Your daily briefing for all the top news in Energy, Technology, Finance, and Politics.

Energy

Colorado’s Anti-Fracking Retreat
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Editorial
How worried are Democrats about the November election? Look no further than Colorado, where this week they leaned on their green supporters to mute their anti-natural gas drilling agenda that is proving to be unpopular even in a liberal-trending state.

 

Strong economic case for coal divestment
FINANCIAL TIMES (Subscribe)
Al Gore and David Blood
Although the moral case for divesting from coal is a powerful one, the economic case for doing so is equally compelling. Of course, traders may find new opportunities to buy distressed coal assets and make money on a short-term basis. However, for long-term investors to be properly compensated for the risks of owning coal, they would have to believe coal will deliver sustained outperformance. Such a belief is increasingly difficult to reconcile with any credible risk-return analysis of long-term trends in the energy sector.

 

Colorado methane compromise could be model for other states
FUEL FIX
Jennifer Dlouhy
Oil companies and environmentalists can find common ground, Noble Energy CEO Chuck Davidson said Tuesday, pointing to first-of-their-kind regulations in Colorado aimed at corralling methane emissions from drilling.

 

CFTC Settlement in Crude-Oil Case Setback for Regulators
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Christian Berthelsen
In a setback for U.S. commodity regulators, two oil traders and their companies settled a major market-manipulation case for $13 million, a fraction of the penalties they potentially faced. The case was the only enforcement action to result from an investigation by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission into what caused the rapid escalation in oil prices during 2008, which peaked at $147 a barrel that year.
China Pushes to Build Its Own Ships to Deliver Gas
REUTERS
Chinese shipyards are seeking to take about $10 billion in orders for new liquefied natural gas tankers over the rest of the decade, part of a plan to restructure the country’s ailing shipbuilding sector and secure China’s energy supply chain.

 

Reducing Carbon by Curbing Population
NEW YORK TIMES
Eduardo Porter
Well, concerns about population seem to be creeping back. As the threat of climate change has evolved from a fuzzy faraway concept to one of the central existential threats to humanity, scholars like Professor Cohen have noted that reducing the burning of fossil fuels might be easier if there were fewer of us consuming them.

 

Ethanol is explosive for Cruz and Paul
THE HILL
Alexander Bolton
Iowa kingmakers in the party such as Sen. Chuck Grassley want the Republican presidential nominee in 2016 to champion ethanol. That’s a problem for Cruz and to a lesser extent for Paul, who are both crisscrossing the state this week in advance of possible campaigns for the presidency.

 

 

Technology

President warns ‘fast lanes’ on Web could hurt ‘the next Google’
THE HILL
Julian Hattem
“One of the issues around net neutrality is whether you are creating different rates or charges for different content providers,” Obama said at a business forum with African leaders.  “That’s the big controversy here. You have big, wealthy media companies who might be willing to pay more but then also charge more for more spectrum, more bandwidth on the Internet so they can stream movies faster or what have you,” he said. “The position of my administration, as well as I think a lot of companies here, is you don’t want to start getting a differentiation in how accessible the Internet is to various user,” Obama added. “You want to leave it open so that the next Google or the next Facebook can succeed.”

 

Latest beef on net neutrality: Enforcement
POLITICOPRO (Subscribe)
Alex Byers
Some tech companies and investors say the proposal’s lack of clear-cut rules — and the bureaucratic machinery involved in monitoring the system — could leave startups and smaller firms spinning their wheels in administrative fights while their businesses flounder in a fast-paced market.

 

FCC’s Friends and Family Plan
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Holman W. Jenkins
Racial spoils are making a comeback at the Federal Communications Commission after being put mostly to rest in an important 2006 reform. The latest sign is a quiet, nonpublic vote by Chairman Tom Wheeler and his two fellow Democrats to approve a waiver for minority entrepreneur David Grain, allowing him a 25% discount in this fall’s spectrum auction—a nice windfall. Mr. Grain already owns several spectrum licenses acquired as part of a swap between AT&T and Verizon—which he leases back to AT&T and Verizon. This alone should have made him ineligible for bidding credits. Credits aren’t supposed to be available to those who are looking merely to flip spectrum for easy profits.

 

Russian Gang Amasses Over a Billion Internet Passwords
NEW YORK TIMES
Nicole Perlroth and David Gelles
A Russian crime ring has amassed the largest known collection of stolen Internet credentials, including 1.2 billion user name and password combinations and more than 500 million email addresses, security researchers say. The records, discovered by Hold Security, a firm in Milwaukee, include confidential material gathered from 420,000 websites, including household names, and small Internet sites.

 

Sprint Abandons Pursuit of T-Mobile, Replaces CEO
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Ryan Knutson and Dana Mattioli
After months of arguing that it couldn’t compete effectively without a merger partner, Sprint Corp. is preparing to go it alone. The company decided Tuesday to end its pursuit of T-Mobile US Inc. in the face of stiff opposition from regulators and replace Chief Executive Dan Hesse with Marcelo Claure, a billionaire entrepreneur who is untested as a wireless operator.

 

Verizon to FCC: Our data throttling is perfectly reasonable. Everyone does it.
WASHINGTON POST
Brian Fung
Verizon’s letter to the FCC points out that all wireless carriers have implemented some form of data throttling in response to excessive usage, and that Verizon’s way of doing it is actually superior. “The FCC has expressly endorsed the type of targeted congestion management practice that we employ as a form or reasonable network management,” the letter reads. “Providers throughout the industry have employed similar (and often less tailored) versions of this same practice.”

