The Growing Split between Workers and Bosses on Returning to the Office

Boston Globe – There’s a new turf war shaping up at work: managers who want everyone back in the “real” office vs. employees who prefer the one at home. And that standoff is leading to some irreconcilable conflicts.

Naomi Baruch and her coworkers were required to return to their downtown Boston office two days a week starting Jan. 1, despite the crippling Omicron surge at the time. There was no explanation given, she said, no attempt to make their presence more purposeful.

“It really felt pointless/punitive/‘We just like things the way they were,’ ‘‘ she said.

So when Baruch launched a job search recently, being fully remote was a high priority. And she got her wish.

For some office workers who’ve grown accustomed to the flexibility and commute-free lifestyle of remote work — and the feeling, as Baruch put it, of not being just “a cog in a machine” — the surge of back-to-office mandates is driving a wedge between them and their bosses.

At least one notable employer has resorted to threats. Elon Musk said he would fire Tesla employees who weren’t back in the office at least 40 hours a week, saying success doesn’t come by “phoning it in.” A number of major companies, including Goldman Sachs, are tracking workers electronically to make sure they are coming into the office as required. Starbucks chief executive Howard Shultz said he’d been “unsuccessful” at getting the company’s office workers to return: “I’ve pleaded with them. I said I’ll get on my knees. I’ll do push-ups.”

Updated COVID Shots are Coming. Will They be Too Late?

Boston Globe – Roseann Renouf, 77, has grown tired of the current generation of coronavirus shots. Having “never been one for a lot of vaccination,” she decided to forgo the latest round of boosters after watching vaccinated friends contract COVID-19, even though the doses offer a critical extra layer of protection.

“It’s just taking another same booster,” said Renouf, a retired nurse anesthetist from Fort Worth, Texas. “They haven’t done anything different with them to cover new variants.”

But her gripe about the COVID-19 vaccines may soon be settled. US regulators committed last week to updating the 2020 vaccine recipes for this fall’s booster campaign with new formulas meant to defend against the ultra-contagious Omicron subvariants, offering Renouf and other holdouts a fresh reason to change their minds.

The Biden administration is betting that the new formulas, the centerpiece of an effort to drastically speed up vaccine development, might appeal to the half of inoculated Americans who have spurned booster shots, a key constituency in the fight against future COVID-19 waves.

Vaccine updates are becoming more urgent by the day, many scientists said. The most evasive forms of Omicron yet, known as BA.4 and BA.5, appear to be driving a fresh surge of cases across much of the United States. The same subvariants have sent hospital admissions climbing in Britain, France, Portugal, Belgium, and Israel.

Americans Tap Pandemic Savings to Cope With Inflation

Wall Street Journal – Americans are starting to dip into the huge pile of savings they accumulated over the first two years of the pandemic.

From the start of the pandemic to the end of 2021, U.S. households built up $2.7 trillion in extra savings, according to Moody’s Analytics. Covid-19 lockdowns kept people at home with nowhere to spend money, and three rounds of stimulus payments boosted their incomes.

Now, with inflation at its highest point in decades and wage gains trailing behind, Americans are turning to that stash to cover costs.

The personal saving rate, a measure of how much money people have left over after spending and taxes, reached 5.4% in May. That figure is below the average of the last decade and far below the record of 34% in April 2020, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Families have tapped about $114 billion of their pandemic savings so far, according to Moody’s Analytics, which analyzed government data.

“Most households have a cash cushion to navigate through the very high inflation,” said Mark Zandi, Moody’s Analytics chief economist. “This is allowing consumers to stay in the game.”

Stimulus checks and expanded child-tax-credit payments helped Shannon Houston and her husband cover major expenses, including daycare. “It was just enough buffer to make things easier month to month,” said Ms. Houston.

The child tax credit gave families up to $300 per child each month in the second half of 2021, but that ended in December. The federal government’s last stimulus checks were sent more than a year ago.

Each month this year, the Connecticut couple has drawn on their savings, which includes money from the child tax credit as well as prepandemic savings. Higher prices are forcing the family to spend more on gas and groceries for their two children, Ms. Houston said.

Ms. Houston, 37 years old, works part time as a freelance communications specialist for nonprofit organizations but is considering returning to work full time when her son starts kindergarten in the fall. “We don’t want to completely squander our savings,” she said.

Americans’ checking-account balances jumped after they got their pandemic stimulus payments, bank executives have said. While customers have spent some of that money, balances still remain markedly above where they were in 2019, said Chris Wheat, co-president of the JPMorgan Chase Institute, the bank’s in-house think tank. At the end of March, balances of families with the lowest incomes were 65% above 2019 levels.

Still, they used to be higher. In March 2021, around the time of the third round of federal stimulus checks, balances for those families were up 126% from 2019 levels.

JPMorgan Chief Executive Jamie Dimon last month said U.S. consumers still had between six and nine months of spending power remaining in their bank accounts.

Americans Are Taking on Record Debt in 2022. Are We in Trouble?Play video: Americans Are Taking on Record Debt in 2022. Are We in Trouble?

Americans have sharply increased the amount of credit they have taken on this year. With prices expected to continue rising, this could be flashing a warning sign about the economy. WSJ’s Dion Rabouin examines these trends and explains what they tell us. Photo composite: Elizabeth Smelov

Darius Palmer built up an investment account of more than $5,000 by stashing away money from his paycheck and some earlier pandemic stimulus payments. But he turned to his credit card to cover costs for trips this year to Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., when they were more expensive than he anticipated.

