Republican lawmakers in the US were to unveil yesterday a massive energy bill loaded with billions of dollars in incentives that they said would create US jobs while boosting oil, natural gas, coal and nuclear production.
Although the legislation has been mostly written in secret by Republicans, Democrats said the bill is about 1,700 pages long and offers an estimated US$20 billion in tax breaks. An earlier version of the bill had about US$16 billion in financial incentives.
At a news conference on Friday, Republicans refused to say how much the bill cost, preferring instead to focus on what they said would be a major boost to the US economy.
Senator Pete Domenici, a New Mexico Republican and the bill manager, said the legislation would create nearly 1 million "direct and indirect" jobs.
"This bill creates jobs in virtually every segment of the economy," Domenici said. "The investment we are making in clean coal technologies will create 62,000 jobs, including 10,000 research jobs in the fields of math, engineering, physics and science at an estimated annual salary of US$125,000."
Release of the draft bill yesterday afternoon will pave the way for expected votes next week in the full House and Senate, Domenici said.
While the House is likely to approve the bill, Senate Democrats have threatened to filibuster, or talk to death, the energy bill if it includes too many industry giveaways.
"It's unfortunate that the Republicans have decided to release their conference report over a weekend, when many senators are not around," said Senator Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico, the senior Democrat on the Senate Energy Committee.
"We'll do the best we can to digest the details, analyzing this text for good provisions that we will be happy to support as well as those provisions which must be fixed or removed," Bingaman said.
But presidential candidate Senator Joseph Lieberman, a Connecticut Democrat, said he was ready to filibuster the bill.
Lieberman is among the Democrats who oppose a provision that would shield makers of the fuel additive MTBE from contamination liability lawsuits. MTBE is a suspected carcinogen that has seeped into the groundwater of many US cities.
The US Conference of Mayors criticized the MTBE liability protection in the draft bill, saying it would force local communities to pay an estimated US$29 billion in clean-up costs that should be borne by makers of the oil-based chemical.
The bill will require US use of ethanol to stretch gasoline supplies to rise to 19 billion litres by 2012, double current consumption. Ethanol is a politically sensitive issue with broad support in the Midwest, which may make the bill difficult for Democrats to filibuster, according to lobbyists.
Other measures in the bill would reduce royalty payments for offshore oil drilling and offer tax credits to help build six new US nuclear plants.
The White House said it supported the bill, even though it did not include a measure to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling. This was a pet project of the Bush administration, but is opposed by Democrats and moderate Republicans.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day