IBM downgraded by S&P as deal spree clouds ability to cut debt
IBM Corp. was downgraded by S&P Global Ratings because an acquisition spree adds doubt to the companys timeline for reducing debt.
S&P cut IBM one notch to A- with a stable outlook, according to a report Thursday. The credit rater expects IBM to pursue additional takeovers to bolster its hybrid cloud and artificial ingelligence capabilities. Coupled with the planned spinoff of its managed infrastructure services business, there’s uncertainty IBM can reduce leverage to a certain level in the next year or two, S&P said.
Chief Executive Officer Arvind Krishna has been on a spending spree as he seeks to transform IBM into a more modern technology company, focusing on fast-growing markets like AI and cloud services after years of stagnation.
The first step along that road was IBM’s purchase of Red Hat, completed in 2019 for $34 billion. Since then Krishna, who became CEO last year, has stepped up the pace, spending about $1 billion on acquisitions in the first quarter of this year, according to S&P. IBM also said it’d buy Turbonomic Inc. in April in a deal valued at as much as $2 billion.
The efforts appear to be paying off, as IBM recently reported its biggest revenue gain in 11 quarters, though there was only a 1% increase in sales. The stock has gained 15% this year.
While the M&A spree has helped lift IBM’s debt load to $56.4 billion, total debt has declined $17 billion since its 2019 peak, and could fall as much as $10 billion over the next two years, Bloomberg Intelligence analysts Robert Schiffman and Suborna Panja said in an April 30 report.
Last October, Krishna announced plans to spin off IBM’s managed infrastructure services unit into a separate publicly traded company, which will be called Kyndryl and be based in New York. The division, currently part of IBM’s Global Technology Services division, handles day-to-day infrastructure service operations like managing client data centers and traditional information-technology support for installing, repairing and operating equipment.
IBM’s shares and bonds were little changed in early trading in New York.
Published : May 07, 2021
By : Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Molly Smith, Molly Schuetz
Weekly jobless claims fall below 500,000, setting new pandemic low
Weekly jobless claims hit a pandemic-era low for the fourth consecutive week, the Labor Department reported Thursday, with 498,000 Americans filing for initial unemployment benefits during the week ended May 1.
That’s down 92,000 from the previous week’s upwardly revised level, a bigger decrease than economists expected and the lowest figure since March 2020. The streak of declines, which started with a surprise drop in mid-April, suggests the recovery is gaining traction, pulling scores of people back into the folds of the labor market as business restrictions continue to loosen and vaccination numbers climb.
Signs of an economic rebound are abundant: Hunger, which has hovered near historic highs for much of the pandemic, is decreasing. The number of families behind on rent fell by more than 2 million in March. The S&P 500 has notched at least 21 records since President Joe Biden took office, the most seen in the first 100 days of any new administration since that of John F. Kennedy. Business optimism is bouncing back in the manufacturing and service sectors. Consumer confidence and retail sales have surged.
“A bigger than expected decline in new jobless claims is a most pleasant surprise,” Mark Hamrick, a senior economic analyst at Bankrate, said Thursday in comments emailed to The Washington Post. “The healing of the job market, including reduction of unemployed and those seeking and receiving jobless aid, is as important an economic thread as any being monitored amid the reopening story.”
States reported 101,214 initial claims for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, for gig and self-employed workers, for the week that ended May 1. Nearly 7 million PUA claims were continued in mid-April for benefits that are set to expire in September.
California, Florida, New York and Virginia had the biggest decreases in first-time unemployment claims last week. Kentucky, Minnesota and New Jersey were among the only states to post increases in weekly claims greater than 1,000.
This time last year, more than 2.7 million Americans were applying for initial unemployment benefits, and the national unemployment rate ranged from 15 to 20%. At the height of the coronavirus pandemic, weekly claims surpassed 6 million.
But the rebound has cascaded unevenly through the economy, a dynamic that many economists refer to as “K-shaped” because of the diverging prospects for rich and poor Americans. Poverty rose to 11.7% in March, the highest level of the pandemic, according to research from the University of Chicago and the University of Notre Dame, with children and women being hit the hardest.
Women would need nearly 15 straight months of job gains at last month’s level to recover the more than 4.6 million net jobs they have lost since February 2020, according to the National Women’s Law Center. Those who are employed are experiencing greater burnout and feeling more pressure at work, according to data from McKinsey.
“How do I file for unemployment?” was the most Googled question nationwide the past year, according to research from CenturyLinkQuote.com.
Economists are looking toward Friday’s monthly jobs report for a fuller employment picture. The private payroll report that ADP released Wednesday showed gains of about 742,000 positions from March to April.