The 24-year-old industrial engineer is weighing different options for paying off the $2,000 balance. He plans to cancel a meat-subscription service that costs around $150 a month and buy fewer books. If the North Carolina resident can’t cover the payment with his income, he plans to dip into his investments.

Mr. Palmer is also concerned about the potential end of the student-loan payment moratorium. The government paused payments on federal student loans in the spring of 2020, though borrowers might have to start making monthly payments again this fall.

“I know what it’s like to have to tighten the belt,” Mr. Palmer said.

The bottom 20% of earners was the only income group that didn’t draw on their pandemic savings in the first quarter of the year, Moody’s Analytics found. “These are folks working in leisure, hospitality, retail, healthcare,” Mr. Zandi said. Strong wage growth has allowed many of these workers to continue to save.

Eric Cullen was laid off from his job at AmeriCorps at the start of the pandemic. Over the following months, he was able to save about half of his federal stimulus checks and unemployment payments.

The 27-year-old continued to increase his savings after he took a job at an upscale New Orleans restaurant in spring 2021, where he initially earned about $500 a week as a busser and food runner. A staff shortage helped him get promoted to a waiter position, where he sometimes brought home as much as $1,500 weekly.

Mr. Cullen recently moved back to his hometown near Albany, N.Y. He noticed gas prices going up steadily on the drive north from Louisiana. “I was initially taking this summer off,” he said.

Red States Are Winning the Post-Pandemic Economy

The pandemic has changed the geography of the American economy.

By many measures, red states—those that lean Republican—have recovered faster economically than Democratic-leaning blue ones, with workers and employers moving from the coasts to the middle of the country and Florida.

Since February 2020, the month before the pandemic began, the share of all U.S. jobs located in red states has grown by more than half a percentage point, according to an analysis of Labor Department data by the Brookings Institution think tank. Red states have added 341,000 jobs over that time, while blue states were still short 1.3 million jobs as of May.

Several major companies have recently announced moves of their headquarters from blue to red states. Hedge-fund company Citadel said recently it would move its headquarters from Chicago to Miami, and Caterpillar Inc. plans to move from Illinois to Texas.

To track each state’s progress toward normal since the pandemic began, Moody’s Analytics developed an index of 13 metrics, including the value of goods and services produced, employment, retail sales and new-home listings. Eleven of the 15 states with the highest readings through mid-June were red. Eight of the bottom 10 were blue.

Behind those differences is mass migration. Forty-six million people moved to a different ZIP Code in the year through February 2022, the most in any 12-month period in records going back to 2010, according to a Moody’s analysis of Equifax Inc. consumer-credit reports. The states that gained the most, led by Florida, Texas and North Carolina, are almost all red, as defined by the Cook Political Report based on how states voted in the past two presidential elections. The states that lost the most residents are almost all blue, led by California, New York and Illinois.

Analysts who have studied the migration attributed much of it to the pandemic’s severing of the link between geography and the workplace. Remote work allowed many workers to move to red states, not because of political preferences, but for financial and lifestyle reasons—cheaper housing, better weather, less traffic and lower taxes, the analysts said.

There is no data on what role, if any, political preferences have played in migration decisions. Some researchers have reported that pandemic restrictions played a role for some people who moved. It is too early to know whether the Supreme Court decision on abortion also might affect migration patterns.

The movement is already starting to affect state economies and finances. Florida is on track to register a record budget surplus for the fiscal year that ends June 30, which it attributes in part to new residents. The state is putting most of the extra money into a reserve fund to protect state agencies and residents during the next downturn, while investing in school construction and raising teacher pay, a spokeswoman for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said.

Over the 30 years that preceded the pandemic, globalization and technology had fueled a “knowledge economy” dominated by college graduates who clustered in big city metropolitan areas in the West and Northeast. Property values soared in those areas, while lagging behind in other areas.

The Covid-19 pandemic changed that dynamic.

“I almost feel like the pandemic differs from any other time I’ve seen. There’s definitely a flight to lifestyle,” said Chris Camacho, chief executive of the Greater Phoenix Economic Council, a private consulting group that recruits businesses to Arizona. “Individuals were choosing where to live.”

In a recent survey led by researchers at Stanford University, the University of Chicago and the Mexican university ITAM, about 16% of workers said they plan to stay fully remote, and another 31% plan to adopt a “hybrid” schedule of working in the office part-time and at home the rest. Most of those remote workers are well-paid, white-collar college graduates, according to the research.

“I always had to go to where the job was,” said Sankeerth Bommi, a 40-year-old technology worker from India who emigrated to the U.S. in the early 2000s. When the pandemic hit, Mr. Bommi was living in Los Angeles and commuting to the Pasadena offices of financial-technology company Green Dot Corp., where he is a senior director on a product team. Within weeks, the company told its 900 employees they were free to permanently work from anywhere.

Mr. Bommi moved to Austin, Texas, to be closer to cousins in Oklahoma and Texas, and for cheaper housing. He just bought his first house, where he plans to work once it is built. “This is the first time I’m able to go to the city I really wanted to go to,” he said, as opposed to where his job took him.