 

How fast should basic Internet be? Telecom regulators want to know.
WASHINGTON POST
Brian Fung
Right now, Washington’s minimum definition of “broadband” is 4 megabits per second. At that rate, if you tried streaming a Netflix movie at standard quality it’d use up 75 percent of your available bandwidth, leaving you little capacity to do much else. So the FCC is thinking about raising the threshold for what’s considered broadband. In a formal notice Tuesday, the FCC asked the public to weigh in on whether it should raise the standard to 10 Mbps — which is roughly the current national average — or perhaps even higher, to 15 or 25 Mbps.

 

New Strategy as Tech Giants Transform Into Conglomerates
NEW YORK TIMES
Steven Davidoff Solomon
The deep pockets and willing buyers among Google and the like have changed the venture capital strategy. Now, the idea is to move into a hot space — social media! — and develop a product that the web conglomerates will buy at prices never before seen in private deals.

 

 

Finance

Federal Reserve and F.D.I.C. Fault Big Banks’ ‘Living Wills’
NEW YORK TIMES
Peter Eavis
Congress’s overhaul of the financial system aims to reshape large banks so that if they get into trouble they can descend into an orderly bankruptcy that does not set off a wider panic. But on Tuesday, two regulators, the Federal Reserve and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, sharply criticized the plans that the banks have prepared for winding themselves down in a controlled fashion. The F.D.I.C. said that it had determined that the so-called living wills were “not credible.”

 

Double Punch for ‘Inversion’ Deals
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Damian Paletta and Dana Mattioli
Overseas takeover deals designed to lower corporate taxes took a double-punch on Tuesday, with Walgreen Co. moving ahead with a foreign merger without the tactic and the U.S. Treasury Department saying it was looking for ways to deter the strategy. … But on Tuesday, a spokeswoman confirmed that Treasury “is reviewing a broad range of authorities for possible administrative actions that could limit the ability of companies to engage in inversions, as well as approaches that could meaningfully reduce the tax benefits after inversions take place.”

 

U.S. policymakers gird for rash of corporate expatriations
WASHINGTON POST
Lori Montgomery
Washington policymakers are bracing for a wave of corporations to renounce their U.S. citizenship over the next few months, depriving the federal government of billions of dollars in tax revenue and stoking public outrage ahead of the Nov. 4 congressional elections.

 

African Leaders Sit Down With American Investors
NEW YORK TIMES
Mark Landler
“Our entire trade with all of Africa is still only about equal to our trade with Brazil,” the president said. “I want Africans buying more American products; I want Americans buying more African products. I know you do, too, and that’s what you’re doing today.” The African leaders seemed gratified by Mr. Obama’s sales pitch, which was echoed by a roster of boldface names from the business world, including the chief executives of General Electric, Coca-Cola and IBM and private-equity titans from Blackstone and the Carlyle Group.

 

 

Politics

Poll Finds Widespread Economic Anxiety
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Patrick O’Connor
A new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found that despite the steady pace of hiring in recent months, 76% of adults lack confidence that their children’s generation will have a better life than they do—an all-time high. … The president’s approval rating dropped to 40% in this latest poll from 41% in a June survey, and he notched a disapproval rating of 54%, matching a previous high. Meanwhile, 36% approve of Mr. Obama’s handling of foreign policy, compared with the 60% who disapprove—his worst-ever marks. Congressional Republicans fared even worse, with 54% of adults viewing them negatively and just 19% expressing positive views, a gap of 35 percentage points. Democrats in Congress were viewed negatively by 46% and favorably by 31%, a difference of 15 points.

 

Democrats throw kitchen sink at Republicans ahead of midterms
THE HILL
Mike Lillis
While the Democrats’ official campaign strategy focuses wholly on the economy, education and women’s rights, party leaders have charged into the August recess with a much broader message that paints Republicans as too tough on immigrants, too easy on corporate election donors and too focused on toppling President Obama in lieu of helping the middle class. … But the strategy is not without its perils, as calling attention to a spectrum of topics also risks muddling their message ahead of the elections.

 

Obama is an unreliable ally
WASHINGTON POST
Sen. Bob Corker
Those around the world who are looking to the United States for support against intimidation, oppression or outright massacres have learned a tough lesson in the past few years: This U.S. president, despite his bold pronouncements and moral posturing, cannot be counted on.

 

How to really turn the economy around
USA TODAY
Charles Koch
When it comes to creating opportunities for all, we can do much better. It’s time to let people seek opportunities that best suit their talents, for businesses to forsake cronyism and for government to get out of the way.

 

Pat Roberts defeats tea party-backed Milton Wolf
POLITICO
Kyle Cheney and James Hohmann
Kansas Sen. Pat Roberts, aided by national Republican forces, beat back a tea party challenger Tuesday — effectively thwarting conservatives’ last, best hope to topple an incumbent GOP senator this year. With 95 percent of precincts reporting, according to The Associated Press, Roberts led Milton Wolf, 48 percent to 41 percent.

 

Frustration over stalled immigration action doesn’t mean Obama can act unilaterally
WASHINGTON POST
Editorial
The right response to the collapse of the U.S. immigration system is for Congress to fix the law. The House had a vehicle to do just that by taking up the legislation passed by the Senate last year. But it does not follow that Congress can be ignored based on its failure to act. The right response to lawmakers who won’t solve the immigration mess is to replace them with ones who will.