The Federal Reserve cut its benchmark interest rate by a quarter point Wednesday for the third time since September, bringing its key rate to about 3.6%, the lowest in nearly three years. Before September, it had gone nine months without a cut.The benchmark rate is the rate at which banks borrow and lend to one another, and the Fed has two goals when it sets the rate: one, to manage prices for goods and services, and two, to encourage full employment. The benchmark rate also affects the interest rates consumers pay to borrow money via credit cards, auto loans, mortgages, and other financial products.Typically, the Fed might increase the rate to try to bring down inflation and decrease it to encourage faster economic growth, including by boosting hiring. The challenge now is that inflation remains higher than the Fed’s 2% target but the job market has cooled. The government shutdown had also prevented the timely collection and release of some data the Fed relies on to monitor the health of the economy.Here’s what to know:
Interest on savings accounts will continue to decline
For savers, falling interest rates will continue to erode attractive yields currently on offer with certificates of deposit (CDs) and high-yield savings accounts.Three of the big five banks (Ally, American Express, and Synchrony) cut their savings account rates since the last Fed rate cut in October, according to Ken Tumin, founder of DepositAccounts.com. The top rates for high yield savings accounts right now remain around 4.35% to 4.6%.Those are still better than the trends of recent years, and a good option for consumers who want to earn a return on money they may want to access in the near-term. A high yield savings account generally has a much higher annual percentage yield than a traditional savings account. The national average for traditional savings accounts is currently 0.61%, according to Bankrate.
A cut will impact mortgages gradually
For prospective homebuyers, the market has already priced in the rate cut, meaning mortgage rates continue to hover around the lowest levels in more than a year.Mortgage rates are also influenced by bond market investors’ expectations for the economy and inflation. They generally follow the trajectory of the 10-year Treasury yield, which lenders use as a guide to pricing home loans.“While there’s no guarantee that the Fed’s move will push mortgage rates lower, there’s reason to be optimistic that homebuyers could see rates below 6.00% in the next year, even if only briefly,” according to Matt Schulz, chief consumer finance analyst at LendingTree. “That would likely spur more Americans to refinance their current high-rate mortgages and possibly even to consider shopping for a new home.”
Credit card rate relief could be slow
Interest rates for credit cards are currently at an average of 19.80%, down from a record-high 20.79% set in August 2024, but still historically high. The Fed’s rate cut may be slow to be felt by anyone carrying a large amount of credit card debt. That said, any reduction is positive news.“The reductions could mean hundreds of dollars in savings for debtors,” according to LendingTree’s Schulz.While the decrease is incremental, improved affordability could also help stabilize delinquency trends, according to Michele Raneri, vice president of U.S. research at credit reporting bureau TransUnion.“Lower borrowing costs can begin to ease household budgets, providing relief from inflationary pressures and reducing financial stress,” she said.Still, the best thing for anyone carrying a large credit card balance is to prioritize paying down high-interest-rate debt, and to seek to transfer any amounts possible to lower APR cards or negotiate directly with credit card companies for accommodation.Raneri added that the current economic environment continues to be defined by “persistent affordability challenges.”
Auto loans are not expected to decline soon
Americans have faced steeper auto loan rates over the last three years after the Fed raised its benchmark interest rate starting in early 2022. Those are not expected to decline anytime soon. While a cut will contribute to eventual relief, it might be slow in arriving, analysts say.And more borrowers are falling behind on car payments, a sign of economic distress. In October, 6.65% of subprime borrowers were at least 60 days late on their payments, according to Fitch Ratings, the highest delinquency rate on record, since record-keeping began in the early 1990s. The costs of both new and used vehicles remain high, according to Bankrate, which may be in part due to a shortage of used cars.Generally speaking, an auto loan annual percentage rate can run from about 4% to 30%, depending on the borrower’s credit score. Bankrate’s most recent weekly survey found that average auto loan interest rates are currently at 7.05% on a 60-month new car loan.
The cut signals the Fed cares about the labor market
If you’re a job-seeker right now, the Fed rate cut is good news, since cheaper borrowing for businesses could help them invest in additional employees to grow their business.“Overall, we’ve seen a slowing demand for workers with employers not hiring the way they did a couple of years ago,” said Cory Stahle, senior economist at the Indeed Hiring Lab. “By lowering the interest rate, you make it a little more financially reasonable for employers to hire additional people. Especially in some areas – like startups, where companies lean pretty heavily on borrowed money – that’s the hope here.”Stahle acknowledged that it could take time for the rate cuts to filter down to employers and then to workers, but he said the signal of the reduction is also important.“Beyond the size of the cut, it tells employers and job-seekers something about the Federal Reserve’s priorities and focus. That they’re concerned about the labor market and willing to step in and support the labor market. It’s an assurance of the reserve’s priorities.”The Associated Press receives support from the Charles Schwab Foundation for educational and explanatory reporting to improve financial literacy. The independent foundation is separate from Charles Schwab and Co. Inc. The AP is solely responsible for its journalism.