“With jobless claims hitting a pandemic-era low, anticipation for the full jobs picture tomorrow mounts,” Mike Loewengart, managing director of investment strategy at eTrade, said Thursday in comments emailed to The Washington Post. “Today’s read is another proof point that we’re one step closer to full economic recovery, sooner than some may have expected.”
Employers are believed to have recovered nearly 1 million jobs across the board in April after gaining more than 900,000 the previous month. That would put the national unemployment rate in the “high 5% range,” Hamrick said, a level not seen since late 2014.
But vaccinations, a key engine for the recovery, have been slowing. More than 107.3 million Americans are fully vaccinated, according to data tracked by the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Biden announced a new vaccination goal on Tuesday, saying he wants 70% of adults to have received at least one dose by July 4.
Even with major gains in the labor market, there is still a long way to go before employment reaches pre-pandemic levels. More than 16 million Americans were drawing unemployment benefits across all programs in April. In 2019, average weekly initial claims hovered around 218,000.
Hopes surge for boosted vaccine supply after U.S. voices support for waiving patents, even as uncertainty remains
NAIROBI – When South Africa and India proposed it in October, the idea seemed straightforward: Waive intellectual property rights on coronavirus vaccine recipes and production technology so the world can produce as many doses as possible and end the pandemic as fast as possible.
Instead wealthy, mostly Western nations, including the United States, with powerful pharmaceutical lobbies, rejected the idea and then cut deals with vaccine makers to effectively hoard doses. The World Health Organization’s head called it a “catastrophic moral failure,” and other critics likened it to “vaccine apartheid.”
Seven months later, as the U.S. vaccine rollout nears its peak and life veers back toward normal, Washington has reversed its position to support a short-term waiver, angering drug companies while infusing hope into efforts to ramp up vaccine production as severe shortages coincide with enormous waves of virus infections in India, Latin America and other parts of the developing world.
“The notion that ‘no one is safe until everyone is safe’ is true, and the Biden administration seems to have finally taken that to heart,” said Fatima Hassan, a South African human rights lawyer and founder of the Health Justice Initiative, which was part of a global campaign for a generically produced “people’s vaccine.”
“Did it take them seeing people in India dying on television to make this decision?” she asked. “Maybe, but however late this comes, attention now needs to turn immediately to getting other vaccine-producing countries to follow.”
The statement, issued Wednesday by U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai, said the United States will move forward with international discussions to waive the protections for the duration of the pandemic.
World Trade Organization Director General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala said in an interview Thursday that she was pressing member countries to reach an agreement on the waiver no later than December.
“It’s not overnight that we’re going to be able to scale up,” she said, adding that “it is very difficult to say now whether there is going to be a consensus.” She described the U.S. announcement as “helpful” and said it would give momentum to talks.
The U.S. statement did not appear to be a move coordinated with U.S. allies.
The German government voiced opposition to the U.S. proposal in a statement Thursday, saying it would have “significant implications” for vaccine production. The statement said the limiting factor in manufacturing vaccines is production capacity and quality control rather than patents. “The protection of intellectual property is a source of innovation and must remain so in the future,” it said.
Canada and Britain’s trade ministers as well as the European Commission president issued statements indicating their willingness to continue discussions, but they did not commit to any change of stance.
The European Union’s top vaccine czar, Thierry Breton, pointed to concerns about supply chains, expressing skepticism that it made sense to open up the patents immediately. He noted there were many barriers to speeding up production, including access to the raw materials.
“When we will be able to reach this without destabilizing the ramp-up and the supply chain, . . . I could tell you, ‘Yes, the supply chains now are solid, the ramp-up is effective, so yes, it is the time to do it,'” Breton said. “Personally I think it will be good to do it quickly, but as I said always, everything at its time.”
French President Emmanuel Macron took time on the sidelines of a visit to a vaccination center to say that he was in favor of “opening up intellectual property” but that a waiver wouldn’t have much effect without a concrete plan to transfer technology and know-how.
Those technical details – like how quickly a factory in India, for instance, could actually start churning out vaccine doses based on Pfizer’s formula should they gain access to it – were certain to be tricky if a temporary waiver does eventually come through. And even that is not a given.
It remained unclear whether other countries that had been blocking the waiver, which include almost all of Europe as well as Japan, Canada, Brazil, Australia and Singapore, would follow suit. Those negotiations, which would take place under the auspices of the World Trade Organization, would determine whether Washington’s change of stance leads to the ramping up of production of generic vaccines.