In the end, his employer made the same move. The company last year moved its headquarters to Austin, slashing its real-estate and business-travel costs, due to Austin’s central location.

After closing its offices in March 2020, Green Dot routinely surveyed employees about work-from-home policies. More than two-thirds said they didn’t want to go back to the office, said Chief Executive Daniel Henry. The company has just 25 people working out of its new location. The rest are scattered across the country.

In Austin and Houston, office occupancy has recovered faster than in the nation as a whole, with more than half of offices occupied, according to swipe-card data by the security firm Kastle Systems. In the business districts of San Francisco and San Jose, by contrast, only about one-third of office space is occupied, and in Los Angeles, about 40%.

One big reason so many people moved during the pandemic has been a desire for less expensive housing, according to an April report from the Economic Innovation Group, a think tank. By analyzing county-level census data, it found that large urban areas with high shares of commuters lost residents in the 12 months through July 2021. Among that group, large urban counties with the highest median home values experienced the biggest declines.

Small and medium-size cities, suburbs and rural areas—all of which tended to have less expensive housing than large urban areas—all gained residents.

It remains to be seen how many of those moves turn out to be permanent, and whether many recent migrants eventually move back to more urban areas. In recent months, some companies have been urging remote workers to return to the office.

In the 10 states that gained the most people from moves between April 2020 and June 2021, the typical home cost 23% less than the typical home in the 10 that lost the most residents to moves, according to an analysis by the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.

The states that gained the most migrants levied an average maximum income-tax rate of 3.8% on individuals. Four—Florida, Texas, Tennessee and Nevada—charged no income tax at all. The 10 states that lost the most residents to moves have an average tax rate of 8.0%.

Now that more employees are leaving expensive blue regions or working remotely, employers themselves have more freedom to move to lower-cost areas.

“I can’t force people to move. You can’t do that anymore,” said Chris Rouland, chief executive of Phosphorus, a privately held cybersecurity firm.

He started the company in 2017 and opened small offices in Atlanta and Carlsbad, Calif. When the pandemic hit, he said, his 14 employees began working remotely—many moved from California to lower-cost states—and soon told him they wanted to do so for good.

Mr. Rouland gave them that option. Last year, he moved the company’s headquarters to Nashville, to take advantage of lower taxes and a higher standard of living, he said, while allowing most employees to work remotely.

“They started to think about where they’d actually like to live based on quality of life, based on taxes,” Mr. Rouland said. “And for us, we looked at where we wanted our business to be and, honestly, where I wanted to live. For me, it was literally the first time in my life I chose to work someplace”—as opposed to having to move to an employer. Earlier in his career he had moved to New York City to work for Lehman Brothers and to Atlanta to work for a tech startup.

Mr. Rouland has closed the California and Georgia offices and now employs 40—seven in the Nashville office with the rest spread around the country. Yet over time, he said, he has become less enthusiastic about remote work, and he has begun urging workers to consider moving to Nashville and returning to the office.

Tennessee’s economy has benefited from such moves. Its unemployment hit an all-time low of 3.2% in April, according to federal data dating from 1976. Its workers saw some of the biggest gains in weekly earnings among all states last year. Its economy grew by 8.6% last year, leading all states. Corporate and sales tax revenues are rising.

Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican, has proposed increases in teachers salaries, freezing tuition at state colleges and hiring more state troopers.

People who moved during the pandemic tended to go to areas with fewer pandemic-related restrictions, such as school and office closures and event cancellations, according to a paper from researchers at Vanderbilt University and the Georgia Institute of Technology.

In general, red states were less likely than blue ones to impose mask or vaccine mandates, social-distancing restrictions or remote schooling. Enrollment in public elementary and secondary schools fell nationally during the pandemic, but the sharpest drops occurred in school districts that had more days of remote learning, according to a recent American Enterprise Institute study.

California’s public-school enrollment has fallen 4.4% since the pandemic, according to American Enterprise Institute. In Oakland, the school board recently voted to close schools because of declining enrollment.

Florida saw a surge in new residents, many from the Northeast, where Covid-19 related restrictions such as school closures were stricter.

At the Ohana Institute, a private school in Florida’s Panhandle, for kindergarten through 12th grade, the waiting list for students grew from 95 just before the pandemic to 393 last fall, Executive Director Lettye Burgtorf said.

Mrs. Burgtorf said the school fielded requests from hundreds of parents around the U.S. who wanted to move to Florida to be closer to the beach. Many were also unhappy that their children’s schools in other states had moved to remote learning. The Ohana Institute went remote for several weeks, then reopened, with mask mandates. “The parents were really like, ‘We cannot educate our kids at home,’ ” Mrs. Burgtorf said.

For years, a real estate boom in coastal cities made many families wealthy because their homes appreciated. Now, that is happening in red states. Florida led all states with a 31% jump in the median home price in the 12 months through January, with prices soaring in the Panhandle.

Such price increases can narrow the cost-of-living differential with the blue states that the migrants are fleeing, and increase living costs for longtime residents who don’t own homes,

These days, Mr. DeSantis’s spokeswoman said, one of the top complaints the governor’s office receives is soaring rent.

Hard Times Can be Busy Times for Thrift Stores

Boston Globe – When everything feels more expensive, it’s good business to be known for bargains. Just ask thrift stores.

