Oil Tanker Owners Pay to Move Crude in Wake of Supply Cuts

Alex Longley
Wed, January 20, 2021


Oil Tanker Owners Pay to Move Crude in Wake of Supply Cuts

(Bloomberg) -- Saudi Arabia’s oil production cuts have hit the tanker market so hard that owners of the biggest vessels are effectively subsidizing cargo deliveries on the industry’s main trade route.

Supertankers delivering 2-million-barrel shipments of the kingdom’s oil to China are losing $736 a day for the privilege, according to data from the Baltic Exchange in London on Tuesday. While owners might, in practice, be able to mitigate such losses by ordering captains to sail the vessels slower, the reality is that some ships are losing money on Middle East-to-Asia deliveries, according to Halvor Ellefsen, a shipbroker at Fearnleys.

“Even the most economical ships out there are struggling to get positive numbers,” he said. “It’s carnage right now.”


While tanker rates weren’t particularly strong up to the end of last year, they weren’t disastrous either. What really seems to have tipped the balance is when Saudi Arabia, wary of oil demand risks posed by Covid-19, announced that it would unilaterally cut 1 million barrels a day of production to support crude prices. That removed a big chunk of seaborne shipments in a market where cargoes were already curtailed.

It also came at a time when the supply of ships was being bolstered. Huge numbers of tankers had been used to store crude at sea when an oil market glut built up last year, and that’s now tumbling. Since its peak last year, about 132 million barrels of oil are no longer being stored at sea, enough to fill 66 supertankers, Vortexa data shows.

Traders also reported lower demand over the past few days from some buyers in Asia where refineries will soon start carrying out seasonal maintenance programs and therefore need fewer crude cargoes.

Seeking Approvals

While negative earnings may look illogical, owners might be tempted to operate ships at a loss because there are still costs involved in keeping a ship at anchor -- so they could lose money anyway. Vessels that spend too long without moving cargoes also risk losing much-prized approvals, whereby oil companies deem the ships fit for charter. Approvals can take time to secure.

Negative earnings can arise when the fees that oil companies pay to charter ships don’t cover the costs involved. At that point, owners either have to reject the bookings or pay some of the ship’s fuel bills.

As a result of the slump, analysts are expecting to see the tanker fleet begin to slow down when ships return, sailing in ballast, from having delivered cargoes.

“Earnings estimates are now sensitive to speed assumption,” said Clarksons Platou analysts including Frode Moerkedal. “Although we cannot see it in the average data yet, vessel speed on the empty return voyage from the Far East should go down.”

Adani to Raise $2.5 Billion From Green Deal With Total

Baiju Kalesh, Manuel Baigorri, Francois de Beaupuy and P R Sanjai
Mon, January 18, 2021


(Bloomberg) -- Indian billionaire Gautam Adani is raising $2.5 billion from a deal that includes the sale of a minority stake in his renewables business to French energy giant Total SE, a transaction that may help the tycoon cut group debt.

Paris-based Total will acquire 20% of Adani Green Energy Ltd. and a board seat as well as a 50% stake in a portfolio of operating solar assets with 2.35 gigawatts capacity, the company said Monday in a statement, confirming an earlier report by Bloomberg News. But shares of Adani Green have more than quadrupled in value in the past year in Mumbai, giving the company a market value of about $20 billion.

Adani is the latest Indian tycoon to raise money by selling a piece of his empire to an overseas partner, as rising consumption of electricity to fuels and mobile data makes the country an attractive destination for some investors. Last year, Mukesh Ambani -- India’s richest man -- mopped up about $27 billion from Facebook Inc., Google and private-equity investors for his technology and retail ventures.

“Primarily, this fund infusion will help Adani lower its leverage,” said Chakri Lokapriya, chief executive officer at TCG Asset Management in Mumbai. “Thanks to a series of deals, Adani is highly leveraged at this point of time.”

The Adani group, which started off as a commodities trader in 1988, has grown rapidly to become India’s top private-sector port operator and power generator. In 2019, Adani started focusing on airports, and now he’s trying to enter sectors including data storage and financial services.

The group had an overall gross debt of 1.74 trillion rupees ($24 billion) as of end-September, according to a November report from Credit Suisse. Adani Enterprises Ltd., the biggest listed company in his group, had about $1.7 billion of consolidated debt as of March 2020, according to Brickwork Ratings.

The latest transaction marks Total’s third commitment to the Adani group. In 2019, the French firm spent $600 million to buy a 37.4% stake in Adani Gas Ltd., now called Adani Total Gas, and in February last year, acquired 50% of a solar assets joint venture.

“India is the right place to put into action our energy transition strategy based on two pillars: renewables and natural gas,” Total CEO Patrick Pouyanne said in the statement.