Cora Lewis, Associated Press
Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss are taking Gemini Space Station Inc. into the prediction market space.
The cryptocurrency exchanges CEO and president, respectively, said on Thursday that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has granted a Designated Contract Market (DCM) license to a company affiliate called Gemini Titan, LLC.
Gemini Titan will offer event contracts written as yes-or-no questions about future occurrences, essentially letting U.S. users gamble on the outcomes of everyday events.
As examples, Gemini in its announcement provided the questions, Will 1 bitcoin end this year higher than $200k? and Will Elon Musks X end up paying the full $140 million fine to the European Commission in 2026?
The news comes three months after the Winklevoss twins, made infamous in the 2010 film The Social Network, brought Gemini public amid a wave of crypto-focused IPOs this year.
Geminis shares (Nasdaq:GEMI) soared about 16% during after-hours and into premarket trading on Thursday.
However, its stock is still down more than 64% from a high that it had reached around its market debut in September.
“Making America the crypto capital of the world”
The CFTCs granting of the license comes half a decade after Gemini first applied on March 10, 2020.
Tyler Winklevoss credited the approval to President Trump for ending the Biden Administrations War on Crypto.
He also thanked the CFTCs acting chairman, Caroline D. Pham, for her hard work and dedication to help realize President Trumps vision for making America the crypto capital of the world.
Tyler Winklevoss continued his fawning: Its incredibly refreshing and invigorating to have a President and a financial regulator who are pro crypto, pro innovation, and pro America.
As for when Gemini Titan will be up and running, the release simply states that it’s starting shortly.
U.S. customers should be able to use dollars to trade event contracts in their Gemini account on the web and, eventually, the mobile app. The company adds that Gemini Titan might add crypto futures, options, and perpetual contracts to its derivative offerings in the future.
It will have to compete with existing prediction markets such as Polymarket and Kalshi.
Today, investors are waking up to red on their screens as many tech and AI stocks are dropping in premarket trading.
But why are shares in these companies falling? Much of it has to do with the cloud infrastructure company Oracle (NYSE: ORCL) and its latest quarterly earnings results. Heres what you need to know.
Oracle’s Q2 2026 results send ORCL plunging
Yesterday, Oracle reported financial results for its second quarter of fiscal 2026. To say investors were disappointed in the results is an understatement, given how poorly ORCL shares are performing in premarket trading this morning.
As of the time of this writing, ORCL shares are down over 12% as investors unpack its results:
Non-GAAP Earnings per Share: $2.26
Total Revenue: $16.1 billion
On the surface, the numbers look good. Non-GAAP earnings per share (EPS) were up 54% and total revenue was up 14%.
However, as noted by CNBC, while Oracles non-GAAP EPS beat LSEG analyst expectations of $1.64, analysts were expecting higher total revenue figures: $16.21 billion versus the $16.1 billion Oracle delivered.
That discrepancy caused the stock to tumble, even after the company announced new agreements with major AI investors, Nvidia, and Meta.
As noted by Investopedia, although these agreements have helped boost Oracle’s remaining performance obligations to $523 billion, they have also raised investor concerns about circular spending in the AI industry.
Circular spending refers to when companies invest in each other, effectively passing money back and forth.
Circular spending is also one of the biggest reasons why many fear we could be in an AI bubble waiting to pop.
Chip stocks fall after Oracles earnings results
These AI bubble fears seem to have been renewed today after Oracles financial results. As of the time of this writing, major chip companies operating in the AI space are seeing stock price declines, including:
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (Nasdaq: AMD): down 1.2%
Arm Holdings plc (Nasdaq: ARM): down 1.2%
Broadcom Inc. (Nasdaq: AVGO): down 1.3%
Intel Corporation (Nasdaq: INTC): down 1%
Micron Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq: MU): down 1.1%
NVIDIA Corporation (Nasdaq: NVDA): down 1.3%
QUALCOMM Incorporated (Nasdaq: QCOM): down 0.9%
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited (NYSE: TSM): down 1.4%
Big Tech shares are also falling after Nvidias earnings
Oracle’s disappointing earnings and renewed fears of an AI bubble also seem to be impacting the stock prices of many of techs most prominent players this morning, albeit to a lesser extent:
Alphabet Inc. (Nasdaq: GOOG): down 0.5%
Amazon.com, Inc. (Nasdaq: AMZN): down 0.7%
Apple Inc. (Nasdaq: AAPL): up 0.1%
Meta Platforms, Inc. (Nasdaq: META): down 0.9%
Microsoft Corporation (Nasdaq: MSFT): down 0.6%
Nvidia Corporation (Nasdaq: NVDA): down 1.3%
As for Oracle itself, the companys stock price is currently down over 12% to $196.25 per share.
This decline follows a strong year for Oracle. As of yesterday’s close, the stock is up 33% so far in 2025, outperforming the Nasdaq Composite’s rise of 22.68%. Over the past 12 months, ORCL shares have climbed 25%.