The process to hammer out a deal could take months and result in a narrow interpretation of intellectual property rights. The WTO has met 10 times in the past seven months on the original waiver proposal. The organization’s rules stipulate that any decision has to be made by consensus, meaning any country could hold up a coordinated move on intellectual property waivers.
Ultimately, such a waiver might come into effect only later this year, once vaccine manufacturers in the West have boosted production.
Western pharmaceutical giants such as Pfizer stand to make billions of dollars off coronavirus vaccines alone, and they have received billions more in subsidies from the U.S. government. The industry opposed the short-term waiver, warning of dire consequences for vaccine development and manufacturing going forward.
On Monday, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America condemned the U.S. decision. “In the midst of a deadly pandemic, the Biden administration has taken an unprecedented step that will undermine our global response to the pandemic and compromise safety,” president and CEO Stephen Ubl said in a statement.
Wednesday’s news was welcomed in India and South Africa, both hit hard by the pandemic but where vaccination campaigns are far behind those in the United States and Europe.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa praised the new U.S. stance in a statement and said the “anticipated temporary waiver provides a global response” to the pandemic.
“For countries that do not currently have manufacturing capacity on certain medical technologies, the waiver could open up more supply options and avoid countries being reliant on only one or two suppliers,” he said.
India’s Ministry of External Affairs welcomed the U.S. decision, calling it an “important step for enabling rapid scaling up of manufacture and timely availability of affordable Covid 19 vaccines and essential medical products.”
“We are hopeful that with a consensus based approach, the waiver can be approved quickly at the WTO,” the ministry said in a statement issued Thursday.
The Indian government had been lobbying for a relaxation of the patent regime for coronavirus vaccines for months. Prime Minister Narendra Modi brought up the topic in a call with President Joe Biden in April, and Indian diplomats have reportedly reached out to U.S. senators to appeal for their support.
A spokesman for Serum Institute of India, one of the world’s largest vaccine makers, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the move. Serum is manufacturing vaccine doses under licensing deals with large U.S. and European pharmaceutical companies.
The vaccine supply crunch has made it difficult for Covax – a World Health Organization-backed effort to equitably distribute vaccine doses – to get off the ground. The program aims to deliver up to 2 billion doses by the end of the year, targeting 20 percent of the population of participating low- and middle-income countries, but under current conditions, some countries could be waiting until 2023 to secure what they need.
So far, Covax has delivered only 53 million doses, with deliveries well behind schedule.
The huge wave of infections in India – where many of Covax’s doses are being manufactured – has slowed the international effort’s timeline, leaving many countries wondering when or if their next doses will arrive. For months now governments, public health experts and rights advocates have urged policymakers to address the growing gap by focusing not just on sharing available doses but on dramatically expanding supply.
Many of these voices now stress that a waiver is a helpful but not sufficient step toward ramping up vaccine production.
“The US must also demand that pharma companies that received significant amounts of US taxpayer funding to create these vaccines share the technology and know-how with other capable manufacturers to protect more people worldwide,” Doctors Without Borders said in a statement.
Since October, at least 60 countries became co-sponsors with India and South Africa on the proposal, and at least 40 more voiced their support. Most of them are in the Global South, which includes Latin America, Africa, and South and Southeast Asia.
“This development represents true leadership in a time of need,” said John Nkengasong, director of the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the continent’s main public health body. “When the history of the covid-19 pandemic will be written, the decision of this waiver by the U.S. government will be remembered as pivotal in our fight against this terrible virus.”
The U.S. announcement came as a win for South Africa, India and the broad coalition they built at the WTO, where delegations of civil servants, not politicians, persevered against a bloc of the world’s most powerful nations who seemed unready to budge.
“How could we have a situation with a global pandemic, and you keep considering vaccines a commodity?” said Hassan, the South African campaigner. “It was and is absurd. In a sense, it was rich countries and their pharmaceutical companies saying that intellectual property claims and the interests of shareholders on a very narrow set of items mattered more than the lives of millions of people – people in the Global South, in particular.”
Published : May 07, 2021
By : The Washington Post · Max Bearak, Emily Rauhala
Israel, worlds vaccine trailblazer, shows what return to office will look like
Traffic is returning to the city streets. Elevators are getting crowded. Favorite lunch spots are filling up. Two months after Israel reopened its economy, Tel Aviv is moving on from the work-from-home era.
Israel’s lightning-fast vaccine program gave it a headstart in planning for life after coronavirus, and its quick rollout turned it into a global test case on everything from real-world efficacy data to vaccine passports. With commercial activity now heating up in Tel Aviv, employers and employees around the world are watching with interest to see what happens in a country that has come to be seen as a late-pandemic bellwether.