It’s also Total’s third deal in a week in the renewables area, following the acquisition of a French biogas producer and of a stake in a large U.S. solar portfolio, underscoring mounting pressure from investors, governments and consumers on energy giants to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

Total, which invested $8 billion from 2016 to 2020 in battery manufacturing, power utilities, solar and wind projects, intends to increase spending on electricity and clean energy to become one of the top five renewable companies by the end of the decade. The producer, which had close to 7 gigawatts of gross renewable power capacity at the end of last year, is targeting 35 gigawatts by 2025.

Stiff Targets

“Renewable energy investment will have to be ramped up and oil and gas supermajors have set themselves fairly stiff targets,” said Debasish Mishra, a Mumbai-based partner at Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu. “India, given its increasing energy demand, renewable energy potential and policy intent, is an attractive investment destination.”

Adani Green is targeting 25 gigawatts of renewable capacity by 2025, the company said in a separate statement. Chairman Adani last year signaled there was room for founders to dilute their stake in the company and flagged global energy producers, including Total, were interested in investing as they expand their renewable portfolios.

Adani Green shares rose as much as 3.4% on Monday in Mumbai.

While Adani has done well at home, his controversial Carmichael coal mine in Australia has faced criticism from environmentalists, including from activist Greta Thunberg. Adani added $22.5 billion to his net worth last year to become India’s second-richest man, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Shale Driller Stuns Creditors as Argentina’s Dollars Dwindle

Scott Squires and Jonathan Gilbert
Tue, January 19, 2021


Shale Driller Stuns Creditors as Argentina’s Dollars Dwindle

(Bloomberg) -- In the 99 years since it was founded to pump the oil fields of Patagonia, Argentine energy driller YPF SA has been whipsawed by countless booms and busts. If global oil markets weren’t collapsing, it seemed, then Argentina was mired in a debt crisis that was wreaking havoc on the whole nation’s finances.

Never, though, had the company been pushed into a large-scale default of any kind. Until, it would appear, now. Word of this came in an odd way: Officials at state-run YPF sent a press release in the dead of night laying out a plan to saddle creditors with losses in a debt exchange.

Implicit in its statement was a threat that traders immediately understood -- failure to reach a restructuring deal could lead to a flat-out suspension of debt payments -- and they began frantically unloading the shale driller’s bonds the next morning. Today, some two weeks later, the securities trade as low as 56 cents on the dollar.


Creditors, including BlackRock Inc. and Howard Marks’s Oaktree Capital Group, are gearing up for bare-knuckled negotiations just four months after ironing out a restructuring deal with the government that marked the country’s third sovereign default this century alone.

YPF’s downfall underscores just how hard the pandemic has hammered both the global oil industry and the perennially hobbled Argentine economy. Dollars are now so scarce in Buenos Aires that the central bank refused to let YPF buy the full amount it needed to pay notes coming due in March. That was the immediate cause of the restructuring announcement.

A longer view reveals a steady decline in the company’s finances since the government re-nationalized it in 2012 and forced it to swell payrolls, artificially hold down domestic fuel prices and skimp on investments, leading to four straight years of oil-and-gas output declines.

YPF must now reach a deal with creditors to get its finances in order to boost investment in the gas-rich Vaca Muerta shale formation in Patagonia.

The task is even more urgent as the South American winter approaches with YPF unable to meet domestic gas demand, meaning Argentina will have to boost imports -- and fork over precious hard currency -- in the middle of a global spike in prices.

“The central bank’s decision really put YPF between a rock and a hard place,” said Lorena Reich, a corporate-debt analyst at Lucror Analytics in Buenos Aires.

In private conversations with investors, YPF officials are portraying the deal as a voluntary exchange and are insisting that they will pay back all their bonds -- with the exception of the notes coming due in March -- whether they are tendered in the swap or not. But that’s certainly not how investors interpret the situation, and ratings companies say the proposal constitutes a distressed exchange that would be tantamount to default.

The company’s $413 million in bonds due in March tumbled 6.5 cents Tuesday, the most since September, to about 82 cents on the dollar.

Overall, YPF is seeking to restructure $6.2 billion of bonds, pushing back a total of $2.1 billion in debt payments through the end of next year so that it can invest the money in bolstering production. The deal offers investors a slight upside from current bond prices, but would stick creditors with losses of as high as 16% on a net-present-value basis, according to calculations by Portfolio Personal Inversiones, a local brokerage.

While some investors had anticipated YPF would try to refinance its short-term debt -- without imposing any losses -- the plan to restructure virtually all the company’s overseas bonds was a big surprise.

“The offer crossed the line of reason,” said Ray Zucaro, the chief investment officer at RVX Asset Management in Miami, who owns YPF bonds. “There was no reason they needed to include all the bonds when they only needed relief on the short-dated notes.”

YPF says it included all its securities in the swap to give all its bondholders a fair shot at exchanging into a new export-backed note maturing in 2026 that offers more protection than unsecured debt.