“It’s part of our mission to provide affordable goods to the community, and we’re recession-proof,” said Chris Roth, manager of The Thrift Shop of Boston in Roslindale. “There’s always outside economic forces, but at the thrift shop, prices won’t be going up to reflect that.”

At the Bureau Drawer in Quincy, sales have been increasing for months, and while bargain-hunters make up a big chunk of customers, the store has also seen more people coming out of concern about rising prices, said Rick Doane, executive director of the organization that receives the thrift shop’s proceeds.

“We’ve seen more customers talking about feeling the pinch on their wallets, and we’re selling more of everything,” Doane said.

Nationally, thrift stores run by Goodwill Industries International — the sector’s biggest operator — report sales up 4.4 percent year over year through May, compared with the same period last year, said Goodwill’s Bill Parrish.

Senate Seeks Greater Public Funding of Child Care

Commonwealth Magazine – Massachusetts Senate leaders on Thursday unveiled a proposal to inject significant sums of public money into the state’s child-care system, which has traditionally been mostly privately funded.

The Senate plan would provide additional subsidies to families, including for the first time middle-class families, in order to make child care more affordable. It would also pay more to child-care providers as a way to increase the salaries of early educators – a step toward stabilizing the industry’s struggling workforce.

“This legislation, if and when it’s fully implemented, will be transformative to our society here in Massachusetts,” said Senate President Karen Spilka. “In fact, I would say this is the most comprehensive early education and care bill that the Legislature has taken up this century.”

Lawmakers have not yet determined exactly how much the proposal will cost. A report by a legislative commission examining the early education and care system suggested that systemic changes will cost around $1.5 billion annually, and this plan adopts many, though not all, of its recommendations.

“We recognize this is not something we can do overnight, and…if the bill is passed into law, we expect the Legislature would deliver on this over time,” said Senate Education Committee Chair Jason Lewis.

The Senate plans to vote on the bill next Thursday. With only a month left before the end of formal legislative sessions for the current two-year session, it is unclear if the House will even consider the bill, much less if both bodies will be able to get a final version to the governor’s desk.

With Roe Overturned, Congress Must Act on Data Privacy

Boston Globe (Opinion) – As soon as the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, a wave of abortion bans were either automatically triggered or swiftly implemented in states in the South and Midwest. In response, a network of groups, ranging from grass-roots organizers to the country’s largest employers, started laying the groundwork to help people who live in those states and are seeking abortions to travel to places where the procedure remains legal.

It’s a far cry from making abortion universally accessible, but it’s better than nothing — that is, unless certain antiabortion politicians get their way. Since the day the landmark decision fell, antiabortion politicians and activists have been drafting model legislation that would not only ban abortions in a given state but also criminalize going out of state to receive one.

One of the ways these potential laws would do that is by following Texas’s vigilante system that was imposed last year, which empowers private citizens to sue people who violate the state’s abortion law.

When states begin to criminalize not just the act of providing an abortion but receiving one as well, then women will be at risk of being surveilled and targeted by state governments and antiabortion vigilantes — getting dragged into a courtroom instead of simply receiving the care that they need.

It’s yet another reminder that Congress desperately needs to revamp digital privacy laws, in this case to prevent state governments from simply circumventing people’s Fourth Amendment privacy rights and to protect consumers from being harassed by antiabortion activists.

Given the gravity of the Supreme Court’s ruling, it’s time for ambitious legislation, and Senator Elizabeth Warren has taken a big step toward that end. Anticipating the Dobbs decision, she introduced a sweeping bill that would, in effect, ban all sales of location and health data — a move that would dramatically regulate what has become a multibillion-dollar data broker industry.

Health Care

Massachusetts Senate Votes to Expand Access to HIV Prevention Care

Boston Globe – The Massachusetts Senate voted Thursday, the last day of LGBTQ Pride month, to advance a bill that would significantly expand access to preventative HIV care.

The legislation, which passed by voice vote and was sponsored by state Senator Julian Cyr, would allow pharmacies to dispense a 60-day supply of HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, without a prescription. The proposal also would require pharmacists to link customers with a primary care physician for ongoing medical care and PrEP oversight.

“PrEP has been a game changer in HIV prevention,” said the Truro Democrat, who says he uses the medication on a regular basis. “We are trying to do everything we can to expand access to PrEP and to create more avenues to reduce HIV transmission. But there have been significant barriers.”

PrEP is a daily pill that reduces the risk of HIV transmission by close to 100 percent, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

While Massachusetts has been successful in reducing new HIV infections, the state’s health department says the HIV transmission continued at a rate of approximately 640 new cases per year from 2014 to 2018.

While PrEP is highly effective, advocates say it is underutilized, especially among uninsured or underinsured communities, and communities of color.

Abortion Clinics Prepare for Influx of Patients

Eagle Tribune – Abortion providers across Massachusetts are bracing for an expected influx of women from states where the procedure is now restricted or outlawed following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn federal protections.

Dr. Jennifer Childs-Roshak, president & CEO of Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts, said the group’s network of abortion providers started fielding an increase in calls to crisis hotlines just hours after the high court’s ruling June 24, and said the volume of inquiries hasn’t subsided.

“We’re absolutely seeing an uptick,” she said in an interview. “A lot of that is people, from our state and others, looking for advice and assurances.”

