Raphael Stevens

“While we can come back safely and build back better after most river flooding, there is no coming back for land that coastal erosion has simply taken away,” James Bevan says.
The chief executive of the U.K.’s Environment Agency admits it’s “far too early to say which communities are likely to need to move.”
Rising sea levels pose a threat to many coastal communities around the world, including island nations in the Pacific and Indian Oceans.

Houses on the east coast of England, photographed in 2020. On Tuesday, the chief executive of the U.K.’s Environment Agency said climate change meant some coastal communities would have to move.
Owen Humphreys | PA Images | Getty Images

The chief executive of the U.K.’s Environment Agency has issued a stark warning to coastal communities, acknowledging that the effects of climate change will force people — both in the U.K. and abroad — to relocate due to rising sea levels and coastal erosion.
Referring to what he described as the “hardest of all the inconvenient truths,” James Bevan said that in the long term, climate change meant “some of our communities, both in this country and around the world, cannot stay where they are.”

“That’s because while we can come back safely and build back better after most river flooding, there is no coming back for land that coastal erosion has simply taken away or which a rising sea level has put permanently, or frequently, underwater,” he said.  
Rising sea levels pose a threat to many coastal communities around the world, including island nations in the Pacific and Indian Oceans.
In a speech at the COP26 climate change summit last year, the President of the Maldives sought to highlight the peril facing his country, an archipelago made up of 1,192 islands.
“Our islands are slowly being inundated by the sea, one by one,” Ibrahim Mohamed Solih said. “If we do not reverse this trend, the Maldives will cease to exist by the end of this century.”
Meanwhile, in the U.S., the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration warned in February that sea levels along the country’s coastlines are expected to rise by, on average, around one foot by 2050. That’s as much as the rise measured over the last 100 years.

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The U.K.’s Bevan, who was speaking on Tuesday at a conference in Telford, Shropshire, argued that “in some places the right answer — in economic, in strategic, in human terms — will have to be to move communities away from the danger rather than to try and protect them from the inevitable impacts of a rising sea level.”
In additional remarks released on the U.K. government’s website, Bevan said the impacts of climate change would “continue to worsen.” He added it was “inevitable that at some point some of our communities will have to move back from the coast.”
In May, the World Meteorological Organization said the global mean sea level had “reached a new record high in 2021, rising an average of 4.5 mm per year over the period 2013–2021.”
This, the WMO said, was “more than double the rate of between 1993 and 2002” and “mainly due to the accelerated loss of ice mass from the ice sheets.”
It is likely to have “major implications for hundreds of millions of coastal dwellers” in addition to increasing “vulnerability to tropical cyclones.”

The U.K.’s plan

Bevan was speaking on the same day that his agency released its Flood and Coastal Erosion Risk Management Strategy Roadmap.
Covering the period up until 2026, the roadmap lays out plans to ensure “the country is resilient and ready to respond and adapt to flooding and coastal change.”
Among other things, the plan will look to:

Develop “a new national assessment of flood risk” focused on the sea, rivers and surface water.

Work on improving the Environment Agency’s digital tools so people are able to look at their flood risk and sign up for flood warnings.

Work with the Town and Country Planning Association to put together training materials with the goal of boosting “skills and capabilities” related to development planning and flood risk.

This image from 2018 shows properties on the edge of a cliff on the coast of Norfolk, England. Rising sea levels and coastal erosion pose a threat to many coastal communities around the world.
Joe Giddens | PA Images | Getty Images

In his speech, Bevan admitted that any sort of community relocation would be controversial, but sought to allay fears such moves were imminent.
The aim, he stressed, should be focused on making sure, wherever possible, coastal communities stayed where they were and thrived.
“I think that, with the right interventions over the coming years, we can achieve that for most of the coastal communities in this country as far ahead as any of us can reasonably foresee,” he said.
It was, Bevan added, “far too early to say which communities are likely to need to move in due course, still less to make any decisions.”
In addition, when any decision was made, the views of people living in the at-risk areas would have to be considered.
“No one should be forced from their homes against their will,” he said. “But — and there is a but — we do need to start the conversation about all this now.”

‘Honest conversations’

Among those reacting to the U.K. Environment Agency’s announcement and Bevan’s message was Jim Hall, professor of Climate and Environmental Risks at the University of Oxford.
“Even if the Environment Agency could afford to build coast protection everywhere — which they cannot — the things that many people cherish about the coast, like beaches and sand dunes, will eventually become submerged, unless we start to plan now for how the coastline can adjust to rising sea levels,” he said.

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“There need to be honest conversations within coastal communities about what the future holds, and a strategic approach to deciding how to manage the coast sustainably in the future,” Hall said.
Elsewhere, Natasha Barlow, associate professor at the University of Leeds’ School of Earth and Environment, said the “speed and amount of future sea-level rise” could be “limited by restricting global temperatures.”
“However, we are already committed to some degree of rising sea levels and coastal erosion due to the long-term melt of ice sheets, as a result of climate change,” she said. 
“Therefore, there is a need for a range of adaptation strategies, which in some cases will require coastal communities to have to relocate as land is lost to the sea.” More

Looking to invest in stocks with long-term value? Veteran investor Mohnish Pabrai has two books to recommend.
Speaking to CNBC Pro Talks, Pabrai — a value investor and disciple of billionaire Warren Buffett — said that “100 to 1 in the Stock Market” is an “extremely well-written” book.