Creditors have begun to form groups to negotiate the terms of the restructuring, and while the talks haven’t begun in earnest, the company says it’s willing to negotiate. On Jan. 14, YPF amended some of the rules for its consent solicitation after investor outcry over a procedural issue.

Cash Crunch

Argentina’s cash crunch couldn’t come at a worse time for YPF, which was already facing a drop in demand because of the pandemic. The driller needs more investment to ramp up capital-intensive shale production in Vaca Muerta as aging traditional fields decline. It’s expected to spend $2.2 billion in 2021 after last year’s paltry $1.5 billion. But that’s still a far cry from the more than $6 billion a year it invested in the wake of the nationalization.

As the company looks for savings in the bond market, it’s also slashing other costs, cutting salaries and reducing its bloated workforce by 12%. It’s trying to sell stakes in some oil fields, as well as its headquarters in Buenos Aires, a sleek glass skyscraper where executives take calls looking out over the vast River Plate estuary into Uruguay.

Founded in 1922 as one of the world’s first entirely state-run oil companies, YPF was passed from nationalist governments to military dictatorships until the early 1990s, when it was sold to Madrid-based Repsol SA as part of a short-lived attempt to free up the economy. In 2012, President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner’s leftist government expropriated 51% of the company, eventually paying Repsol $5 billion in bonds for its stake. YPF’s market value today is just $1.6 billion.

The central bank’s refusal to sell YPF the dollars it needs to pay its obligations, despite the company’s earlier efforts to refinance its short-term debt, is a bad sign for all overseas corporate bonds from Argentina, according to the financial services firm TPCG. The concern is that if the country’s flagship company isn’t eligible to buy dollars at the official exchange rate as the bank seeks to hold onto hard-currency reserves, no one else will be either.

“The central bank’s message is pretty clear,” said Santiago Barros Moss, a TPCG analyst in Buenos Aires. “There just aren’t enough dollars in Argentina for corporates right now.”

(Updates bond prices in the 11th paragraph. A previous version of this story corrected the 10th paragraph to make clear that YPF is telling investors that bonds maturing in 2021 wouldn’t be repaid if a restructuring deal fails.)

©2021 Bloomberg L.P.

The US Can Make Bitcoin Mining Greener

James Cooper
Tue, January 19, 2021


The incoming administration of Joe Biden has an opportunity to take the global lead in green mining for digital assets. It is no secret that there is a geopolitical struggle brewing over new forms of cryptocurrencies – both state-backed and private – and the best location for new capital formation and technological advancements. To win this global competition, the new U.S. government must ensure more regulatory clarity for digital assets while also ensuring that the mining process, a tremendous drain on energy resources and a contributor to global warming, is done in an environmentally sensitive way.

Some of the new administration’s leaders should work together to make policies to encourage development in this burgeoning industry. The expected ascension of Gary Gensler, a former chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, to lead the Securities and Exchange Commission augurs well for a more enlightened and proactive approach by regulators concerning digital assets. After all, he just finished teaching a course on blockchain at MIT, sees the technology as a “catalyst for change,” and is viewed as a threat to the legacy financial system. That’s all good for the disruptive financial technologies.

James Cooper is a Professor of Law and Associate Dean of Experiential Learning at California Western School of Law. He is moderating a panel for Digital Davos on Jan. 20 on ethics and technologies in developing countries.

Related: Bitcoin Is Aiding the Ransomware Industry

Also, the naming of former Secretary of State John Kerry to a cabinet-level position as Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, is a signal of the new administration’s commitment to tackling global climate change. He understands the importance of cryptocurrency. At the World Economic Forum three years ago this week, Kerry was quoted as saying cryptocurrency has “got value.” Together, these two appointees can ensure the country leads fintech development while preventing crypto mining from contributing to more greenhouse gases.

A raft of projects abroad are already primed for success in the green mining space and can act as models for the United States. In 2019, Bitfury set up mining centers in Paraguay, home to South America’s biggest hydro-electric project – the Itaipu Dam – the world’s largest generator of renewable clean energy. The government in Asunción has backed the Commons Foundation’s Golden Goose project, in its attempt to establish the region as the world’s largest crypto mining center. But there is a challenge to keep the Paraguay project itself from contributing to greenhouse gases given the intense heat that the tropical country faces year round. It would be counter-productive to use a lot of energy to cool the computers even if the energy was being produced by renewable sources.

See also: Jeff Bandman – What Crypto Can Expect From Gary Gensler at the SEC

Cost-effective mining centers based on renewable energy have also been established in Russia’s frozen lands of Siberia. The city of Norilsk is home to the mineral mining behemoth Norilsk Nickel but increasingly bitcoin mining is becoming an important economic driver. With temperatures in winter bottoming out at minus 40 degrees Celsius (which is roughly minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit), this is a perfect climate by which to keep computing machines cool. It’s a lot cooler than Paraguay for sure.

