore that the drug looked “green,” he ultimately took it and didn’t survive.
Moore’s conviction balances some competing interests: a ratcheting up of the drug war and a desire to crack down on fraud, as the county zeroes in on people who sold substances marketed purely as one thing when they were actually laced with another.
At least, that’s the strategy for now. “The law says that we can pursue any drug dealers who sell drugs that cause an overdose and death. Currently, we’re choosing to focus on ones that involve some element of deception,” says Brandon Delfunt, deputy chief district attorney for Gwinnett County and the managing attorney of the Gwinnett Drug and Gang Task Force. “We’re starting that way to see how it goes and see how our community responds to it….We may expand.”
We should all worry about such an expansion.
The law in question is the felony murder rule, which allows the state to bring homicide charges against those who didn’t technically commit murder if the death was somehow associated with the commission of a different felony. Governments have contorted the law in some impressive ways as of late: There was the recent case in which a cop killed another cop with his car while responding to what may have been a mental health crisis. In response, the prosecutor charged Jenna Holm, the woman those officers were there to help, with manslaughter. (An Idaho judge recently struck the charge down as unconstitutional, though only after Holm spent around 18 months in jail on $100,000 bond.)
Moore’s prosecution may be yet another contortion, depending on who you ask and depending on where such offenses take place. “The crime is complete once the delivery takes place, meaning that anything that happens afterward is beyond the scope of the crime in a way,” says Brian McNeil, a senior assistant public defender in York County, Pennsylvania, who has represented clients accused of drug-induced homicide. “That would probably cause problems in a lot of jurisdictions.”
Even still, the state’s pursuit of Moore and his ultimate conviction aren’t necessarily beyond the pale. “You’re going outside of the garden variety…situation, where the actual conduct on the part of the defendant is more than just consummating a drug deal,” adds McNeil. “I’m not sure how much of a difference it makes as far as the way that the statutes are drafted, which is part of the problem. If they were limited in a way to something deceptive like that, I think some of these prosecutions would be less egregious. The problem is that they’re not.”
McNeil notes that it is possible Moore didn’t realize the drug was contaminated. “I don’t think that’s out of the realm of possibility that someone who passed off the drug to the ultimate end user would be unaware of the precise content,” he says. But Moore’s conviction doesn’t exactly shock the conscience at first glance.
The problem is that there are plenty such prosecutions that would, and do, shock the conscience—a phenomenon that is not confined to the greater Atlanta area.
Consider Mitchell Peck Jr. He was convicted of drug delivery resulting in death and sentenced to 20 to 40 years in prison for selling heroin to his friend, who later overdosed and died in late 2014. McNeil, who represented Peck, notes that such prosecutions are becoming increasingly common in Pennsylvania even as the concept itself is still a fairly novel one.
As both Delfunt and McNeil note, the statutes are indeed broad, and pave the way for abuses that verge on the fantastical. Emma Semler was convicted of distribution of heroin resulting in death after her friend Jenny Werstler asked that she get heroin to celebrate her birthday. The two shot up together in a KFC bathroom, with Semler, then a teen, leaving the building alive after Werstler experienced a fatal overdose. She was sentenced to 21 years in prison, though a federal court overturned that conviction earlier this year and called for a new trial.
“I’m personally aware of a fair number of cases where…one user [was] literally handing drugs to another user over the course of a joint using session,” says McNeil, “and then one person dies and one person doesn’t.” Such cases can now bring decades-long prison terms, as if physically passing off a drug constitutes a “delivery” any more than handing someone a bottle of strong liquor makes them culpable in any resulting alcohol poisoning. And while the substances involved in these cases are clearly illegal, whereas alcohol is not, it bears mentioning that drug prohibition and the ensuing black markets are a direct cause behind why laced drugs and harder versions of already-harmful substances proliferate in the first place. If safety is the goal here, then a different approach is required.