Early signs are that the end of lockdown has flicked the switch on office life. Demand for space is picking up across the board, according to data tracked by commercial real estate outfit Natam Group. Co-working provider WeWork says footfall in its Israeli buildings is up 20% since February, with strong demand for new sales. Google’s mobility data shows a sharp increase in travel to work in Tel Aviv during April, with numbers now close to their pre-pandemic baseline.
Nir Minerbi got the first sign that things were about to change back in December, when he tried – and failed – to renew the discounted deal he struck with WeWork during 2020’s initial lockdown.
Being in the office last year was like “being at a graveyard,” said Minerbi, chief executive officer of quantum computing firm Classiq Technologies. He’s keen to revive the camaraderie of face-to-face working, so has signed an interim contract with a smaller co-working space while looking for a more traditional long-term office lease.
While covid-19 continues to ravage India and cases accelerate around the world, countries with high vaccination levels are taking first their steps towards reopening. Australia and New Zealand kept Covid-19 at bay, though many office-based employees remain at home. In the U.K., where working from home is recommended until at least June 21, some 42% of employees were at their desks in April, according to Morgan Stanley research. That figure is higher in Europe. In the U.S., New York will soon lift many pandemic restrictions, and major banks are planning a resumption of office life.
Tel Aviv offers a glimpse for other economic hubs of what work may look like soon, as workers and employees alike seek to rekindle the sense of community they lost last year.
“There’s a huge bounce back,” Dotan Weiner, chief operating officer at Labs, a co-working firm owned by Israeli billionaire Teddy Sagi, said in an interview. “Companies are telling us that without the office, it’s harder to recruit and maintain their culture.”
Footfall at Labs’ Israel site is now back to over 95% of total capacity, Weiner said, up from a low of 15% in 2020’s first lockdown and 40% in the second. Weiner was five minutes late to his interview, a tardiness he blamed on “elevator traffic.” Labs is in talks to open two more Tel Aviv locations in the next two years, he said.
Labs also operates 12 buildings in London, and Weiner is similarly optimistic for business prospects in the English capital. Weiner expects a somewhat slower return than in Tel Aviv, with Londoners seen as reluctant to flock back onto public transport networks.
The U.K. has broadly tracked Israel’s path through the pandemic, locking down and reopening a few weeks behind the Middle Eastern nation. With case numbers now low and vaccination rates high in both countries, the U.K. appears on course to reopen its economy fully in late June.
Nevertheless, even in Israel many companies are yet to settle on a definitive balance between working from home and returning to the office.
Check Point Software Technologies Ltd., one of the country’s largest employers, has seen attendance double recently to about 35% of its 2,400 workers at its Tel Aviv headquarters, said Nirit Schneider, head of real estate and operations. While that is still a steep drop from before the pandemic it covers a significantly larger group of people, with most splitting their working week between home and office.
More than half the cyber security giant’s workforce is outside Israel, where Check Point has been trying to shorten contracts and swap desks for meeting rooms. Face-to-face contact is now the main reason for people to show up to the office, Schneider said.
The new need for adaptability is driving change in Israel’s commercial real estate sector. Co-working provider Mindspace is shifting towards what it calls a “partnership” model with landlords, handling rental agreements with tenants on behalf of landlords in a bid to minimize the risk of a falling market.
“Companies don’t know what to do with their real estate strategy,” Mindspace CEO Dan Zakai said. “That’s why we’ll see an increase in flexible contracts.”
At Classiq, Nir Minerbi understands that some of his team are still scarred by the pandemic and prefer a more tightly controlled office experience than they can get at a co-working venue.
“People don’t love crowded working areas anymore,” Minerbi said. “Even if it isn’t 100% full, some of our employees want a place where they feel they can breathe.”
Published : May 07, 2021
By : Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Yaacov Benmeleh
Europes vaccine campaign is accelerating. It expects to match the U.S. by July.
ROME – After months of supply shortages and embarrassing blunders, Europes coronavirus vaccine campaign is at last sprinting ahead, renewing hopes that the continent might meet its initial inoculation goals and tame the virus even while relaxing restrictions.
Across the European Union, countries are touting new daily vaccination records. Supply concerns have eased. The EU is now administering roughly the same number of daily per capita doses as the United States, trending up while America trends down.
Some European countries have helped their cause by sorting out logistical problems or enlisting family doctors and pharmacists to administer shots. But the bloc, more broadly, owes its turnaround to a deepened reliance on Pfizer-BioNTech, which has ramped up vaccine production – beyond what was initially expected – as other options have faltered or come too slowly.