Related: Nvidia May Restart Production of Crypto Mining GPUs if Demand Sufficient

Nor should we forget about China, the home to over half the bitcoin miners in the world, the majority of whom are situated in Sichuan due to low energy costs, powered by hydro-electric facilities. That the area has recently suffered some of the worst flooding in 70 years, largely due to climate change, shows that irony is as much at play here as hash rates. Poolin, which controls the majority of BTC hash rate, has had trouble with consistent energy supplies and some of its mining farms have been inundated by monsoon floods. Even with the province’s vast hydro-electric capabilities, the authorities in the People’s Republic of China have generally banned the digital asset industry – shuttering mining, exchanges and industry conferences.

A more secure and geographically proximate project is rolling out near the Churchill Falls hydro-electric plant in Labrador, a remote part of Eastern Canada. Pow.re, a Montreal-based company with investors from Asia, is taking advantage of the stranded energy that NL Hydro generates. This hydro-electric facility is long past emitting mercury traces, so the project meets many environmental protection and sustainable development goals. The temperature rarely exceeds 60 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer, ensuring that the machines stay cool. The only source of waste is heat – which is a luxury in the sub-Arctic region where they are mining.

See also: State of Crypto: What the Crypto World Should Watch for in the Biden Era

The United States has much to learn from such foreign green mining projects. There are some new initiatives to encourage bitcoin mining stateside (including a new legislative bill in Kentucky to provide state tax incentives), but many of these are not green and may contribute to the earth’s warming. Coal-fired power plants supply 73% of Kentucky’s electrical generation, for example, dulling the greenness of that project. (Layer1’s mining project in Texas, by contrast, is prized for its environmental performance.)

And while bountiful and clean electricity are critical to providing hash rates that are cost effective and have little environmental impact, so are champions in major policy-making positions. The combination of Gensler and Kerry in the Biden administration can help position the United States at the forefront of green mining. President Biden promised to “build back better.” Green mining is one such way. Private companies are getting in on this opportunity too: Square Crypto recently announced a $10 million fund to promote projects that use green energy for bitcoin mining.

The U.S. government has much to gain by providing regulatory clarity for fintech and environmentally sound policies for cryptocurrency mining. If it does not, there are plenty of other countries to take the lead and profit accordingly.

Analysis: A lot of hot air? Investors snap up hydrogen stocks in green frenzy


Elizabeth Howcroft and Thyagaraju Adinarayan
Wed, January 20, 2021,

LONDON (Reuters) - An unprecedented rally in "green" hydrogen stocks looks set to extend as investors flock to companies which promise to produce the gas without using fossil fuels, 

BULLSHIT IT REQUIRES NATURAL GAS

expecting the technology to scale up over the next 10 years to justify rocketing valuations.

Hydrogen is earth's most abundant element but is mostly extracted from fossil fuels, emitting carbon dioxide in the process. "Green" or clean hydrogen requires using electrolysis to split water into its components of hydrogen and oxygen and doing so cheaply is often described as the holy grail of green energy transition.

Share prices of companies in the industry have soared more than 500% in the past year, driven by the rising adoption of zero-emission vehicles, a deadline set by many countries to go carbon-free by 2050 and lately U.S. President-elect Joe Biden's support for clean energy.

Plug Power, Ceres Power and Fuelcell Energy, which make hydrogen fuel cell systems that power devices ranging from warehouse machines to cars, are leading that charge, jumping 400% to 1,600% in the last year.

"Hot money is flowing towards renewables and clean energy, and there's been a clear re-rating of valuations in the sector," said Emmanuel Cau, head of European equity strategy at Barclays.

While a lot of focus has been on hydrogen's role in the automotive sector, its usage is growing far beyond that.

The European Union plans to scale up renewable hydrogen projects across polluting sectors ranging from chemicals to steel with cumulative investments in renewable hydrogen in the region seen reaching up to 470 billion euros ($570 billion) by 2050, the region's commission said.

That has fuelled the stocks of electrolyser makers Norway's Nel and UK's ITM Power.

"The momentum just keeps going really with this theme," Ashim Paun, HSBC's global co-head of climate change and ESG research said on a webinar.

ZeroAvia, a hydrogen plane startup, last month secured $37.7 million in new cash via a funding round led by Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures and from the British government to support its bid to develop zero-emission aircraft.

The frenzy in hydrogen-related stocks has led to some concerns about a bubble, with companies trading at extreme prices based on expectations that their revenue will surge in future, despite worries about possible headwinds for the sector.

Widespread adoption of hydrogen as a fuel for cars is far from a given.

Toyota launched a new hydrogen fuel cell car in December, but it has largely failed to win customers over to the technology amid concerns about a lack of fuelling stations, resale values and the risk of hydrogen explosions.

The momentum behind electric vehicles may be another headwind, said Jonathan Bell, chief investment officer at Stanhope Capital.

"The problem with hydrogen is that sometimes when you have two competing systems, it’s not the better technology that wins, it's the one that gets market share and the network effect first of all," Bell said.