I spend most days in rooms where four generations argue about the same spreadsheet.
Boomers, Gen X, millennials, and Gen Z staff the same executive teams, often guided by directors from a fifththe Silent Generation. Four different eras, four different mental operating systems, one quarterly earnings call. When leaders tell me, Weve got a generation problem, what they usually have is a self-awareness problem.
A widely cited review of so-called generational differences at work found that many popular stereotypes dont hold up very well when you look at actual data on values and attitudes. At the same time, more recent research shows that age-mixed teams can outperform when leaders handle the friction with care.
So, the data tell us two things at once: People from different birth years are less alien than weve been told, and they can be a strength or a liability depending on how leaders show up.
After three decades recruiting and coaching leaders, Ive learned a simple rule: What you can see, you can shape. What you cant see quietly shapes you.
How our eras built our habits
Im a boomer. I grew up on a steady diet of show up early, stay late, say yes, sir. That wiring served me well in my time at the White House and later in boardrooms. It also produced a habit that took me years to spot: the urge to please.
In hard conversations, Id soften the edges. Add extra words. Smooth things over. Younger colleagues didnt experience that as kindness. They experienced it as dodging. They wanted clarity, not choreography.
Psychologist Jean Twenge, in her book Generations, shows how each cohorts habits grew out of the era that raised them: boom-time expansion, layoffs and divorce, student debt and purpose-driven careers, social media and permanent comparison. None of that is virtue or vice. Its conditioning.
Trouble comes when we treat our conditioning as the gold standard and everyone elses as a flaw.
The most freeing move Ive made as a leader was saying to myself, My boomer urge to be agreeable is watering down the truth. Once I named it, I could do something about it.
A good first question for any leader is small and uncomfortable: What do people my age regularly praise me for that might secretly be wearing my team out?
When senior leaders look in the mirror
This isnt just a mid-career problem. Senior leaders wrestle with it too.
Elon Musk, a Gen Xer, has spoken openly about his pathologically optimistic timelines. That belief that nearly anything is solvable with enough grit, iteration, and contrarian thinkingis one of the hallmark traits of the Generation X worldview. For Elon, is has helped drive rockets, electric cars, and ambitious AI projects, and it has also pushed employees into impossible deadlines when reality didnt cooperate.
A classic boomer, Jamie Dimon, notes that his vigilance on risk is a strength, and he knows it can land as sharp or impatient in the room. Warren Buffett has explained in shareholder letters that his strong loyalty to managers sometimes kept him from moving fast enough to replace them when performance lagged.
These leaders didnt erase their blind spots. They acknowledged them, adjusted, and built teams that were allowed to tell the truth back to them and accelerated performance and massive shareholder value creation. The same move is available to the rest of us.
Caricatures versus real people
Generational caricatures are easier than real work. Boomers as workaholics. Gen X as cynical. Millennials as needy. Gen Z as fragile. They make for good jokes; they make for bad leadership.
A study of multigenerational teams found that most friction comes from mismatched assumptions about communication, career speed, and feedback, not from wildly different values. That lines up with what I see in succession conversations: People want to grow, feel useful, and be treated fairly, regardless of their birth year. They simply learned different ways to signal those desires.
You dont need a grand theory to lead through that. You need a few habits that make your own lens visible to you and to others.
5 small moves to shrink the ‘generation gap’
Heres a list I often give to CEOs who are tired of the generational blame game:
Run a shadow meeting review once a month. After a key meeting, ask one person whos at least 15 years older or younger than you: Walk me through how that meeting felt to youwhat landed, what didnt? Listen without defending.
Add a two-question feedback round every quarter. Ask your direct reports: Whats one thing I should keep doing? Whats one thing I should adjust? No surveys. Just live conversation.
Pair up for reverse mentoring. Invite a younger colleague to teach you one digital habit or collaboratio tool they rely on. In return, offer one story about a time you failed and recovered. Research on reverse mentoring points to gains on both sidesskills and understanding grow together.
Narrate your intent. In tense moments, say aloud what youre trying to do: Im pushing hard here because Im worried about risk, or Im being quiet here because I want to hear others first. Youll be surprised how much misreading that removes.
Pick one generational habit to bend. A Silent-era or boomer leader might deliberately leave the office on time twice a week and invite a younger colleague to walk out with them. A Millennial or Gen Z leader might choose one meeting a day where the laptop stays shut and the phone stays face-down.
None of that requires a task force. It does require an honest look in the mirror.
The real bridge across generations
When leaders learn to notice their own blind spots and talk openly about them, something changes in the room. Silent-era steadiness calms Gen Z anxiety. boomer grit reinforces Millennial desire for purpose. Gen X realism ties these temperaments together.
The bridge is not another app, policy, or slogan about generations. The bridge is a leader willing to see themselves clearly and invite others to do the same.
Instacarts artificial intelligence-enabled pricing may be increasing the cost of your groceries by as much as $1,200 a year, according to a new study published on Monday.