Mostly using Pfizer, France’s pace of daily doses has increased 60% over the past month. Italy has accelerated by 90%. Germany by 145%.
While the United States has doses widely available to any adults who want them – and is struggling to find takers – many people in the EU are not yet eligible. But appointments are starting to open up in Europe, even for younger cohorts.
EU officials, noting President Joe Biden’s target of getting at least one dose to 70% of U.S. adults by July 4, say that by midsummer Europeans and Americans will be in roughly the same situation.
“The U.S. has a similar goal, and this shows how much our vaccination campaigns are aligned by now,” said European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.
The EU has so far administered at least one dose to 30% of its total population, compared to 45% in the United States, 52% in Britain and 60% in Israel.
Even as the EU campaign takes off, the costs of the slow start are being felt. A bruising third wave struck the continent toward the end of winter, leading to scores of preventable deaths among the uninoculated elderly. Lockdowns caused the EU’s economy to contract in the first three months of the year. All the while, the bloc’s leaders were warring with AstraZeneca, the drugmaker that was falling short of delivery pledges, whose vaccine had initially been counted on to play a primary role in the campaign.
“Obviously, it was painful for EU leaders in January and February,” said Jacob Kirkegaard, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. “There was an acute shortage, while the countries they like to compare themselves with didn’t have that problem. But now, it has changed. The scale-up of production in the EU has been extremely rapid.”
Pfizer has said it will be delivering 250 million doses in the second quarter of the year, a fourfold increase from the first three months. Italy, for instance, received 6.9 million doses of Pfizer in April, compared with 8.7 during the previous three months combined.
The EU expects supplies to be boosted further as additional vaccines start to come online. After a delay to assess concerns about rare blood clots, the rollout of Johnson & Johnson’s one-shot vaccine is underway in Europe.
Another vaccine, made by the German company CureVac, could soon be approved, depending on the imminent results of a late-stage clinical trial. The CureVac vaccine is similar to those produced by Pfizer and Moderna, in that it uses mRNA technology.
The EU has scrambled to make up for lost time after an approach characterized by more caution and less urgency than that of the United States.
While the U.S. Operation Warp Speed spared little expense to help companies build factories and expand their production capacity at an early stage last year, the EU behaved more like an ordinary customer in early vaccine negotiations, haggling with drug companies over the price of doses and leaving it up to the drugmakers to figure out how to produce the promised supplies.
The EU team that negotiated the deals on behalf of the 27-nation bloc had no experience with the issue, since health issues have previously been the responsibility of individual countries. And it was plagued by a mix of demands from rich countries, such as Germany, that wanted to go big with the more expensive, newer technology Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, and poorer ones such as Bulgaria, for whom cost was a major issue and who preferred AstraZeneca’s cheaper and easier-to-store doses.
European policymakers also didn’t fully realize the extent to which barriers to vaccine exports out of the United States, Britain and India would put pressure on EU production to supply the world, leaving fewer doses to supply the Europeans themselves.
The result was that as Britain, the United States and a handful of other countries raced ahead with vaccinations starting in December, the EU badly lagged behind. At the last minute, AstraZeneca also said it would not be able to deliver nearly as many doses of its vaccine as it had promised, further slowing the E.U. effort.
Politicians in every country faced down furious citizens.
“France: Homeland of Permanent Delay,” read one headline in France’s Le Point magazine in early March, atop an angry opinion piece about the molasses-slow vaccination campaign there.
But behind the scenes, a shift was underway. Von der Leyen, a trained doctor, had developed a productive relationship with Pfizer chief executive Albert Bourla, who seemed more capable than AstraZeneca’s leaders of expanding production capacity and meeting new and faster delivery targets, officials said.
And Thierry Breton, the top European Commission official in charge of Europe’s internal market and a former French finance minister and industrialist, started a whistle-stop tour of the continent’s 53 vaccine factories, speaking to workers on the production floor and to leaders of the factories about what they needed to sort out snags and speed doses.
When he was tasked in early February with overseeing the vaccine production effort, his team had little insight into what was happening with the complex process needed to make vaccines from start to finish.
“There was not really a good overview of the numbers, of where are the factories, of what is the capacity of the factories,” said one European official familiar with the situation, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the closed-door process. Breton mapped out the process, and realized that there was a good chance that Europe already had the capacity to meet the 70% target in July, the official said.
Companies have gone to him with issues as basic as a shortage of plastic bags used in bioreactors, devices that are crucial for making the substances needed for the vaccines. He found another supplier and fixed the bottleneck, the official said.