UK-based ITM Power, which manufactures the electrolysers needed to make green hydrogen, is trading at a massive seven times its 2030 sales, while rival Nel is relatively cheap at three times 2030 sales, according to HSBC's calculations.

Some investors may avoid the sector altogether, after a similar burst of enthusiasm two decades ago proved short-lived, and much of the latest excitement around green energy is based on Biden's policy plans, which are yet to be passed into law.

But no bank is ringing the alarm bells, yet.

JP Morgan analysts advised long-term investors in a recent note to take advantage of any pullback in prices and "take an unorthodox approach to valuation for the next several years" - in other words, not worry about a potential bubble.

Sean McLoughlin, HSBC EMEA head of industrials research, said scarce value in the market, unprecedented fiscal stimulus, low cost of capital and debt and low yields in other asset classes mean the hydrogen market's valuation may be justified though he cautioned it was at a "potentially fraught level."

"There’s a lot of capital that is very ESG-focused chasing a select number of companies that offer this kind of pure play exposure to these future energy trends. So there is a risk that this may unwind."

($1 = 0.8258 euros)

(Reporting by Thyagaraju Adinarayan and Elizabeth Howcroft, additional reporting by Julien Ponthus; editing by Rachel Armstrong and Emelia Sithole-Matarise)

Global Stock Fund With 41% Gain Makes Climate Top Priority

Jackie Edwards
Wed, January 20, 2021




2 / 2Global Stock Fund With 41% Gain Makes Climate Top Priority

(Bloomberg) -- A Melbourne-based global equity fund manager has raised climate-related issues to the top of his investment priority list as major economies and companies step up their environmental ambitions.

Climate will become one of the biggest growth areas over the next 20 years as entities from the European Union to Microsoft Corp. pledge to become carbon neutral, said Nick Griffin, chief investment officer at Munro Partners. The theme now accounts for 18% of the stocks in his Munro Global Growth Fund, up from under 10% as of September. The fund returned 41% last year compared with a 5.9% gain in the MSCI All Country World Net Index in Australian dollar terms, according to its website.

“The decarbonization of the planet is going to happen, period,” Griffin said in a webinar on Tuesday. “There are just too many stakeholders that are on board here.”


Investing focused on environmental, social and corporate governance issues has exploded globally amid the pandemic, an upsurge in retail investing and government stimulus. Clean energy and electric-vehicle stocks have climbed over the last few months, with Joe Biden’s U.S. presidential election win further bolstering the prospects for environment-friendly policies.

A flurry of countries and corporations have recently set zero carbon targets. Europe has said it aims to become the first climate-neutral continent by the middle of the century, while China set a deadline to end emissions by 2060. Microsoft last month joined a coalition of companies vowing to reduce its contribution to climate change.

While Biden’s victory boosted the fight against climate change, the world’s path toward carbon neutrality was already unfolding, Griffin said.

Global investment in transitioning to low-carbon energy projects and systems -- including generation, storage and end-use devices like electric vehicles -- totaled $501.3 billion in 2020, up 9% from a year earlier and more than twice the 2013 total, according to BloombergNEF.

Assets in ESG exchange-traded funds more than doubled in 2020 to over $200 billion, driven by pension funds and millennial interest, according to Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Shaheen Contractor. And asset managers including BlackRock Inc. have touted the performance of their ESG investments.

The biggest contributors to gains in Griffin’s A$1 billion ($773 million) fund in the latest quarter included Danish renewable energy firms Orsted AS and Vestas Wind Systems A/S as well as Korean electric-car battery maker Samsung SDI Co., according to its latest performance report.

Japanese Politicians Are Pushing to Give Everyone 4-Day Work Weeks



The politician from the Liberal Democratic Party is spearheading the push for a bill that would give workers a three-day weekend without affecting job security. About the bill: House of Councilors member Kuniko Inoguchi, who represents a district of Chiba Prefecture, saw the potential to introduce the bill after the successful implementation of four-day workweeks by a few Japanese companies in the past, according to Sankei Shimbun via SoraNews24.

“We have seen that Japan has a latent ability to create flexible work environments and workstyles,” the politician said.

In 2019, Microsoft Japan gave its workers three-day weekends for the entire month of August. The experiment — which the company called the Work-Life Choice Challenge Summer 2019 — was a huge success, and Microsoft Japan saw a nearly 40% increase in productivity.

Mizuho Financial Group introduced a similar experiment last year, giving its workers the freedom to take four-day weekends.

The government is willing to hand out financial incentives to encourage smaller companies to support the proposed bill.

Pros and cons: The bill would give workers the option to take a three-day weekend whenever they'd like. This would boost team productivity and provide both company employees and the general public with various benefits amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

One benefit is the reduced number of workers taking public vehicles and spending time with other people. The bill would help support the fight against COVID-19.

Three-day weekends could also give employees plenty of opportunities to spend time with their families and pursue other ways to earn money or further their education.