Instacart is an online grocery delivery and pickup service that allows customers to order groceries from local stores by using its technology platform, via app or its website, and then fulfills those orders through a personal shopper.
The investigation from Consumer Reports and Groundwork Collaborative, a progressive policy group, found that some identical products were priced differently from one customer to the nextsometimes by as much as 23%. One company executive reportedly called the tactic smart rounding in an email between Instacart and Costco that Consumer Reports says was inadvertently sent to the magazine by Costco.
The findings are based on data from 200 volunteers who checked prices on 20 items, in four cities, and found a difference in about 75% of those items in some of the biggest grocery and big-box retailers, including Costco, Kroger, Safeway, Sprouts Farmers Market, Albertsons, and Target. (Prices for the same products varied from as little as 7 cents to $2.56 per item.)
Instacart, which previously disclosed its pricing experiments in corporate marketing and investor materials, said its shoppers are not aware that theyre involved in an experiment, but said the resulting price differences are small and negligible.
“These tests are not dynamic pricingprices never change in real time, including in response to supply and demand,” an Instagram spokesperson told Fast Company. “The tests are never based on personal or behavioral characteristicsthey are completely randomized.”
Instacart said the stores control the prices, and they work closely with them to align online and in-store pricing, wherever possible.
“Each retailers pricing policy is displayed on their Instacart storefront, so customers always know when prices may differ from in-store and can easily compare prices across retailers before checkout,” the spokesperson added. “Just as retailers have long tested prices in their physical stores to better understand consumer preferences, a subset of only 10 retail partnersones that already apply markupsdo the same online via Instacart. These limited, short-term, and randomized tests help retail partners learn what matters most to consumers and how to keep essential items affordable.”
As a result, a customer may see slightly lower prices on family staples such as milk or bread, and slightly higher prices on less price-sensitive products like craft beverages or specialty snacks, Instacart said.
They look like ordinary basketball courts. But two new courts built next to public housing in New York City double as flood prevention.
In a sudden flash floodwhen the citys aging sewer system can easily become overwhelmed and streets can fill with waterthe sunken basketball courts act like retention basins. The design can hold as much as 330,000 gallons, with the courts lowest areas filling like a pool and additional water stored in bioretention cells beneath the surface.
[Photo: courtesy Grain Collective]
The project becomes like a sponge, which basically holds the water as much as it can, says Runit Chhaya, principal at Grain Collective, a landscape architecture firm that worked on the design with city agencies, local residents, engineers from Hazen and Sawyer, and the urban planning firm Marc Wouters Studios. It helps in not putting stress on the city storm system during a flood event.
[Image: courtesy Grain Collective]
The redesign is part of a larger program that began in 2017, when the New York City Department of Environmental Protection drew inspiration from the way that low-lying cities like Copenhagen were dealing with “cloudbursts” of extreme rain.
Climate change is making heavy storms more likely because warmer air holds more moisture, loading clouds with extra water. Its an even bigger challenge in cities like New York that are covered in pavement and that have combined sewer systems, meaning a single system handles both household sewage and stormwater.
[Photo: courtesy Grain Collective]
As the city looked for ways to capture stormwater, public housing sites presented an opportunity. “NYCHA is unique in having large pieces of property within very dense neighborhoods that provide the opportunity to mitigate stormwater overflows in a way that most properties do not,” says Siobhan Watson, vice president of sustainability at the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA).
There was also an opportunity to improve public space. The design team worked closely with NYCHA residents, emphasizing that the project wasn’t just about climate change. “It’s very hard to go to these communities and just start talking about climate change and flood protection because they are thinking about basic needs and we are talking about infrastructure they didn’t even ask for,” says Chhaya. “So you kind of change the storyand it’s an honest story that, hey, it’s actually a win-win situation. You’re going to get an upgraded amenity.”
At South Jamaica Houses, an apartment complex in a low-lying, flood-prone neighborhood in Queens, the project replaced two older basketball courts with the new sunken design. The courts are now surrounded by steps so spectators can watch a game or casually hang out. The space is also designed to be used for other purposes, like a summer movie night or farmers market.
[Photo: courtesy Grain Collective]
During storms, rain from nearby streets is channeled through pipes into bioretention areas beneath the basketball courts. The courts, which are roughly three feet deep, also can hold up to a foot of water in areas and then slowly release it. Most of the stored water seeps underground in the 48 hours after a storm. If the subsurface storage is full, a valve allows the rest of the water to overflow to the sewer only when there’s capacity.
The inspiration came from similar designs in Europe, including a “watersquare” in Rotterdam that functions as public space most of the time but captures water in heavy storms. The projects are an investmentthe first system at South Jamaica Houses cost around $5 millionbut could help prevent more costly damage.
[Photo: courtesy Grain Collective]
When planning first began, the city was thinking about long-term resilience. “At the time, we had not really experienced these kinds of extreme rains that we’ve seen over the past few years,” says Watson. “And over the course of time as this project has been developed, the context has totally changed.” The city has now seen storms like Hurricane Ida, in 2021, where extreme, sudden rain caused severe flooding and killed 11 people living in basement apartments. Ida showed the danger is real and urgent, underscoring the need for projects like the new courts.