Abortion is legal in Massachusetts under a two-year-old law, but advocates say the state will likely become a destination for women coming from other states that have banned the procedure or tightened their laws following the Supreme Court’s ruling.

Childs-Roshak said the state’s providers have been preparing for the possible overturn of the 1973 Roe v. Wade landmark ruling for several years.

“We’ve been doing a lot of things over the past five years to make sure that our health centers are resilient and able to expand or contract, depending on what is happening,” she said. “We also have lots of providers lined up and ready to see patients.”

Tufts to Partner with Acadia to Build $65 million Behavioral Health Hospital

Boston Globe – Tufts Medicine and Acadia Healthcare announced plans to construct a $65 million behavioral-health hospital at the site of the former Malden Hospital, an addition that officials say will help address the state’s ongoing behavioral-health crisis.

The 144-bed hospital, scheduled to open in two and a half years, will generate 86 additional beds for the state, with Tufts planning to relocate 58 inpatient behavioral health beds from Lawrence Memorial and MelroseWakefield Healthcare, which are both under the Tufts Medicine umbrella.

Tufts Medicine will donate the land to the transaction, 9.5 acres of which will be preserved as community space. Acadia, a Tennessee-based for-profit behavioral health care system, will run and operate the facility. The two organizations will share governance, and Tufts expects to receive 30 to 35 percent of the revenue.

“One of the things we like about Acadia is they serve the Medicaid population,” said David Storto, executive vice president and chief strategy and growth officer of Tufts Medicine. “They are amongst the most accessible [to patients with different insurance plans].”

The behavioral health hospital is one of several similar facilities being planned or opened throughout the state. This week, Cambridge Health Alliance opened a new Center for Inpatient Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, which ultimately will increase its child psychiatric beds from 27 to 69 and add a unit for children with neurodevelopmental disorders. The health system is also in the process of adding more adult psychiatric beds, which will grow from 64 to 86.

Sustainability, Climate and Energy

The Price of Going Green Is Rising for American Companies

Prices are rising for a financial instrument that lets companies say they are using green power.

As more companies pledge to neutralize their carbon emissions in response to climate change, securing green power in the U.S. is getting more expensive.

Surging demand has pushed up the U.S. price of renewable energy certificates, a financial instrument that lets companies say they bought clean electricity from the grid. The price of RECs more than quadrupled at one point last year and is still around triple its level for most of the past decade, data trackers say.

Meanwhile, inflation and supply-chain bottlenecks are driving up costs for another way U.S. companies get their green electricity: by funding solar or wind projects directly in return for their power. Those costs have seen double- or even triple-digit percentage increases, green-energy experts say.

“The market now is tough,” said Misti Groves, vice president of market and policy innovation at the Clean Energy Buyers Association, a Washington, D.C.-based group for green-power buyers.

Companies and governments the world over are increasingly focused on shifting to renewable energy as a way of reducing carbon emissions to help curb global warming. More than 5,000 companies have signed up with the United Nations’ Race to Zero campaign, pledging to purchase clean energy and take other measures to help eliminate or offset the greenhouse gases they generate. Some 370 companies including General Motors Co. and Airbnb Inc. have joined a group, RE100, whose members pledge to be 100% powered by renewable energy by midcentury.

In the U.S., renewable energy certificates have long been the cheapest and most common way of procuring green power. The certificates represent the “greenness” of each unit of electricity generated by sources such as solar or wind, and can be bought separately from the power itself. Under current carbon-accounting rules, RECs let companies say they are buying clean energy—and thus have zero emissions—even though technically they are using electricity from a grid that can contain green as well as carbon-emitting sources of power.

For most of the past decade, the price for stand-alone RECs was less than $1 per megawatt hour, data trackers say. But last year, as more companies sought RECs to satisfy renewable-energy targets, the benchmark price rose from around $1.60 per megawatt hour to more than $7 in August, before falling to around $3 recently, according to data from Karbone Inc., a financial services firm that specializes in renewable energy.

“We have definitely seen companies shocked at price increases,” said Maya Kelty, director of regulatory affairs at 3Degrees Group Inc., a firm that helps corporations with climate-change measures.

Some companies are fleeing stand-alone RECs in favor of buying clean electricity through long-term contracts with wind or solar developers, in hopes of getting lower, more stable prices. But the cost of such power-purchase agreements has been soaring, too, pushed by increasing demand as well as supply chain issues, inflation and long wait times to receive necessary approvals to connect new projects to the electric grid.

A report by LevelTen Energy, a renewable-energy marketplace, found that in competitive power markets, prices for long-term contracts for wind and solar-power purchases, which are used to finance new projects, jumped by 15.8% for solar and 41.5% for wind during the first quarter of 2022, compared with the previous year.

The climbing cost of renewable-energy facilities, like this Enel Green Power solar farm in Texas, is making it more expensive for companies to go green in the

Cybersecurity and network-services provider Akamai Technologies Inc., which relies on long-term contracts for its green-power purchases, has seen the cost of buying solar power through those agreements more than double this year versus last, said Mike Mattera, Akamai’s director of corporate sustainability.

But Akamai and other companies, including Alphabet Inc. unit Google and Microsoft Corp., are increasingly asking just how green the power they are securing now really is—a question that could further complicate the cost and pursuit of clean electricity.