“If the goal is to better protect people from tragic consequences that’s not what these laws are doing. We have to turn to harm reduction solutions that have proven effective and reject those that haven’t worked,” says Grey Garner, senior staff attorney at the Drug Policy Alliance. “Incarceration of users and low level sellers has never effectively deterred people from using substances, significantly disrupted markets, or prevented overdoses. What they have done is make people less safe, exacerbated inequity, and diverted taxpayer funds that would be far better spent on drug checking and disease prevention.”
Whether or not Moore deserves to spend the rest of his natural life in prison is a matter of debate. Perhaps he does, perhaps he doesn’t. But the same levers used to prosecute him are implicating a slew of others across the U.S. whose crimes don’t merit the attached punishments. For its part, Gwinnett County says it will only focus on the Moores of the world and not the Semlers—for now.
from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3lXrDuO
via IFTTT
In the summer of 2019, a Georgia man overdosed and died. Over two years later, a different man has been convicted of felony murder and sentenced to life in prison for selling the drugs that led to that demise.
The conviction is the first of its kind for Gwinnett County, which covers part of Atlanta, with local prosecutors saying that they’re gunning for more after ensuring that Eric Denver Moore, who sold the deadly cocktail to Barth Moser, will face life in prison.
Moser purchased what he thought was heroin. He got something else: a concoction of heroin mixed with fentanyl, another opioid 50 times stronger than the former. Though Moser complained to Moore that the drug looked “green,” he ultimately took it and didn’t survive.
Moore’s conviction balances some competing interests: a ratcheting up of the drug war and a desire to crack down on fraud, as the county zeroes in on people who sold substances marketed purely as one thing when they were actually laced with another.
At least, that’s the strategy for now. “The law says that we can pursue any drug dealers who sell drugs that cause an overdose and death. Currently, we’re choosing to focus on ones that involve some element of deception,” says Brandon Delfunt, deputy chief district attorney for Gwinnett County and the managing attorney of the Gwinnett Drug and Gang Task Force. “We’re starting that way to see how it goes and see how our community responds to it….We may expand.”
We should all worry about such an expansion.
The law in question is the felony murder rule, which allows the state to bring homicide charges against those who didn’t technically commit murder if the death was somehow associated with the commission of a different felony. Governments have contorted the law in some impressive ways as of late: There was the recent case in which a cop killed another cop with his car while responding to what may have been a mental health crisis. In response, the prosecutor charged Jenna Holm, the woman those officers were there to help, with manslaughter. (An Idaho judge recently struck the charge down as unconstitutional, though only after Holm spent around 18 months in jail on $100,000 bond.)
Moore’s prosecution may be yet another contortion, depending on who you ask and depending on where such offenses take place. “The crime is complete once the delivery takes place, meaning that anything that happens afterward is beyond the scope of the crime in a way,” says Brian McNeil, a senior assistant public defender in York County, Pennsylvania, who has represented clients accused of drug-induced homicide. “That would probably cause problems in a lot of jurisdictions.”
Even still, the state’s pursuit of Moore and his ultimate conviction aren’t necessarily beyond the pale. “You’re going outside of the garden variety…situation, where the actual conduct on the part of the defendant is more than just consummating a drug deal,” adds McNeil. “I’m not sure how much of a difference it makes as far as the way that the statutes are drafted, which is part of the problem. If they were limited in a way to something deceptive like that, I think some of these prosecutions would be less egregious. The problem is that they’re not.”
McNeil notes that it is possible Moore didn’t realize the drug was contaminated. “I don’t think that’s out of the realm of possibility that someone who passed off the drug to the ultimate end user would be unaware of the precise content,” he says. But Moore’s conviction doesn’t exactly shock the conscience at first glance.
The problem is that there are plenty such prosecutions that would, and do, shock the conscience—a phenomenon that is not confined to the greater Atlanta area.