Now, New York City is moving forward with more of the infrastructure at other public housing around the city. At a complex called Jefferson Houses, a new playground under construction uses permeable pavers to channel rainwater into underground storage tanks. Another basketball court is set to begin construction at Clinton Houses, and other projects are in the design phase now at four other sites.
Remember earlier this year when everyone on your feed was wearing bizarre shoes, like Maison Margiella’s ballerina flats with split toes and mesh ballet flats? Or when statement scrunchies were all the rage? Don’t feel bad if you missed it. Blink, and the trend was over.
Over the past 15 years, the pace of fashion trends has sped up thanks to social media and fast fashion brands. But over the past five years, with the rise of TikTok and Shein, they’ve gotten out of control. Micro-trends pop up in a subculture of the internet, lasting for just a few days before fading into oblivion.
It’s gotten to the point where many people have lost interest in fashion trends altogether, at least according to Stitch Fix, the personal styling service. Every year, the company culls through the data of its more than two million clients and gathers insights from the personal stylists who serve them, to predict future buying behavior. Two thirds of customers have expressed “trend-fatigue,” and are generally ignoring trends. “People are tired of trying to keep up with what’s in,” says Amy Sullivan, Stitch Fix’s VP of buying and private brands.
This wasn’t always the case. Stitch Fix’s customers aren’t necessarily fashionistas, since they’re keen to outsource their clothes shopping to experts, but they do generally mirror the tastes of the broader American population. Over the past few years, they’ve requested garments that were on trend. After the pandemic, they were keen on “dopamine dressing,” which meant picking colorful, mood-boosting looks. Then, last year, they were into quiet luxury, the understated sophisticated look popularized by the TV show Succession. But this year, nobody seems to knowor carewhether there’s a single, dominant aesthetic.
[Photo: Stitch Fix]
Instead, Sullivan says they’re just requesting classic, versatile staple looks, like black tops and white button-down shirts. To prevent their outfit from getting too boring, they’re asking for statement pieces, like sculptural jewelry or colorful handbags, that add a hit of visual interest. Stitch Fix has surfaced the color “Chili Red” as a hue that will allow customers to add some spice to otherwise very basic looks. “Color is a way to bring neutral staples to life,” says Sullivan. “We’re seeing sales of red pieces go up, but they’re generally adding just a small pop of color to their outfit.”
If you needed another piece of evidence that consumers are over trends, Stitch Fix stylists say that customers are inspired by the style of Jennifer Aniston and Anne Hathaway. These celebrities aren’t exactly known for their cutting-edge fashion: When they’re not on the red carpet, they’re generally wearing classic pieces in neutral colors. “Their style is very accessible,” says Sullivan. “They’re not as fashion-forward as some other celebrities.”
[Photo: Stitch Fix]
Pantone, the color expert, appears to have also recognized that the world is exhausted by the constant churn of trends. For 2026, it has chosen a shade of white called Cloud Dancer for its color of the year. It’s a hue that telegraphs a desire for blankness at a time when “the overstimulation of the internet is only increasing,” as my colleague Mark Wilson writes.
For those of us who care about sustainability, consumers’ exhaustion with trends is an unmitigated good. For the past two decades, as trends have sped up, the industry has churned out more and more clothing.
Brands like Shein produce low-priced, low-quality clothes that are effectively designed to be disposable. This flood of clothing is destroying the planet. Making these garments consumes natural resources and spews carbon emissions into the atmosphere. Most will only be worn a few times before ending up in a landfill.
[Photo: Stitch Fix]
One solution to this environmental catastrophe is for people to buy fewer clothes. A way to get there is for consumers to abandon trends and focus, instead, on purchasing staples when their budget allows. So Stitch Fix’s prediction is encouraging. But will our abstention from trends last? Have we finally entered a post-fashion-trend reality?
Sullivan believes that’s possible. “Everyone is agreed that we want to invest in durable classics as the foundation of our wardrobe,” she says. “It doesn’t seem like we’re ever going back to a time when the fashion industry dictated trends that we all have to follow. And there’s something liberating about that.”
As the Trump administration makes announcement after announcement about its efforts to promote the U.S. fossil fuel industry, the industry isnt exactly jumping at new opportunities.
Some high-profile oil and gas industry leaders and organizations have objected to changes to long-standing government policy positions that give companies firm ground on which to make their plans.
And the financial picture around oil and gas drilling is moving against the Trump administrations hopes. Though politicians may tout new opportunities to drill offshore or in Arctic Alaska, the commercial payoff is not clear and even unlikely.
Having worked in and studied the energy industry for decades, Ive seen a number of discoveries that companies struggled to move forward with because either the discovery was not large enough to be commercially profitable or the geology was too difficult to make development plausible. Market conditions are the prime drivers of U.S. energy investmentnot moves by politicians seeking to seem supportive of the industry.