Buying RECs doesn’t lessen the overall carbon emissions of the power grid, unless companies fund new wind and solar to replace dirtier sources such as coal, some companies say. Grid emissions vary with weather and time of day as sources such as wind and solar go on and offline. Currently, RECs don’t reflect that, they say.

Akamai is now trying to measure how much its green-power purchases are lowering emissions on the grid each hour and to use that data to calculate its carbon footprint. Buying stand-alone RECs would be cheaper but wouldn’t be as helpful for the environment, said Mr. Mattera.

“We don’t want to greenwash,” he said.

Nuclear Power Gets New Push in U.S., Winning Converts

Boston Globe – Driven by the difficulty of meeting clean energy goals and by surging electricity demands, a growing number of political leaders are taking a fresh look at nuclear power — both extending the life of existing reactors and building new ones.

Even past skeptics, largely Democrats, have come around to the idea — notably in California, where the state’s sole remaining nuclear plant, Diablo Canyon, is scheduled to close in 2025. The search for clean energy has given nuclear power a spark that has drawn bipartisan support that added billions in funding for existing and new projects.

But critics of the nuclear industry argue that a veneer of clean energy has not changed the concerns about the technology, including aging facilities in need of potentially costly improvements, the challenge of nuclear waste disposal and steep cost overruns for new projects that are years late — if they reach completion.

“The industry knows it does not have a good story to tell,” said Edwin Lyman, a physicist and the director of nuclear power safety with the Union of Concerned Scientists. “It’s still plagued by the same issues.”

President Biden wants to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions from the power industry by 2035, and he said a Supreme Court ruling last week limiting federal regulatory authority would not halt such efforts. But the supply chain issues that have hurt wind and solar power development have presented the latest hurdle to reaching that goal.

As a stopgap, the Biden administration has established a $6 billion fund to help troubled nuclear plant operators keep their reactors running and make them more economically competitive against cheaper resources like solar and wind power. The application deadline is Tuesday, though it might be extended and the requirements amended to broaden eligibility.

“The Biden administration has been very clear that we will get to the net zero goals,” Kathryn Huff, assistant secretary for nuclear energy at the Department of Energy, said at a recent conference of the American Nuclear Society. “They’re incredibly aggressive goals, and nuclear is a part of that solution, a very big part potentially.”

In addition to the $6 billion fund, the administration is providing $2.5 billion for two projects meant to demonstrate new nuclear technology, in Washington State and Wyoming.

A separate bipartisan measure introduced last year is aimed at preserving and expanding nuclear energy in the United States. The bill, whose backers include Senators Shelley Moore Capito, Republican of West Virginia, and Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey, would provide financial assistance like tax credits, according to the Tax Foundation, a nonprofit tax policy organization.

Ms. Capito has argued that coal-fired power plants, which have been closing as the nation moves away from fossil fuel sources, could become sites for nuclear reactors. That would provide benefits for places like her home state, which has produced coal and relied on it as fuel for power generators.

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“Ultimately, you get to a point where you need something that’s not weather dependent, something like nuclear to make the grid reliable,” said John Kotek, who ran the Office of Nuclear Energy during the Obama administration and is now vice president for policy at the Nuclear Energy Institute, a trade association. “There are other technologies that are candidates to play that role, but if you look at what is available today across the widest scale, that’s nuclear energy.”

The rising costs of other sources of power have made nuclear energy more competitive around the world, including in the United States, which has the largest fleet of nuclear plants of any country. They produce about 20 percent of the nation’s electricity and 50 percent of the clean energy.

The United States maintains 92 reactors, though a dozen have closed over the last decade — including, a month ago, the Palisades Nuclear Generating Station in Michigan, about 55 miles southwest of Grand Rapids.

The owner, Entergy, decided to shut the plant after a power-purchase agreement with a utility expired. Entergy said it could not find buyers for the plant, and decommissioning has gone too far to bring it back online, even with the money from the federal government.

Diablo Canyon is next on the decommissioning list, but Gov. Gavin Newsom has proposed extending its life. The plant, on California’s central coast, supplies almost 10 percent of the state’s electricity. Pacific Gas & Electric, which owns the plant, announced in 2016 that it planned to close it when its licenses expired, saying it would focus more on solar and wind power as renewable energy sources.

Among those backing an extension is Senator Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, who had supported closing the plant. To meet clean energy goals while addressing power demands arising from climate change, “Diablo must keep operating, at least for the time being,” she declared in an essay in The Sacramento Bee under a headline that said, “Why I changed my mind.”

A study last year by Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that keeping Diablo Canyon open for 10 years could reduce the California power industry’s carbon emissions by more than 10 percent from 2017 levels and reduce reliance on natural gas. It also could save $2.6 billion in electricity costs and help prevent brownouts.

Brownouts and blackouts are an increasing concern, especially with more extreme weather events. The California Independent System Operator, which operates the electric grid that supplies power to about 80 percent of the state, says this summer could bring the highest load in the system operator’s 24-year history.

PG&E won’t say whether it supports extending the life of the plant, only that it will follow any decision and guidance from the state.

A leading critic of keeping Diablo Canyon open is Arnie Gundersen, the chief engineer at Fairewinds Energy Education, a nonprofit organization focused on the perils of nuclear power. The organization often points to the radioactive leak from the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan after an earthquake and tsunami in 2011, a disaster that cost public support for reactors.