However, there are problems that employees must keep in mind. One issue is a cut in one's salary, for workers might only receive 80% of it due to working four days instead of five.

The pay cut could also change an employee's status from full-time to part-time, but workers who take three-day weekends would still keep their jobs and the benefits that full-time workers receive.

 

Supreme Court justices lean toward FCC bid to loosen media ownership rules

By Andrew Chung

(Reuters) - Conservative U.S. Supreme Court justices signaled sympathy on Tuesday toward a bid by President Donald Trump's administration, backed by broadcast companies, to loosen regulations that critics have said promote a diversity of views in local broadcast media and ownership by racial minorities and women.

During arguments by teleconference in the case, conservative justices asked questions that appeared to indicate they believe the Federal Communications Commission did not overstep its authority in repealing certain media ownership regulations in 2017. The court has a 6-3 conservative majority.

The justices were considering appeals by the FCC, companies including News Corp, Fox Corp and Sinclair Broadcast Group Inc and the National Association of Broadcasters of a lower court ruling that blocked the rule changes for failing to consider the effects on ownership diversity.

The broadcast industry wants a freer hand to consolidate operations, and the FCC's move helped that goal. But critics of the FCC's action have said loosening ownership rules as the agency did could jeopardize a wider array of news and information sources at the local level.

The Philadelphia-based 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has thwarted the FCC's efforts to revise the rules since 2003 in a series of decisions.

Chief Justice John Roberts and other conservative justices focused during the arguments on the FCC's obligation to extensively analyze potential impacts on women and minorities.

Roberts wondered whether the FCC should have to justify changing its focus from one priority to another that it thinks is more important, such as cross-ownership between broadcast and print media as opposed to ownership by minorities and women.

"Reasonable people can disagree on that," Roberts said.

Fellow conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch said that a 1996 law directing the FCC to periodically review ownership rules had a "deregulatory impulse and yet that impulse idea has never been exercised."

Liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor said that the FCC has "for decades" considered minority and women ownership when making its rules and that legal precedent requires an adequate explanation if that approach is rejected.

At issue in the case is a 2019 ruling by the 3rd Circuit, which ordered the FCC to reconsider the issue.

In 2017, the Republican-led FCC voted to eliminate a ban in place since 1975 on cross-ownership of a newspaper and TV station in a major market. It also voted to make it easier for media companies to buy additional TV stations in the same market, for local stations to jointly sell advertising time and for companies to buy additional radio stations in some markets.

The new rules were challenged by a number of community advocacy groups led by Prometheus Radio Project.

(Reporting by Andrew Chung in New York; Additional reporting by David Shepardson in Washington; Editing by Will Dunham)

Republicans built up QAnon backer Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, but now are they afraid of what they created?

Marquise Francis
·National Reporter & Producer
Tue, January 19, 2021

On the eve of President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration, freshman Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the combative Georgia Republican known for her association with the fantastical, cultlike QAnon conspiracy theory, was back on Twitter after a 12-hour suspension, and back to making waves and rocking the precarious boat that Republicans find themselves in, having lost the White House and both chambers of Congress.

“I’ve said this all along, it’s people over politicians, not the other way around,” Greene tweeted late Monday night, just hours after her Twitter account was reinstated after it was suspended for violating the social media giant’s policies. “It’s the people of this country that matter. That’s why I’m asking everyone to join me as a Citizen Cosponsor to #ImpeachBiden.”

A rising star among the far-right wing of the party because of her brash, outspoken pro-gun, anti-abortion, stridently conservative views, Greene has most recently found herself at odds with Republican officials, who are alarmed by her record of conspiracy-mongering, bigoted rhetoric and last-stand efforts to undo the election results in her own state.

On Tuesday, Media Matters for America uncovered Facebook posts by Greene from 2018 in which she accused House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton of encouraging school shootings to push for gun control, calling the tragedy at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., in which 17 people were killed and 17 others injured, a staged “false flag” operation.

“I am told that Nancy Pelosi tells Hillary Clinton several times a month that ‘we need another school shooting’ in order to persuade the public to want strict gun control,” Greene wrote.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene with a “Trump won” face mask. (Erin Scott-Pool/Getty Images)

GOP colleagues have gone out of their way to denounce what one called her “cuckoo” ways.

“She’ll keep making fools out of herself, her constituents, and the Republican Party,” Republican Sen. Ben Sasse from Nebraska wrote in a recent op-ed for the Atlantic, describing Greene as “cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.”

“If the GOP is to have a future outside the fever dreams of internet trolls, we have to call out falsehoods and conspiracy theories unequivocally. We have to repudiate people who peddle those lies,” he added.

Last summer Republican officials panicked after videos uploaded to Greene’s Facebook account emerged that showed the then candidate making a series of racist, anti-Semitic and Islamophobic comments. As thousands of Americans across the country were in the streets marching daily on behalf of racial justice in the aftermath of the police killing of George Floyd, Greene was spewing hate. GOP officials attempted to distance themselves from her campaign.