Countries have also fine-tuned their strategies, making doses easier to come by. Germany, for instance, has allowed family doctors to administer vaccines, meaning people are no longer obliged to go to government-run vaccine centers. Italy, meantime, under new Prime Minister Mario Draghi, appointed a military logistics specialist, General Francesco Figliuolo, to overhaul the rollout.
Figliuolo has helped create some 1,000 new vaccination centers, nearly doubling Italy’s total. He has worked with the country’s most populous region, Lombardy, on a new vaccine reservations portal, after the region’s initial system kept crashing, leading in a few instances to empty vaccination centers. The general, in March, set a goal for Italy to administer 500,000 doses per day – something that seemed like a long shot at the time, when the nation was administering some 200,000 daily jabs.
Two days over the past week, Italy exceeded 500,000 doses. It has averaged 442,000 daily doses in the latest week.
Figliuolo, in a telephone interview, described his role as, “basically, fine-tuning the vaccination machine.”
“By June, we are counting on having such an inflow that we’ll further increase the speed of the machine,” he said.
Published : May 07, 2021
By : The Washington Post · Chico Harlan, Michael Birnbaum
U.S. announces major conservation effort but offers few details
WASHINGTON – Months after President Joe Biden set a goal of conserving 30% of the nations land and waters by 2030, the administration Thursday laid out broad principles – but few details – for achieving that vision.
The new 22-page document from the Commerce, Interior and Agriculture Departments highlights one of the Biden administration’s central challenges: Having committed to bold environmental goals during their early days in power, officials now face the more uncertain and contentious task of figuring out how to follow through on those ambitions.
The “America the Beautiful” report outlines steps the U.S. could take to safeguard key areas on land and in the sea to restore biodiversity, tackle climate change and make natural spaces more accessible to all Americans.
“This is the very first national conservation goal we have ever set as a country,” White House National Climate Adviser Gina McCarthy said in a call with reporters. “It really reflects the urgency with which we have to respond to a global extinction crisis, the climate crisis and the deep racial and economic disparities that too often dictate who has access to nature.”
But the new report doesn’t identify specific places for enhanced protection, define what level of conservation would be required for an area to count toward the administration’s 30% goal or indicate how much federal funding would be needed to make Biden’s vision a reality.
This ambiguity is partly by design. Some environmentalists said that it would be impractical to make that assessment at this point, and that it will take time to muster the kind of grass-roots support needed to achieve such a sweeping conservation goal.
“I see it as a starting point that’s telling us this is the direction we want to go in, and this is how we want to do this work to ensure we’re going to get the best outcomes,” said Ali Chase, senior policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “In terms of just trying to bring the country around to a conservation ethic, I think it’s pretty significant.”
The report is less a road map than a vision statement, painting a picture of accessible parks, ranchlands that double as wildlife corridors and farms that could also store carbon instead of releasing it into the atmosphere. It lays out guiding principles for the program – utilizing scientific research, pursuing projects that create jobs – and calls for a “voluntary and locally led” approach to conservation, in which the federal government provides support and guidance to efforts led by landowners, cities, states and tribes.
As part of the effort, the government will launch and maintain an “American Conservation and Stewardship Atlas” to track the amount of protected land and water, and the Interior Department will be required to publish annual reports on the progress being made.
Brenda Mallory, chair of the Council on Environmental Quality, said the acreage of protected areas is just one metric for measuring success. Progress will have to be judged, she said, “in the lives of people and the health of ecosystems rather than solely by scale.”
At the moment, roughly 12% of U.S. land and 11% of its freshwater ecosystems enjoy some level of official protection. About 26% of U.S. ocean waters are safeguarded, in part because in 2016 President Barack Obama expanded the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument – first established by President George W. Bush – to encompass more than 582,000 square miles of land and sea.
Many private landowners and commercial users of public lands, such as ranchers, anglers and hunters, are leery of Biden’s attempts to more than double that conserved area.
Farmers and ranchers are still seeking reassurance that their property rights will be respected and access to public lands for grazing will be maintained, American Farm Bureau Federation President Zippy Duvall said in an email.
Trout Unlimited president Chris Wood said in an interview that it is important the plan target restoring private lands, rather than just adding new federal protections. “The effects of a changing climate – fire, droughts, floods – don’t respect those boundaries. . . . The devil is in the details, and it’s yet to be worked out.”
Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said the report came out of dozens of conversations with scientists, farmers, hunters and outdoor-recreation businesses as well as city, state and tribal officials, and that the agency will solicit more feedback in the months to come.