Mr. Gundersen, a nuclear engineer who once worked in the industry and is a frequent expert witness on utility matters across the country, said he thought Diablo Canyon would need significant improvements to operate beyond 2025.

“To keep uneconomical nukes running will use much more than the $6 billion that Biden has proposed,” Mr. Gundersen said. “That’s chump change for nuclear to remain competitive. I think he’s got some really smart people in his brain trust, yet he’s reaching out for political fig leaves to get the nuclear industry off his back.”

To proponents of nuclear energy, Diablo Canyon represents a pivotal moment. Coupled with solar, wind and hydroelectric power, they say, nuclear power would make 100 percent clean energy possible.

“I can easily see a doubling of nuclear generation in this country,” said Steven Nesbit, a nuclear engineer who spent decades at Duke Energy and is the immediate past president of the American Nuclear Society, an organization of scientists, engineers and industry professionals. “We are solar and wind’s best friend. They just can’t do the job themselves.”

Industry leaders recognize that the age of new large-scale nuclear plants in the United States has passed, chiefly because of runaway costs. Two new units at the Vogtle Electric Generating Plant in Waynesboro, Ga., expected to come online in 2023, are costing about twice the original estimate of $14 billion. A nuclear project in South Carolina drove the utility developing it into bankruptcy.

But many in the industry say smaller reactors that can be expanded over time offer promise of avoiding long delays and high cost. These reactors, they say, can be built in factories and delivered to approved sites. And the reactors’ high-temperature steam could also yield significant amounts of hydrogen, a carbon-free alternative fuel to natural gas.

The project locations can plan for as many as a dozen units but start with just one. But a plant with 12 units would produce half the electricity or even a little less than many other large nuclear facilities.

None of the smaller reactors have been certified by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which approves licenses and operations of the nation’s nuclear power plants. But NuScale Power, a company that designs and markets small reactors in Oregon, expects to receive certification of its design by the end of the summer. A developer then would need approval for a license to build and operate the unit.

Thomas Mundy, chief commercial officer for NuScale Power, said his company’s product could be built and put into use in about three years, a fraction of the time it takes to build larger reactor units. And the cost, Mr. Mundy said, is competitive with new natural gas facilities at a levelized cost — the electricity price needed to break even at the end of the plant’s life — of $45 to $65 a megawatt-hour.

By comparison, a utility-scale solar farm costs $28 to $41 a megawatt-hour and a wind farm $26 to $50, according to the latest analysis by Lazard, the investment firm.

Mr. Mundy said his company’s product would be built by BWX Technologies, a manufacturer of naval nuclear reactor cores based in Lynchburg, Va., as well as by companies in South Korea and Japan.

Concerns about safety, cost and construction delays are not going to be the same as with earlier reactors, he said, because the new ones will have fewer components and will have uniform manufacturing processes, reducing the likelihood of the kinds of failures that come with making each plant unique.

“I think those people are not studying the realities,” Mr. Mundy said of the critics of the new reactors. “We need to continue to educate.”

But at least one of those critics, Mr. Gunderson, is unconvinced. “We’re falling for the same mistakes that we’ve fallen for over the last 50 years,” he said. “I will shut up and retire if you can show a nuclear plant that was built at cost and on schedule.” EXTERNAL: The Boston Globe:  Supreme Court limits EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas pollution

As the world heats up, unleashing frequent floods, fires, and other extreme weather events, the Supreme Court on Thursday sharply curtailed the federal government’s ability to regulate carbon emissions from power plants, putting that responsibility on a dysfunctional Congress while dealing another blow to the Biden administration’s efforts to fight climate change.

In a 6-3 ruling that environmentalists called a devastating blow to the climate, the court said the Environmental Protection Agency can’t force the national energy market to move to cleaner power sources without express authorization from Congress.

“Capping carbon dioxide emissions at a level that will force a nationwide transition away from the use of coal to generate electricity may be a sensible ‘solution to the crisis of the day,’ ” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority opinion. “But it is not plausible that Congress gave EPA the authority to adopt on its own such a regulatory scheme.”

The three liberal justices joined in a dissent written by Justice Elena Kagan that said the majority opinion “deprives EPA of the power needed — and the power granted — to curb the emission of greenhouse gases.”

“And let’s say the obvious: The stakes here are high,” Kagan wrote. “Yet the Court today prevents congressionally authorized agency action to curb power plants’ carbon dioxide emissions. The Court appoints itself — instead of Congress or the expert agency — the decisionmaker on climate policy. I cannot think of many things more frightening. Respectfully, I dissent.”

New State Climate Plan Shows That Massachusetts is Moving Ahead

Boston Globe – Hours after the Supreme Court dealt a devastating blow to the national climate effort, Massachusetts released an aggressive new blueprint that speeds up efforts to slash emissions by electrifying buildings and vehicles and transitioning the electricity supply rapidly from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources.

The new plan offers a detailed path for what the state must achieve by 2025 and 2030, presenting a vision for accelerating climate action in Massachusetts.

“The Clean Energy and Climate Plan is a comprehensive and balanced plan that will serve as a guide for Massachusetts as we work to achieve ambitious emissions goals and reach Net Zero in 2050 in an equitable and affordable manner,” Governor Charlie Baker said in a statement.