“The comments made by Ms. Greene are disgusting and don’t reflect the values of equality and decency that make our country great,” Republican House Minority Whip Steve Scalise said, throwing his support to Greene’s primary opponent, neurosurgeon John Cowan.

Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy told Politico, through his spokesman, that the comments were “appalling” and he had “no tolerance for them.” But McCarthy stayed neutral in the race, choosing to let the primary play out. Greene and Cowan ended up in a runoff, which Greene won.

Some Republican lawmakers then were worried that not enough pushback by national GOP leaders on Greene’s actions would create a firestorm that would not be so easily put out in the months to come.

“This is the kind of race and kind of situation where you need those groups,” said Rep. Buddy Carter, R-Ga., who also supported Greene’s primary opponent. (Her Democratic opponent, who faced long odds in the overwhelmingly Republican district, withdrew before the Nov. 3 general election.) “So often, they only get involved when they have someone that they are trying to get in. But I think it’s just as important they get involved when there’s someone they’re trying to get out.”

Marjorie Taylor Greene and Sen. Kelly Loeffler arrive at a campaign press conference. (Dustin Chambers/Getty Images)

Today they’re seeing their fears play out.

Greene, who became the first open supporter of QAnon elected to Congress in November, now uses her growing social media following and access to conservative media organizations like Newsmax and OANN to spread lies and push political propaganda. She plans to file an article of impeachment for Biden on his first full day in office because of “abuse of power,” citing Biden’s alleged family business connections with China and Ukraine, but she has not offered evidence of wrongdoing.

Greene has been somewhat of a loose cannon in recent weeks on Twitter, spreading lies about election integrity in her state and pushing for “all Americans” to “mobilize and make your voices heard in opposition to these attacks on our liberties” in a now deleted tweet archived by ProPublica.

She’s even come down on fellow Republican officials.

“Morons like you are responsible for losing GA’s 2 Republican Senate seats,” Greene tweeted in response to Georgia election official Gabriel Sterling’s assertion that she, former Rep. Doug Collins and President Trump were responsible for the substantial drop-off in Republican voter turnout in the Georgia Senate runoff elections. “You ran a Nov 3rd election that was stolen bc you idiots at the SOS mailed out millions of absentee ballots to any one and everyone while GA was an open state.”

On Sunday, Twitter suspended Greene’s account for 12 hours “for multiple violations of our civic integrity policy,” according to a Twitter spokesperson, which included lying about the elections’ validity.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene is searched by U.S. Capitol Police after setting off a metal detector. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

But Greene’s status among hard-core conservative voters in the party seems secure for the time being. She has gained popularity as a vocal supporter of Trump’s efforts to overturn the presidential election, and has risen to borderline conservative stardom by openly supporting QAnon, a baseless theory that Trump is fighting a cabal of “deep state” saboteurs who worship Satan and traffic children for sex. The FBI has deemed the conspiracy theory a domestic terrorism threat.

In recent months she’s tried to distance herself from QAnon, but in an earlier video posted to YouTube, which she has since made private, Greene expressed her admiration for the theory. “Q is a patriot,” she said. “He is someone that very much loves his country, and he’s on the same page as us, and he is very pro-Trump.”

Yahoo News reached out to Greene for comment, but she has not responded to the request.

Following the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, Twitter increased its efforts to purge misinformation and incitements to violence from its site. Last week it deleted more than 70,000 accounts that were used to share QAnon conspiracy theories.

But critics want more accountability.

A MoveOn petition to “Remove Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene” from Congress had garnered more than 40,000 signatures as of Tuesday afternoon.

Boebert is a freshman Republican lawmaker from Colorado who holds many of the same views as Greene, and has also dabbled in QAnon conspiracies. Rep. Steve Cohen, a Democrat from Tennessee, said Monday that he and Rep. John Yarmuth, D-Ky., had both seen Boebert giving a tour of the Capitol to a “large” group ahead of the riot. Boebert denies this.

The petition accuses Greene and Boebert of “dereliction of duty” and “collusion” in the Capitol riot and occupation, which is under investigation by the House.

Some progressive activists are calling for Greene to be held accountable for spreading lies about election fraud.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (center, in red) and other newly elected Republican House members at the Capitol. (Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)

“Leave aside the results of this latest big lie, that the president and his enablers won an election, leading to an assault of our Capitol. ... It’s extremely troubling and dangerous for the underpinnings of our democracy, [which] relies on the way we elect our leaders, and a peaceful transfer of power,” Robert Brandon, president and CEO of Fair Elections Center, a national, nonpartisan voting rights organization, told Yahoo News. “Certainly if there are folks who contributed to that, they should be held accountable.”

In a year that saw record voter turnout, Brandon warns about a rollback in voting rights in the coming months as a result.