Market fundamentals trump policy announcements
The general decline in oil prices from 2022 through late 2025 has reduced the attractiveness of many drilling investments.
And opening the East and West coasts to drilling may sound significant, but these regions have unconfirmed reserves. That means a lot of subsurface work, such as seismic surveys, stratigraphic mapping, and reservoir characterizationpotentially taking yearswould need to be done before any drilling would begin.
Offshore drilling also faces enormous opposition.
On the West Coast, California Gov. Gavin Newsom and California Attorney General Rob Bonta have made forceful statements against any new California offshore oil drilling. They have said any effort is economically unnecessary, environmentally reckless, and dead on arrival politically in the state.
California local governments, environmental groups, business alliances, and coastal communities also oppose drilling and have vowed to use legal and political tools to block them.
There is opposition on the East Coast, too. More than 250 East Coast local governments have passed resolutions against drilling.
Governors on both sides of the aisle, including Democrat Josh Stein of North Carolina and Republicans Brian Kemp of Georgia and Henry McMaster of South Carolina, have spoken out against drilling off their coasts.
Drilling for oil in the Arctic region of Alaska is much more complex than in other areas of the country and the world. [Photo: Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement/Flickr]
Arctic drilling is even harder
Drilling for oil and gas in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the Beaufort Sea off Prudhoe Bay in Alaska would be a massive undertaking. These projects require years of development and are subject to future reversals in federal policyjust as Trump has lifted long-standing drilling bans in those areas, at least for now.
In addition, Alaska is one of the most expensive and technically challenging places to drill. Specialized equipment, infrastructure for frozen landscapes, and risk mitigation for extreme weather drive costs far above other regions. These projects also face logistical challenges, such as pipelines running hundreds of miles through remote, icy terrain.
Natural gas from Alaska would likely be sold to Asian buyers, who increasingly have alternative sources of supply from Australia, Canada, Qatar, and even the U.S. Gulf Coast. As production rises in those places, the entrance of Alaskan natural gas into the market raises the risk for global oversupply, which could depress prices and reduce profitability.
Despite political support from the Trump administration, the oil and gas companies would need financing to pay for the drilling. And those loans wont come if the oil companies dont have agreements with buyers for the petroleum products that are produced. Major oil companies have withdrawn rom Alaska and signaled skepticism about attractive long-term returns.
Trump has helped some
In the first 10 months of the second Trump administration, the president has signed at least 13 executive orders pertaining to the energy industry. Most of them focus on streamlining U.S. energy regulation and removing barriers to the development and procurement of domestic energy resources. However, the broad nature of some of these orders may fall short of establishing the stable regulatory environment necessary for the development of capital-intensive energy projects with long time horizons.
Those efforts have reversed the Biden administrations go-slow approach to oil drilling, reducingthough not completely eliminatingthe backlog of requests for onshore and offshore drilling permits that accumulated during Bidens presidency.
Delays in permit approvals increase project costs, risk, and uncertainty. Delays can increase the chances that a project ultimately is downsizedas happened with ConocoPhillips Willow project in Alaskaor canceled altogether. Longer timelines increase financing and carrying costs, because capital is tied up without generating revenue, and developers must pay interest on the debt while waiting for approvals. Delays also lead to higher project costs, eroding project economics and sometimes preventing the project from turning a profit.
Investment follows economics, not politics
Unlike in some countries, such as Saudi Arabias Aramco, Norways Equinor, or Chinas CHN Energy, the U.S. does not have a national oil or gas company. All of the major energy producers in the U.S. are privately owned and answer to shareholders, not the government.
Executive orders or political slogans may set a tone or direction, but they cannot override the fundamental requirement for profitability. Investments cant be mandated by presidential decree: Projects must make economic sense. Without that, whether due to low prices, high costs, uncertain demand, or changing regulations, companies will not proceed.
Even if federal policies open new areas for drilling or relieve some regulatory restrictions, companies will invest only if they see a clear path to profit over the long term.
With most energy investments costing large amounts of money over many years, the industry likely wants a sense of policy stability from the Trump administration. That could include lowering barriers to profitable investments by accelerating the approval process for supporting infrastructure, such as transmission power lines, pipelines, storage capacity, and other logistics, rather than relying on sweeping announcements that lack market traction.
Skip York is a nonresident fellow in energy and global oil at the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Human activity is driving climate change; thats a fact that more than 99.9% of scientific papers agree on.
But the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has quietly removed that information from a webpage explaining climate changes causes.
Its yet another move by the Trump administration that downplays climate science. Trump has previously called climate change a hoax, repealed numerous climate laws, and has bolstered the use of fossil fuels, the burning of which are the main cause of rising heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions.
An EPA page titled Causes of Climate Change once began by directly noting that since the Industrial Revolution, human activities have released large amounts of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, which has changed the earths climate.
Now, that page begins by stating, Natural processes are always influencing the earths climate and can explain climate changes prior to the Industrial Revolution in the 1700s. (The previous version of the website is still available via online archives.)