Consider Mitchell Peck Jr. He was convicted of drug delivery resulting in death and sentenced to 20 to 40 years in prison for selling heroin to his friend, who later overdosed and died in late 2014. McNeil, who represented Peck, notes that such prosecutions are becoming increasingly common in Pennsylvania even as the concept itself is still a fairly novel one.
As both Delfunt and McNeil note, the statutes are indeed broad, and pave the way for abuses that verge on the fantastical. Emma Semler was convicted of distribution of heroin resulting in death after her friend Jenny Werstler asked that she get heroin to celebrate her birthday. The two shot up together in a KFC bathroom, with Semler, then a teen, leaving the building alive after Werstler experienced a fatal overdose. She was sentenced to 21 years in prison, though a federal court overturned that conviction earlier this year and called for a new trial.
“I’m personally aware of a fair number of cases where…one user [was] literally handing drugs to another user over the course of a joint using session,” says McNeil, “and then one person dies and one person doesn’t.” Such cases can now bring decades-long prison terms, as if physically passing off a drug constitutes a “delivery” any more than handing someone a bottle of strong liquor makes them culpable in any resulting alcohol poisoning. And while the substances involved in these cases are clearly illegal, whereas alcohol is not, it bears mentioning that drug prohibition and the ensuing black markets are a direct cause behind why laced drugs and harder versions of already-harmful substances proliferate in the first place. If safety is the goal here, then a different approach is required.
“If the goal is to better protect people from tragic consequences that’s not what these laws are doing. We have to turn to harm reduction solutions that have proven effective and reject those that haven’t worked,” says Grey Garner, senior staff attorney at the Drug Policy Alliance. “Incarceration of users and low level sellers has never effectively deterred people from using substances, significantly disrupted markets, or prevented overdoses. What they have done is make people less safe, exacerbated inequity, and diverted taxpayer funds that would be far better spent on drug checking and disease prevention.”
Whether or not Moore deserves to spend the rest of his natural life in prison is a matter of debate. Perhaps he does, perhaps he doesn’t. But the same levers used to prosecute him are implicating a slew of others across the U.S. whose crimes don’t merit the attached punishments. For its part, Gwinnett County says it will only focus on the Moores of the world and not the Semlers—for now.
from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3lXrDuO
via IFTTT
The Biden administration believes that private companies and markets are not effectively pricing into their calculations the effects of man-made climate change on housing, stocks and bonds, physical assets, crop yields, and fire risks. Consequently, President Joe Biden has issued Executive Order 14030 on Climate-Related Financial Risk.
Pursuant to that executive order, Biden’s National Economic Council published A Roadmap to Build a Climate-Resilient Economy. The Roadmap is necessary, asserts the council, because “Wall Street financial models and investment portfolios that manage the assets of millions of Americans continue to rely on the basic assumption that climate will be stable.” The report outlines a “climate risk accountability framework” with the aim of “safeguarding the U.S. financial system against climate-related financial risk by holding financial institutions accountable for properly measuring, disclosing, managing, and mitigating climate-related financial risks.” That emphasis is in the original.
But are Wall Street and other investors blithely assuming a stable climate? Actually, no. There is plenty of evidence that portfolio managers, bond markets, businesses, farmers, and shareholders are taking the effects of climate change into account when planning their investments. On the other hand, government interference in markets is slowing financial and infrastructure adaptation to the risks of climate change.
For example, a March 2021 report on climate change and asset prices by researchers at the private investment firm Dimensional Fund Advisors outlines how various market actors are responding to the risks posed by climate change. That report cites a 2020 study that found that counties and municipalities with greater exposure to sea level rise must pay higher yields on their long term bonds. A 2019 study reported that houses exposed to sea level rise “sell for approximately 7% less than observably equivalent unexposed properties equidistant from the beach.” Another 2019 study parsing trends in the Chicago Mercantile Exchange weather futures contracts concluded, “the evidence shows that financial markets fully incorporate climate model projections.” The authors of that study added, “at least so far, climate models have been very accurate in predicting the average warming trend that’s been observed across the US. When money is on the line, it is hard to find parties willing to bet against the scientific consensus.”