Meanwhile, the department has plans to stand up the Civilian Climate Corps, Haaland said, which would employ Americans in reforesting and restoring degraded landscapes. The agency this week also proposed opening more than 2 million acres of public lands for hunting and fishing opportunities. And in the coming days, the National Park Service will announce $150 million in new funding to build parks in underserved communities.
On the aquatic side, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said her agency will be expanding the National Marine Sanctuary System and the National Estuarine Research Reserve program, which protects the places where rivers flow into the sea.
One of the looming questions is how Biden can reconcile the new conservation target, which has received relatively little publicity, with his better-known plans to tackle climate change.
Last month, for example, the president announced the United States would slash its greenhouse gas emissions between 50% and 52% by the end of the decade compared with 2005 levels. The goal of eliminating planet-warming emissions from fossil fuels is backed by roughly two-thirds of registered voters, according to a December poll by George Mason University and the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. But the administration has yet to spell out specific reductions that would need to take place in key sectors of the economy.
Broadly speaking, Americans also support the idea of conserving 30% of the nation’s land and water by the end of the decade. Recent polls from left-leaning Center for American Progress and Natural Resources Defense Council found large majorities of respondents favor the plan, often abbreviated as “30×30.” Bipartisan coalitions of 70 mayors and more than 400 state and local elected officials have declared support for the goal, as have environmental groups, hunting and fishing organizations, and tribal leaders.
Scientists have identified land and water conservation as a vital mechanism for protecting biodiversity and addressing climate change. The 30×30 target also puts the United States on par with a group of more than 50 “high-ambition” nations that have pledged to set aside at least that much land for nature.
But when it comes to determining which land to conserve and how it should be protected, the issue becomes much more fraught.
The America the Beautiful initiative proposes increasing that protected area through a hodgepodge of efforts, including creating new parks in nature-deprived communities, supporting tribally led management projects and boosting programs that fund conservation efforts on private land.
Though specific policy mechanisms are not included in the conservation plan, it coincides with other steps from his administration to protect biodiversity. The Fish and Wildlife Service on Thursday also proposed reversing a Trump-era rule change that would make it more difficult to hold firms liable for accidentally killing birds in the course of their operations.
But ecologist Dominick DellaSala, chief scientist with the Earth Island Institute’s Wild Heritage project, said he was disappointed by the absence of specific proposals for conservation on public lands, such as expanding national parks and monuments.
“They can do better than this,” he wrote in an email. “The science they seek already says they need to be bolder.”
On the other hand, conservative groups have voiced fervent opposition to what some call “the 30×30 land grab.” Multiple GOP-led Western counties have issued resolutions opposing the goal. And in March, more than 60 members of the Congressional Western Caucus – all Republicans – signed a letter expressing skepticism about Biden’s approach, which they said displayed “dangerous thoughtlessness.”
Biden’s plans to expand renewable energy – which calls for a major expansion of large-scale solar and wind farms onshore, in addition to offshore wind – could also pose a challenge for his conservation goal.
Princeton University’s recent Net Zero America study, for example, estimates that wind and solar projects will occupy roughly 230,000 square miles by mid-century – more than the states of Arizona and Colorado combined.
“The Department of Interior has a role to play in balancing the interests of clean energy development and conservation,” Sean Gallagher, vice president of state and regulatory affairs at the Solar Energy Industries Association, said in an interview. “Because we know it won’t be easy,”
While large-scale solar and wind farms take up a significant amount of space relative to a nuclear or gas-fired power plant, a 2016 article published in PLoS One noted that the disparities between renewable and fossil fuels even out after a number of decades because extractive industries exhaust the resources in one place and have to relocate. Renewable projects, by contrast, can operate indefinitely in the same site. And other forms of renewables, such as rooftop solar, have a much smaller footprint.
Jessica Wilkinson, senior policy adviser for energy and infrastructure at the Nature Conservancy, said in an email that when it comes to addressing climate and conservation: “Our science shows, that we can be successful on both fronts. We do, however, need to get the right policy signals in place now.”
Published : May 07, 2021
By : The Washington Post · Sarah Kaplan, Juliet Eilperin
Biden frames infrastructure debate as choice between needed investments and tax breaks for wealthy
NEW ORLEANS – Backdropped by a dilapidated bridge that has outlived its expected working life by two decades, President Joe Biden sought to define the debate on his $2 trillion infrastructure plan as a question of priorities: overdue investments that would benefit a wide swath of Americans versus tax cuts that would help a wealthy few.