The previous EPA web page above, noting human activity as a cause, and the edited version below. [Screenshots: epa.gov]
A purging of scientifically accurate information
Daniel Swain, a climate and weather scientist at UCLA, noticed the change earlier this week. It began when a weather communications colleague reached out to him about the EPAs Indicators of Climate Change section being offline.
That section wasnt just one web page, but an entire subdomain that included data, maps, and detailed stories on certain climate change indicators like shrinking glaciers and rising sea levels. It was often used by experts, including Swain himself, to grab ready-made info graphics and other resources.
Swain looked into that issue, and found that the link now redirects to a broken web page. Then he started digging into other webpages from the EPA.
It immediately became clear that there had been a much larger scale, essentially, purging of scientifically accurate information from a large portion of the EPA public facing website, he says.
The EPA also removed a sub page on climate change impacts that discussed events like floods and heatwaves. But even more concerning than certain pages disappearing, Swain says, was the change to the causes webpage removing the mention of human activity.
That had been, not removed, but dramatically modified to the point where it is now false, he says.
The move isnt necessarily surprising from the Trump administration, Swain adds. But he calls it a pretty clearly deliberate effort to shift the public facing view on formally authoritative federal agency documents, communications, and websites to align with partisan political priorities.
The previous “Indicators of Climate Change” website, and the new broken link. [Screenshots: epa.gov]
Its not exactly clear when these changes occurred, but the Wayback Machine shows the comments about human activity still on the EPA website in early October.
While nearly all information about human-caused climate change has been scrubbed from the website, one stray reference to it remains, at the end of a section discussing how volcanic eruptions have previously released large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Volcanic particles from a single eruption do not produce long-term climate change because they remain in the atmosphere for a much shorter time than greenhouse gases, that section currently reads. In addition, human activities emit more than 100 times as much carbon dioxide as volcanoes each year.
In a statement to the New York Times, a spokesperson for EPA administrator Lee Zeldin noted that the archives still existed, and said that the Trump administration is focused on human health over left-wing political agendas.
This agency no longer takes marching orders from the climate cult, she added.
(A separate EPA webpage, titled Future of Climate Change, does still point to human causes of global warming.)
Humans have caused more than 100% of climate change
The science on climate change is clear: Human activity is the cause.
In fact, previous climate scientists analyses have found that humans have caused more than 100% of global warming since 1950.
That’s possible because of the fact that earths natural cycles have actually slightly cooled the planet over the last century. Essentially, human causes have not only caused the warming that we’ve seen, but it’s also offset a bit of cooling that otherwise would have occurred, Swain says.
Human caused warming is, for all intents and purposes, the singular cause of contemporary climae change, he adds.
Disinformation and AI confusion
There are other resources for accurate climate information that note human activity as its cause.
But the EPAs move to remove that information points to a broader issue, in which the Trump administration is eroding credibility in government information and its institutions at large. The same thing has played out on the CDC and Health and Human Services websites, specifically concerning vaccines.
To Swain, altering a page on climate change causes shows intent to deceive.
They chose not to delete that page. They heavily modified it to the point of scientific incorrectness, he says. That is choice . . . and it is arguably something that is even more deeply concerning, because it shows a willingness, essentially, to lie, and to present information that is false.
This move from the EPA could also have ricochet effects. Consider AI overviews and LLMs, Swain says. If they re-aggregate these webpages from the EPA, they may also regurgitate those falsehoods.
The algorithm is not capable of differentiating truth from fiction, he says. The challenge is that it is getting more and more difficult to find consistent, reliable, and authoritative sources for this kind of information.
Change is often presented as an enigma. Unlike a traditional management task, you cant just devise a plan and execute it. To be an effective change leader, you need to embrace a certain amount of uncertainty because change, by definition, involves doing new things, and that always involves some measure of unpredictability.
Still, that doesnt mean change is mysterious. We actually know a lot about it. In Diffusion of Innovations, researcher Everett Rogers compiled hundreds of studies performed over many decades. Around the same time, Gene Sharp led a parallel effort to understand how large-scale political movements drive social and institutional change.
So while any change effort involves no small amount of uncertainty, there is also quite a bit of consistency. Much as Tolstoy remarked about families, all successful transformations end up looking very much alike, while all unsuccessful transformations end up failing in their own way. Here are four numbers to keep in mind as you embark on your change journey.
1. Three Quarters Of Transformational Initiatives Fail
In 1983, McKinsey consultant Julien Phillips published a paper in the journal Human Resource Management that described an adoption penalty for firms that didnt adapt to changes in the marketplace quickly enough. His ideas became McKinseys first change management model that it sold to clients.
Yet it was Harvards John Kotter, in his seminal 1996 book Leading Change, who really popularized the idea of change management, bringing it from academic theory into the practical world of business. His eight-step change management process continues to define the field for many even today. Later, Proscis ADKAR model gained prominence.