The Dimensional report also references a 2019 Swiss Finance Institute study that found that since the 2015 adoption of the Paris Climate Change Agreement, banks around the world have been increasing the rates they charge fossil fuel companies for their loans. Their concern is that the transition to no-carbon energy supplies risks making the reserves of coal, natural gas, and petroleum worthless. “Overall, a growing body of evidence shows that prices across many different markets (stocks, bonds, climate futures, equity options, and real estate) incorporate information about climate risk,” conclude the Dimensional researchers.
The Biden Roadmap approves of moves at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to develop a mandatory disclosure rule for publicly traded companies that would supposedly “bring greater clarity to investors about the material risks and opportunities that climate change poses to their investments.” This SEC effort is mostly a following indicator since an increasing number of companies are already disclosing that sort of information. Earlier this year, Bloomberg Lawreported that 342 of the companies in the S&P 500 mentioned greenhouse gases and climate change in their 2020 annual reports and 220 of them specifically addressed the risks that climate change poses to their businesses. Even the fossil fuel giant ExxonMobil began listing climate change as a risk factor to its businesses starting with its 2006 annual report. If investors and fund managers demand information, companies, however reluctantly, will supply it.
The Roadmap also observes that the risks stemming from hurricanes and wildfires are already disrupting the ability of local banks, insurance companies, and other institutions to serve particular communities. At the same time that private entities are adjusting their investment strategies to a changing climate, government programs are actually hindering the market signals that could spur people and businesses to adapt faster and more wisely to climate change. This is particularly true of government insurance programs like the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) and the Federal Crop Insurance Corporation.
The NFIP was conjured into existence by Congress in 1968 after private insurance companies had concluded that home and business owners simply would not pay the premiums needed to cover the losses of people who built on floodplains and along low lying coasts. The upshot is that the federal government has been subsidizing people to build, live, and work in areas subject to predictably dangerous and damaging flooding. Over the past 50 years, the NFIP has collected $60 billion in premiums, but has paid $96 billion in costs. In its new housing bill, the Democratic Congressional majority proposed in September to wipe away the $20.5 billion the NFIP borrowed from the U.S. Treasury to cover its losses.
The Biden Roadmap cites the recent implementation of the NFIP’s Risk Rating 2.0 that aims to achieve rates that are more actuarially sound and equitable while better reflecting and pricing a property’s flood risk. While raising flood insurance premiums is a step in the right direction, a study by the First Street Foundation earlier this year calculated that even after adopting Risk Rating 2.0, the NFIP would have to increase its rates by 4.5 times to cover the estimated flooding risk of the properties it insures in 2021. In other words, the federal government is still subsidizing people to build, live, and work in areas where the warming climate increases the risks of inland flooding, sea level rise and hurricane damage.
The Biden Roadmap also observes that climate change is increasing the risks to houses and people from ever more extensive wildfires. For example, an August 2020 study in Environmental Research Lettersfound that since 1979, a combination of rising temperatures and falling average precipitation has increased the likelihood of extreme autumn wildfire conditions across California. A recent study by the Milliman consultancy calculated that insurance companies lost a total of $20 billion in covering the losses from the devastating wildfires in 2017 and 2018 in California, twice the industry’s profits since 1991.
As wildfire risks have increased in California, private insurance companies have been seeking to raise their rates or drop coverage for especially risky properties. However, state regulators have banned them from doing so. The state has also stepped in with its Fair Access to Insurance Requirements Plan to provide bare bones fire insurance coverage when private insurers pull out. This is another example of how governments are encouraging people to ignore the rising risks associated with climate change.