The state plan calls for cutting emissions to 33 percent below 1990 levels in less than three years’ time, and getting to 50 percent by 2030. As it works toward those goals, the state envisions growing the economy, with modeling showing clean energy projects bringing a net gain of over 22,000 jobs by 2030.

The plan has been a project of the Baker Administration, but it will fall on the next governor, who will be elected in November, to implement it. Attorney General Maura Healey, whose office would help implement plans, and who is a gubernatorial candidate, said her office is looking forward to working with the state.

“The climate crisis is upon us, and this morning’s Supreme Court decision makes it even clearer states need to step up,” she said.

Buildings and transportation are the two largest sources of emissions in Massachusetts. In 2020, transportation accounted for 27 percent of the state’s emissions, while buildings heated with oil and gas accounted for 30 percent, according to the plan.

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

Black and Latino Households got More Mortgages Than Ever in 2020 — but Continued to Buy Houses in Only a Small Number of Communities

Boston Globe – More Black and Latino households are buying their first homes in Massachusetts than ever before, though overall they continued to choose only a handful of towns, according to a new report that tracks lending data in the state.

And even while Black and Latino families have picked up their purchasing pace, the percentage of loans for those borrowers in 2020 still remained well below their respective share of the overall state population, according to the report — the first comprehensive look at lending data in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Our analysis shows a homeownership market in Massachusetts that, while serving more homebuyers of color than ever before, is still not closing the wide racial homeownership gap in the Commonwealth,” said Carrie Bernstein, research manager and state data center manager at the UMass Donahue Institute, which conducted the analysis in partnership with the Massachusetts Community & Banking Council.

The report was consistent with other recent analyses of the state’s homeownership market, which have found that soaring housing costs across Great Boston have priced many families out of the city, forcing first-time homebuyers to look to buy their dream home in other parts of the state.

That displacement has had a significant impact in Boston’s historically Black communities, as more Black residents are leaving the city and settling in a small cluster of communities along the Route 24 corridor south of Boston, such as Brockton, according to a Globe review in May of statewide lending and census data. Real estate agents point to a range of reasons that first-time homebuyers may choose a certain community: quality of schools, cost of living, the community’s diversity, or business culture. But what is clear is that people buy where they can afford to live.

Taxation and Budget

Long To-Do list for End of Legislative Session

Commonwealth Magazine – This month is shaping up to be an enormously busy one on Beacon Hill. There’s one month until the Legislature wraps up its business for the 2021-2022 legislative session and, as is typical, lawmakers have a lot left on their plates.

They have billions of dollars in budget and bond bills to consider, bills in final stages of negotiation on priorities like sports betting and cannabis, and responses to national events related to guns and abortion. Several stated priorities – like improving early education and mental health care – remain in flux.

The lofty goals set by legislative leaders were clear in a statement issued by Senate President Karen Spilka on Tuesday, which listed among her priorities “transformative reforms to our mental-health and health-care systems, a commitment to build up our early education ecosystem, providing tax relief to help working families, reaching our net-zero 2050 goals and advancing equity and inclusion in the cannabis industry,” in addition to defending state gun laws and protecting abortion rights.

Massachusetts Sees Competition to Host ARPA-H

Axios – Massachusetts has competition in the campaign to host the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), the new federal agency tasked with making breakthroughs in health care and technology.

The agency is expected to focus on innovative solutions, including treatments for diseases such as Alzheimer’s, diabetes and Duchenne muscular dystrophy.

The US House approved a bill creating the $1 billion agency as part of the National Institutes of Health. It still needs Senate approval.

Massachusetts’ congressional delegation made its pitch to house ARPA-H in a letter in May, citing the state’s existing prestigious research universities, hospitals, biotech companies and “unmatched reputation as an idea factory.”

Georgia, North Carolina and other states have also thrown their names in to become home to the new facility.

The research facility is similar to DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which was founded under the Department of Defense in 1958.

Greater Boston is already known as a life-sciences hub, and hosting ARPA-H would foreground the state’s biotechs, colleges and health care companies in the federal government’s research endeavors.

“We have obviously located here the talent, academia, teaching hospitals, one of the largest biotech clusters in the world,” says MassBio President Joe Boncore, whose organization is leading efforts to bring the agency to the Bay State. “It’s all right here. It’s close by, and it’s easy to access from Washington, D.C.”

The region is home to life sciences companies that are already researching certain diseases, from Cambridge-based Alnylam Pharmaceuticals’ work on Alzheimer’s to Boston-based Vertex Pharmaceuticals’ treatments for cystic fibrosis.

Massachusetts is also home to Moderna, one of the three big COVID-19 vaccine makers, though Boncore says that some 90 life sciences companies statewide contributed to the vaccine development efforts.

He won’t give any hints as to where in Massachusetts he’d like to see the federal agency located, saying it’s too early to tell.

But he says he isn’t ruling out cities outside of Boston or Cambridge, adding that such companies have taken root in Woburn, Worcester and other cities.

The details of ARPA-H’s structure are still in the works, including whether its director needs to be confirmed by the Senate.

The agency was formally created and an interim director named last month, but the timeline of a headquarters decision remains unclear.

For now, Boncore isn’t sweating the competition.

“To be quite honest, they’re all competing with Massachusetts. When someone asks where ARPA-H should be located, there’s really only one answer, and that’s right here in the commonwealth.