Yet for all of the prestige surrounding these ideas, theres no evidence that any of these change management methods actually work. In fact, in a 2021 study McKinsey found that 69% of transformation efforts fail. A more recent study by Bain found that only 12% succeeded and 75% had mediocre results. Thats abysmal.
There are many theories about why change fails. The McKinseys report points out that the source of failure can come at any stage, from target setting to planning, implementation, and after. Bain found that nearly all failed transformations were underfunded. In truth, however, these are symptoms, not causes.
In my research Ive found something simpler and more fundamental: change fails because people resist it. If you can overcome resistance, change is possible. If not, it isnt. That is why we developed a simple tool called the Resistance Inventory, so that our clients can anticipate resistance from Day 1 and build strategies to mitigate it.
2. Two-Thirds Of Employees Experience Change Fatigue
Managers launching a new initiative often seek to start with a bang. They work to gain approval for a sizable budget as a sign of institutional commitment. They recruit high-profile executives, arrange a big kick-off meeting, and look to move fast, gain scale, and generate some quick wins. All of this is designed to create a sense of urgency and inevitability.
Yet trying to manufacture urgency often backfires. In Cultures of Growth, Stanford social psychologist Mary C. Murphy points out that disruption undermines the growth mindset that is essential for building an innovative culture. In particular, she cites research indicating that fear inhibits learning. There is also evidence to suggest that this effect is especially pronounced among top performers, who tend to be more prone to anxiety.
Now consider a 2014 report by PwC. In a survey of more than 2,200 executives, managers, and employees located across the globe, it found that 65% of respondents cited change fatigue, and only about half felt their organization had the capabilities to deliver change successfully.
It gets worse: 44% of employees say they dont understand the change theyre being asked to make and 38% say they dont agree with it. Perhaps not surprisingly, employees view new transformation initiatives suspiciously, taking a wait-and-see attitude, undermining the momentum and leading to a boomerang effect in which early progress is reversed when leadership moves on to other priorities.
The impact on mental health is substantial. Stress disengages the parts of the brain related to cognitive and executive functions and activates the emotional parts of the brain instead. A recent study by the American Psychological Association found that 71% of American workers report feeling stressed at work and three in five say it negatively impacts their performance.
3. Only 10%20% Participation Is Needed To Hit An Inflection Point
The biggest misconception about change is that, to get people to adopt it, you need to sell the value of an alternative future. The real problem with change is that the status quo has inertia on its side, and never yields its power gracefully. It has had yearsor even decadesto build support amng internal and external stakeholders.
Thats why most transformational efforts fail and why two-thirds experience change fatigue. The status quo, despite its drawbacks, is what people know. To adopt something new, we need to overcome the synaptic patterns built up in our brains, the cultural forces to which we have conformed and to overcome switching costs.
Thats never easy. So how do you break the cycle?
The good news is that you dont have to convince everyone at once. We know from the earliest diffusion studies on things like hybrid corn and tetracycline that it takes only 10%20% to adopt an innovation for rapid acceptance by the majority to follow. Everett Rogers, in his seminal Diffusion of Innovations, found that this pattern was consistent over hundreds of studies spanning many decades.
The key is to understand that change doesnt spread through communication campaigns, but through peer networks. If you can empower 10%20% of your organization to be successful with a new idea, they will spread it to their friends, who will spread it to others still. People adopt what they see working around them. So instead of trying to shape opinions, work to shape networks.
4. 84% of U.S. Corporate Assets Are Now Intangible Assets
In the early 1980s, Intels President, Andy Grove, realized he had a problem. The company had built its business on DRAM memory chips. But competition from the Japanese was killing its profits. As he described in his book, Only The Paranoid Survive, things came to head in the middle of 1985.
He turned to Intels Chairman and CEO Gordon Moore and asked him what a hypothetical new CEO would do if they were both fired. Moore replied without hesitation that the new CEO would get us out of memories. It was right then and there that a decision was made to focus on the microprocessors that would lead Intel to industry dominance.
Its a great story and, for many, it has come to epitomize effective change leadership. Leaders make a strategic decision, communicate it effectively, and see that it is implemented at every level of the organization. Questions and concerns are listened to and addressed, but at the same time, the message is clear: Change is coming and you need to get on board.
But consider that research shows in 1975, during roughly the same period that Gove and Moore transformed Intel, 83% of the average US corporations assets were tangible assets, such as factories, machinery, and buildings. When your assets are tangible, change is largely about communicating strategic decisions made from above. Theres little anybody can do to resist them anyway.
However, the very same research finds that by 2015, 84% of corporate assets became intangible, such as licenses, patents, and research. Change is no longer about making decisions about strategic assets, but about influencing what people think and do everyday. You cant try to force or overpower that kind of change, you need to attract and empower.
And that is probably the most important thing to know about how transformations happen today: change itself has changed. We can no longer just tell people to do what we want; we need to attract people who want what we want, who share our sense of mission. It is no longer enough to simply plan and direct action; we must inspire and empower belief.