The Roadmap suggests that increasingly severe heatwaves and droughts are already harming agricultural production. Heatwave intensity and duration in the contiguous United States has indeed been increasing over the past 50 years, but is still well below the hellish levels experienced in the 1930s. With respect to droughts in the lower 48 states, the last 50 years have been a bit wetter than the 120-year average.
On the other hand, in September a team of researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued a report analyzing the weather and climate factors behind the exceptionally intense drought now afflicting much of the Western United States. The report looks at regional trends in vapor pressure deficit (VPD), that is, a combination of temperature and humidity that specifies how much and fast moisture will evaporate into atmosphere from the land surface. As temperature increases, atmospheric demand of water increases exponentially. As such, higher VPD means the atmosphere can extract more water from the surface, drying it out.
The NOAA researchers find that normal weather fluctuations can only account for 50 percent of the record high VPD currently experienced in the Southwestern U.S. “This implies that human-caused warming played a significant role in the anomalously high VPD over the last 20 months,” concludes the report.
The Roadmap notes that the federal government will likely have to pay out billions more in crop insurance subsidies to American farmers each year by late-century due to the effects of climate change. Crop insurance protects farmers against losses from bad harvests and/or unexpectedly lower commodity prices. The crop insurance program is basically a subsidy in which farmers pay only about 40 percent of the premiums; it loses money every year.
Climate change has already increased federal crop insurance losses by $27 billion over the past 27 years according to a July 2021 study in Environmental Research Letters. On the brighter side, a 2019 study in Climatic Change projects that technological changes in U.S. agricultural production even in a worst case scenario will likely overcome the negative impacts of climate change on the yields of maize, soybeans, and winter wheat in America’s heartland.
The Roadmap does offer some useful directions to federal agencies with respect climate-proofing federal infrastructure and procuring climate-friendly products and technologies, but it is largely superfluous with respect to investors and businesses as they are already adapting to climate change well ahead of this exercise in federal guidance.
from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3n6tT29
via IFTTT
“Miraculous”: All 21 Passengers Walk Away From Fiery Private Jet Crash Outside Houston
What can be described as nothing short of miraculous has just happened in a field outside of Houston: a small airliner carry 21 people has crashed, with all 21 escaping the fiery wreckage alive.
The crash which happened late Tuesday morning resulted only in one person being sent to the hospital, despite images of the aftermath showing the MD-87 aircraft – a single aisle airliner that’s the size of a large private jet – engulfed in a fireball.
The plane had taken off from Houston Executive Airport, which typically is used by corporate passengers, and is owned by J. Alan Kent, an executive of homebuilding company Flair Builders, according to local news KTRK. It had reportedly just taken off en route to Boston.
In a statement posted to Facebook, Waller County Judge Trey Duhon confirmed the crash, stating that the aircraft attempted to take off from the airport heading north. However, the official said that the plane did not reach altitude by the end of the runway and ended up crossing a road.
The aircraft, described in Duhon’s post as a MD-80, finally stopped in a field, where it caught fire.
Emergency crews continued working into the afternoon to extinguish the massive blaze engulfing the downed aircraft in an empty field.
The industry magazine Plane and Aviation examined the early details of the crash and called it “miraculous”:
The plane crossed a roadway and came to rest, bursting into flames. Early reports are, and this is hard to believe seeing these photos, that all 21 passengers and crew escaped the wreckage with only one casualty, a back injury, among them. Kudos to the passengers and crew for pulling that off.
The MD-87 is a stretched version of the MD-80, which is a modernized and stretched version of the Douglas DC-9, for years one of the most popular short-haul airliners in the United States.
🚨#BREAKING: Fire crews responding to a major plane crash
A small jet has been involved in a serious crashed just north of the regional airport. officials said. 21 people, including three crew members, were on board, according to police injuries are unknown pic.twitter.com/90YIJkHC4g
And the whole event is indeed “miraculous” considering the above FOX affiliate photograph shows all that was left of the aircraft, and yet everyone escaped with not even serious injuries.