“Voter fraud has been talked about for 20 years, but normally as a way to disenfranchise voters,” he added. “We just saw a loosening up of voting options, whether it be mail-in voting or early voting in this year’s elections, and I think we will have an attack on that, starting in states like Georgia.”

University of New Haven associate professor of national security and political science Matthew Schmidt believes Greene’s rhetoric heightens the danger from right-wing extremists.

“The No. 1 national security threat has been domestic extremist groups,” Schmidt told Yahoo News. “It’s not ISIS, it’s not al-Qaida, it’s not Russia, it’s not China. It’s white supremacists and whoever else is attaching themselves onto QAnon. Reps like Marjorie Greene incite these groups. When she repeats these conspiracy theories that have no basis, she gives them validity because she’s an elected official. It’s incredibly dangerous ... and has a long-term effect because this information is used to pass down to other generations that people with differing views are wrong and this is how you can act in response.”

Schmidt added that Congress ultimately has the power to hold Greene and others accountable for things they do and say, but acknowledged that it’s a slippery slope to push to limit any form of free speech.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene at the U.S. Capitol. (Ting Shen/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

“[The issue] is that this is the intersection of free speech and culpability of a criminal process,” Schmidt said. “Right now you don’t see enough evidence that she has incited a specific act, but ... Congress has the capability to set its own rules and its ethics violations. There could be a way Congress could censor its members ... using rules violations.”

But Republicans now have to ask themselves: Have they created a monster they can’t control? Greene has already announced her intention to file an article of impeachment against Biden on his first day in office, a stunt certain to get more attention than votes, but which can only enhance the impression of congressional Republicans as being more interested in showboating than in governing — and complicating McCarthy’s hopes of winning a majority in 2022 and becoming speaker of the House.

Republican leaders have faced this situation before — just last year, in fact, when, after years of tolerating the barely concealed racism and bigotry of Rep. Steve King of Iowa, they decided he went too far in an interview in which he questioned what was offensive about the phrase and concept of “white supremacist.”

Kicked off his committees and denied support by the national party, King lost to a primary challenger and is now out of Congress. It remains to be seen whether Greene and Boebert will take his example to heart.

Cover thumbnail photo: Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images

 Washington state nixes methanol plant meant to supply China

Tue, January 19, 2021

OLYMPIA, Wash. (AP) — Officials in Washington state denied a key permit for a large proposed methanol plant Tuesday, saying the project that aims to send the chemical to China to be used in everything from fabrics and contact lenses to iPhones and medical equipment would pump out too much pollution.

A significant increase in greenhouse gas emissions and inconsistencies with the Shoreline Management Act were the main reasons the permit was rejected for the project planned on the Columbia River, the state Department of Ecology said in a news release.

The $2 billion Northwest Innovation Works plant proposed in Kalama would take natural gas from Canada and convert it into methanol. It would then be shipped to China to make olefins — compounds used in many everyday products.

An environmental analysis done by the state agency found that the facility would be one of the largest sources of carbon pollution in Washington, emitting nearly 1 million metric tons a year within the state, and millions of tons more from extracting natural gas, shipping the product to Asia and final uses of the methanol, officials said.

“I believe we were left with no other choice than to deny the permit for the Kalama project," Ecology Director Laura Watson said in a written statement. "The known and verifiable emissions from the facility would be extremely large and their effects on Washington’s environment would be significant and detrimental.”

The Department of Ecology last year had demanded additional environmental analysis, saying after five years of planning, its backers had failed to provide enough information about the greenhouse gas emissions and how they would be offset.

The company has 21 days to appeal the permit decision.

“While we are disappointed by this ruling and evaluating our options for an immediate appeal, we feel confident that science and reason will prevail,” Kent Caputo, attorney for Northwest Innovation Works, said in a news release.

The company is backed by the Chinese government and has said the project will create 1,000 jobs and generate up to $40 million in annual tax revenue. The company also has said it would offset any emissions produced directly or indirectly in Washington state.

“We volunteered to set mitigation standards that will make Washington state the national leader,” Northwest Innovation Works CEO Simon Zhang said in the news release. “We want to create a model project for Kalama, the state, and the nation.”

Gov. Jay Inslee, who once backed the project as a boost to the economy, changed his stance in May 2019 as he signed a bill banning fracking, The Seattle Times reported.

Inslee said at the time that he couldn't in good conscience support the methanol plant, along with a Tacoma liquified natural gas project, because they wouldn't accomplish what's necessary to combat climate change. He also said the withdrawal of his support would not affect the regulatory decision-making process.

Conservation groups, including Columbia Riverkeeper, the Sierra Club and the Center for Biological Diversity, have been steadfast in their opposition.

“We can’t keep pretending these dirty fossil fuel projects don’t jeopardize our continued existence by accelerating the climate crisis and destroying essential habitat," Jared Margolis, an attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a news release. "Thankfully, Washington has stepped up and rejected this monstrosity.”