“In my view, it’s an easy choice, between giving tax breaks to corporations and the super wealthy and investing in working families,” Biden said in front of the Calcasieu River Bridge in Lake Charles, La.
Biden said the 2017 tax cuts passed by Republicans “created a $2 trillion dollar deficit with the vast majority of that going to the top one tenth of one percent of the wage earners. I don’t want to punish anybody . . . Just pay your fair share,” he said.
“Trickle down ain’t working very well,” he added later. “We’ve got to build from the bottom up.”
Biden delivered a nearly 40-minute speech in a red state he lost by 20 points in November. Most of that speech was aimed at attacking the arguments against the $2 trillion plan, which would undo tax cuts for corporations that were a signature achievement of the Trump administration and use the money to pay for road and bridge repairs, upgrades to electrical grids and water systems and help speed Americans to a future where most cars on the road are electric.
Republicans have argued that Biden’s plan is a costly Trojan horse that would relabel a grab bag of liberal social policies as “infrastructure.” They maintain that low taxes for corporations and the wealthy would accelerate economic growth as the nation climbs out of pandemic-related economic stagnation. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said his top priority is to stop Biden’s ambitious agenda.
“One hundred percent of my focus is on stopping this new administration,” McConnell said during an appearance in Georgetown, Ky. “I think the best way to look at what this new administration is: The president may have won the nomination, but Bernie Sanders won the argument.”
In surveys, many Americans support the infrastructure proposal, but prominent business organizations, like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, oppose it.
Biden stressed that pieces of infrastructure like the Calcasieu River Bridge, a weak link in Interstate 10, are “a perfect example of how we’ve neglected to invest in our economy. It shouldn’t take so long to fix a bridge that is so important.”
Workers started building the Calcasieu River Bridge Bridge three years after the end of World War II. Finished in 1952, it was designed to funnel 37,000 vehicles a day over a five-decade life span. Now, 20 years past that expiration date, it funnels 80,000 cars a day. The speed limit has been dropped to 50 because of safety concerns, and trucks can only travel in the right lane. But the bridge remains a decaying chokepoint in the nation’s southernmost cross-country highway.
Later Thursday, Biden was scheduled to tour the Carrollton Water Plant in New Orleans, a city whose water system has pipes that are in some cases more than a century old. “We are hoping to get funding, and the fact is the system is aged,” New Orleans City Council member Jay Banks told a local television station earlier this week. “It is no longer even repairable. If something breaks, you have to make the part.”
Biden has said that his infrastructure plan would create millions of jobs, and that it would help the nation adopt climate friendly policies and address inequity, which his administration has said is an all-of-government concern.
Nearly 60% of the residents of New Orleans are Black, and the aftereffects of Hurricane Katrina remain a searing symbol of the intersection between inadequate infrastructure and racial inequity. The storm’s eye passed to the east of New Orleans, but the levees in the city and surrounding areas failed in more than 50 places, flooding 80% of the city.
In Thursday’s speech, Biden said the infrastructure would help Louisianans recover from the effects of extreme weather – and make cities like Lake Charles more resilient to future storms.
In the past decade, Louisiana has experienced 30 extreme weather events, according to the White House, costing the state up to $50 billion in damages. Lake Charles was shredded by Hurricane Laura in August, then hit again by Tropical Storm Delta a few months later. Local leaders worried that the region had been overlooked in its time of need during a year in which every part of the country was contending with the coronavirus pandemic.
“I’d be willing to break bread with anyone who’s willing to help,” said Nic Hunter, the Lake Charles Mayor, a Republican who introduced Biden. “Everyday that goes by without disaster relief is a day that Washington fails the people of southwest Louisiana.”
Hunter was Exhibit A for Biden’s argument that addressing the nation’s infrastructure has bipartisan support across the nation – if not in the halls of Congress. Louisiana’s Democratic Governor, John Bel Edwards, also spoke before Biden.
“I’ve never seen a Republican or Democrat road. I just see roads,” Biden said.
Biden stressed that he did not want to be the author of another infrastructure plan that is killed by partisanship.
“What I’m not ready to do is to do nothing,” he said. “I’m not ready to have another period where America has another infrastructure month and doesn’t do a damn thing.”
นายกฯ อินเดียไม่สนวิกฤตโควิดระบาดหนัก ผลักดันโครงการรีโนเวทรัฐสภามูลค่า 1,800 ล้านเหรียญสหรัฐ
นายกเทศมนตรีเมืองนิวยอร์กซิตีพร้อมฉีดวัคซีน Johnson & Johnson ให้นักท่องเที่ยว
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