April 25 2024
Baby bust
1 US fertility rate lowest since records began in 1930s
2 War in Israel threatens to split Democratic coalition
3 Government issues new rules targeting coal plants
4 VW workers in Tennessee vote to unionize
5 US shale shelters America from oil price surges
4/25/1953 The magazine Nature publishes an article by biologists Francis Crick and James Watson, describing the “double helix” of DNA
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1 US fertility rate lowest since records began in 1930s
American women are giving birth at record-low rates. The total fertility rate fell to 1.62 births per woman in 2023, a 2% decline from a year earlier, federal data released Thursday showed. It is the lowest rate recorded since the government began tracking it in the 1930s. The decline reflects a continuing trend as American women navigate economic and social challenges that have prompted some to forgo or delay having children. A confluence of factors are at play. American women are having fewer children, later in life. Women are establishing fulfilling careers and have more access to contraception. At the same time, young people are also more uncertain about their futures and spending more of their income on homeownership, student debt and child care. Some women who wait to have children might have fewer than they would have otherwise for reasons including declining fertility.
2 War in Israel threatens to split Democratic coalition
Public-opinion polls offer another vivid measure of Democratic discontent over the war and the U.S. approach to it. In a recent national Quinnipiac University poll, almost two-thirds of Democrats said they opposed sending further military aid to Israel. In a CBS News/YouGov national poll released Sunday but conducted before Saturday’s hostilities, most Democrats wanted the U.S. to support Israel if Iran attacked it. But two-thirds of Democrats again opposed weapons transfers to Israel for the war with Hamas, and nearly half said Biden should push Israel to entirely end its military action; another fourth of respondents said he should encourage it to wind down the campaign. These negative opinions about the war, and Biden’s approach to it, have been especially pronounced among younger voters. That points to a third central measure of dissension within Democratic ranks: widespread campus-based protests. One telling measure of that challenge for Biden came earlier this month, when the president of the University of Michigan issued new policies toughening penalties against disruptive campus protests. The fact that the leading university in a state that is virtually a must-win for Biden felt compelled to impose new restrictions on protests underscored the intensity of the activism against the Gaza war. Protest “has been pretty persistent since October,” Ali Allam, a University of Michigan sophomore active in the TAHRIR coalition leading the campus protests, told me. “I don’t know very many people who are planning on voting for Biden, because they have seen time and time again, he is a person who says, ‘We’re concerned about the situation,’ and yet he continues to sign off on providing more and more weapons. And that is just not something young people are willing to get behind.” Michigan is a somewhat unique case because of the state’s large Arab American population, which provides an especially impassioned core for the protest movement. But the student hostility to the war has extended to a broad range of left-leaning younger voters that Democrats count on. In Michigan, for instance, some 80 campus groups are part of the TAHRIR coalition, including organizations representing Black, Latino, Asian, and Jewish students, Allam said. Ben Rhodes, who now co-hosts a popular podcast aimed primarily at liberal young people, Pod Save the World, sees the same trend. “It’s not just Arab and Muslim Americans in Michigan, or foreign-policy lefties,” he told me. “It’s this kind of mainstream of the young part of the Democratic coalition.” As Biden advisers point out, the other recent Democratic presidents also provoked internal opposition in Congress or in polls to some of their foreign-policy decisions. But it’s difficult to identify an example under Carter, Clinton, or Obama that combined all three of the elements of Democratic discontent Biden is now facing.
The Atlantic
3 Government issues new rules targeting coal plants
The Biden administration on Thursday issued sweeping new rules that crack down on power-plant pollution and could force many of the country’s coal plants to shutter unless they undertake costly upgrades. The rules, which will almost certainly be challenged in court, mandate strict controls on carbon-dioxide emissions at existing coal plants and newly built natural-gas plants. They set the stage for a significant infrastructure build-out to capture and dispose of CO2 emitted at such plants in order to comply. The changes come as the industry juggles the first upswing in power demand in two decades and a shifting generation mix. Solar and wind projects are being added to the grid, and utilities say more gas-fired power plants are needed for reliability and to replace coal. Some utilities say they could need aging coal plants to stay online longer than expected. Existing gas plants, the backbone of the nation’s power supply, aren’t included in the new rules.
4 VW workers in Tennessee vote to unionize
Workers at a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee voted to form a union on Friday, the first victory in the United Auto Workers’ campaign to build on last year’s strike against the Detroit Three by organising factories across the US south. The workers, who voted 2,628 to 985 to join the union, had said that Volkswagen was underpaying them, targeting the German group as part of a $40mn campaign to organise workers at 13 mostly foreign-owned carmakers with non-union plants in the US. The closely watched election underscores the resurgence of the labour movement in America. Union organisers see southern states including Tennessee as hostile territory and have tried to organise there for decades with little success. Darrell Belcher, who has worked in assembly in the Chattanooga plant for 13 years, told the Financial Times that the union’s pitch to Volkswagen workers hinged on the record 25 per cent raises Ford, Stellantis and GM had agreed to after six weeks of strikes last year. The pay increases will be spread over the length of the 4.5 year contract. “[The union] campaigns on ‘look at what Ford got’,” Belcher said. “They’ve really been pushing $40 [an hour] and free health insurance.” Belcher voted against the union, saying union representatives could not guarantee that they could negotiate the same contract for Volkswagen employees.
5 US shale shelters America from oil price surges
In 1973 and 1979 war in Israel and turmoil in Iran twice ruptured the oil market, triggering an inflationary surge that sapped western economies and unseated a US president. In the decades since, the possibility that new strife in the Middle East could deliver another administration-ending jump in oil and petrol prices has hung like a spectre over the White House. Last week, the fears suddenly looked overblown. On Monday, less than a week after the first-ever direct military strikes by Iran on Israel brought fears of a wider regional war, oil prices settled at $87 per barrel — flat versus their level just before a strike on the Iranian consulate in Damascus precipitated the eruption.
“Shale has redrawn the map of world oil in a way most people don’t seem to understand,” said Daniel Yergin, vice-chair of S&P Global and a Pulitzer Prize-winning energy historian. “It has changed not only the supply-demand balance but it has changed the geopolitical balance and the psychological balance.” The numbers are stark. Two decades ago the US produced about 7mn barrels a day of petroleum and consumed 21mn. Gulf countries like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait — which send oil through the Strait of Hormuz — were among the US’s most important foreign suppliers. Now the US produces almost 20mn b/d of petroleum, roughly on par with consumption. Imports from the Gulf have plummeted, and the US became a net oil exporter for the first time in 2019. The prolific Permian Basin shale of Texas and New Mexico pumps more oil than Kuwait, Iraq or the UAE, three of Opec’s powerhouses.
4/25/1953 The magazine Nature publishes an article by biologists Francis Crick and James Watson, describing the “double helix” of DNA
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