“Russia is entering its third year of war in Ukraine with an unprecedented amount of cash in government coffers, bolstered by a record $37 billion of crude oil sales to India last year, according to new analysis, which concludes that some of the crude was refined by India and then exported to the United States as oil products worth more than $1 billion.
This flow of payments, ultimately to Moscow’s benefit, comes from India increasing its purchases of Russian crude by over 13 times its pre-war amounts, according to the analysis by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA), exclusively shared with CNN. It amounts to US strategic partner New Delhi stepping in to replace crude purchases by Western buyers, reduced by sanctions over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the analysis said.”
“Today, Amazon terminated its planned acquisition of iRobot, manufacturer of Roomba robot vacuums, as the companies saw “no path to regulatory approval.” iRobot then announced that it would be cutting nearly one-third of its work force.
While the companies blamed regulators in the European Union for the termination, meddlesome U.S. lawmakers played their own part in souring the deal.”
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“as the companies waited on regulators, iRobot was losing money: The company took out a $200 million bridge loan in July 2023 to tie it over until the deal closed (at which point Amazon lowered its offer to account for the new debt). With the deal scuttled, Amazon will now pay a $94 million termination fee, but iRobot expects to report an operating loss of as much as $285 million for 2023.
It’s worth wondering, then, if this is what lawmakers like Warren had in mind. The FTC letter worried the merger “could harm consumers and reduce competition and innovation in the home robotics market.” But without the merger, iRobot could very well face insolvency, and nearly one-third of its work force will lose their jobs—and considering the company is based in Massachusetts, a substantial number of them may very well be Warren’s constituents.”
“the pause is a limited one. It will only affect exports of LNG to countries with which the U.S. does not have a free trade agreement, and it does not prevent exports from the eight LNG export facilities already operating—though it will slow construction on several other export facilities, including one in Louisiana that would be America’s largest when finished. Even with the “pause” in place, the White House says America’s LNG exports are expected to double by the end of the decade, thanks to America’s booming natural gas industry and the energy needs of a world that’s getting wealthier.
While it is all a bit complicated, what the Biden administration announced last week amounts to an attempt to slow the growth of America’s natural gas exports—underpinned by the rationale that the slowdown will reduce global carbon emissions.
That’s a rationale based on some dubious assumptions. The climate activists who pushed the White House to consider the “pause” on new LNG export facilities point to an analysis released in November by former Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) policy advisor Jeremy Symons. Among other things, that report found that planned expansions of LNG exports in the U.S. would cause an increase in carbon emissions equal to the current level of emissions from the entire European Union.”
“Even if Symons’ report is right—indeed, an increase in natural gas exports seems likely to result in more global use of natural gas, even if he’s wrong about the scale of the increase—there’s a huge blind spot in that analysis. On his Slow Boring Substack, liberal blogger Matthew Yglesias points out that Symons “doesn’t even purport to estimate the net impact on emissions.”
In other words: How much would the increase in global natural gas consumption offset emissions from dirtier forms of fuel like coal and oil?
That’s the key question to ask. A significant reason why the United States has seen an overall decrease in carbon emissions in recent years is due to natural gas supplanting coal as the country’s top energy source.
The Biden administration is well aware of how exporting more natural gas could facilitate a similar transition in other parts of the world. When the Department of Energy signed off on a new LNG export facility in Corpus Christie, Texas, in March 2022, it concluded that “to the extent U.S. LNG exports are preferred over coal in LNG-importing nations, U.S. LNG exports are likely to reduce global [greenhouse gas] emissions on per unit of energy consumed basis for power production.””
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“this looks like a politically motivated maneuver aimed at garnering election-year praise from environmental activists on the left”
“The U.S. government, for all the money and agents it’s thrown at the border over the past several decades, has never been able to practically “shut down the border” or achieve zero illegal crossings (all the legal issues with those proposals aside).
Between the creation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2003 and January 2021, the U.S. has spent $333 billion to fund the agencies tasked with immigration enforcement, according to the American Immigration Council, a pro-immigration nonprofit. The budgets for those agencies have been rising for years.
But more enforcement money hasn’t necessarily led to lower illegal crossings. As budgets have gone up, apprehensions of people who crossed the border between authorized ports of entry have gone up, down, and remained static. In other words, they don’t cleanly align: Though Customs and Border Protection reported 2.05 million apprehensions in FY 2023, it reported somewhat close to that number—over 1.5 million—in FY 2000. Annual apprehensions hovered below 500,000 from FY 2010 through FY 2018.”
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“The U.S.-Mexico border stretches nearly 2,000 miles, much of it treacherous. No matter the funding and no matter the enforcement mandate, there’s no way that agents could stop every illegal crosser traversing the deserts, mountains, and waters that make up the border region. That’s proven impossible along much smaller and more surveilled borders, such as the boundaries of East Germany and North Korea.”
“DeSantis came out in support of Florida legislation that would ban the sale of lab-grown meat in the state.
“I know the Legislature’s doing a bill to try to protect our meat. You need meat, OK? We’re going to have meat in Florida,” DeSantis said during a Friday press conference. “We’re going to have fake meat? That doesn’t work. We’re going to make sure to do it right. But there’s a whole ideological agenda that’s coming after, I think, a lot of important parts of our society.””
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“like many attempts to curb vegan alternatives to meat and dairy, DeSantis’ support for these bills is also aimed at protecting animal farmers from competition—even if such competition is basically hypothetical.”
“According to US intelligence, Russia wants to put a nuclear weapon into space. Such a weapons system, they believe, could be used to target Western satellites in orbit, knocking out communications and military targeting systems. These weapons would be utterly devastating if they were ever used.
Axiomatically, it makes a lot of sense to use nuclear weapons in space: the result of doing so is far more predictable than on land, where geography and the elements can make their deployment tricky. The outcome is also more calculable: given we are so reliant on satellites to communicate, move, and work, we would all feel the impact.
It’s for this reason the world has long agreed not to put such weapons in the ‘heavens’. But we know the tyrant Putin is no respecter of the rule book and international law. The development of so-called ‘Wunderwaffe’ – “wonder weapons” – is one of Putin’s obsessions. The fact this information is coming from US intelligence sources, not Putin’s usual idle boasts, suggest they at least have a grain of truth about them, though, and should be taken seriously. Very seriously.”