Authored by Thomas Phelps and originally published 50 years ago, the book teaches about how to increase wealth one hundredfold through buy-and-hold investing.
Buy-and-hold is a passive investment strategy that involves purchasing stocks and holding them for a long period of time, even if there are short-term fluctuations.
The founder of the Pabrai Investment Funds, which has grown from $100,000 in 1999 to $1.2 million in revenue as of March this year, was discussing his playbook on what to buy and what to avoid.
Another book for those looking for “competitive advantage or ability to earn superior returns,” he said, is Christopher Mayer’s “100 Baggers” – which talks about companies that returned $100 for every $1 invested.

Does the business earn very high returns on equity? Can it grow and prosper without the use of debt? … Can this business reinvest the high returns and equity back at high rates?

Mohnish Pabrai
founder of the Pabrai Investment Funds

Investors should be asking themselves a few questions, he said.

“Does the business earn very high returns on equity? Can it grow and prosper without the use of debt? … Can this business reinvest the high returns and equity back at high rates?”

How to know if a company’s a ‘homerun’

To illustrate his point, Pabrai gave the example of Starbucks.
“When they open a store in the U.S., they get their money back in two years. When they open a store in China, they get their money back in 12 to 15 months,” he said.
These are “astronomical returns on capital,” the veteran investor said, adding that Starbucks had the ability to “get their money back really fast.”
“The business is getting more efficient because most of us don’t go and lounge around Starbucks. We pre-order, just pick our latte and go. And that’s even more profitable [for them].”
Pabrai summed up his idea of a “homerun” – he said it’s being able to see a clear “10-, 20-, 30-year runway.”
“What I’m trying to say is that if I find a business where the the they can grow without theuse of debt, … at a not expensive looking price, then you got yourself a homerun.”
Don’t miss: Bill Gates has 5 book recommendations for your 2022 summer reading list: ‘Compelling without sacrificing any complexity’
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The House passed a sweeping gun bill that would raise the minimum age to purchase an assault rifle to 21, but it faces long odds in the Senate.
The bill, called the Protecting Our Kids Act, would also bar the sale of large-capacity magazines and institute new rules that dictate proper at-home gun storage.
The House passed the bill in the wake of two mass shootings carried out last month by separate 18-year-old gunmen, both of whom carried AR-15 style assault rifles.

The House on Wednesday passed a sweeping gun bill that would raise the minimum age to purchase an assault rifle in the U.S. from 18 to 21, even though the legislation doesn’t stand much of a chance in the Senate.
The bill, called the Protecting Our Kids Act, would also bar the sale of large-capacity magazines and institute new rules that dictate proper at-home gun storage.

The Democratic-held chamber approved the legislation in a 223-204 vote. It passed in a mostly party line vote: Five Republicans supported the measure, while two Democrats opposed it.
The House earlier voted by a 228 to 199 margin to include the purchasing age provision — under heavy scrutiny after two recent massacres carried out by 18-year-olds — in the broader bill.
The package is a collection of several pieces of legislation designed to limit access to guns and other firearm equipment in the wake of last month’s mass shootings in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas, that left 31 Americans dead.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) speaks at a rally with gun violence prevention organizations, gun violence survivors and hundreds of gun safety supporters demanding gun legislation, ouside the United States Capitol in Washington, June 8, 2022.
Evelyn Hockstein | Reuters

Another component of the legislation, called the Untraceable Firearms Act, would bolster regulations around so-called ghost guns, or those firearms without a serial number. It is far more difficult for law enforcement to track ownership and possession of firearms that lack serial numbers.
While House Democrats passed stronger gun laws in response to the massacres, their success is largely symbolic. Senate Republicans, who have the power to block legislation with a filibuster that requires 60 votes to overcome, are united in their opposition to the House’s restrictions on guns and will block the bill from advancing.

The 50-50 split in the Senate, which gives Vice President Kamala Harris the key tie-breaking vote, means Democrats must persuade 10 Republicans to endorse any legislation. A bipartisan group of senators are negotiating a narrower compromise bill that they say would strengthen background checks, improve mental health services and bolster school security.
Political analysts say that neither the May 24 elementary school massacre in Uvalde, Texas, nor the May 14 racist rampage at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, are likely to drum up enough support for the bill passed by the House.
A gunman at Robb Elementary in Uvalde shot 19 children and two teachers to death, while the attacker in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Buffalo killed 10 people. Both gunmen were 18 years old and carried AR-15 style assault rifles.
Parents of the victims, law enforcement officials and one 11-year-old Uvalde shooting survivor appeared before Congress on Wednesday to urge lawmakers to pass new gun laws.

CNBC Politics

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Kimberly Rubio, mother to slain 10-year-old Lexi Rubio, told lawmakers through tears that she doesn’t want her daughter remembered as “just a number.”
“She was intelligent, compassionate and athletic. She was quiet, shy unless she had a point to make,” Rubio told the House Oversight Committee. “Somewhere out there, there is a mom listening to our testimony thinking, ‘I can’t even imagine their pain,’ not knowing that our reality will someday be hers. Unless we act now.”
In the wake of the two massacres, Senate Leaders Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., blessed bipartisan talks in the upper chamber on a narrower set of new firearm rules.
Sen. Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut, and Sen. John Cornyn, a Republican from Texas, are leading those deliberations, which have thus far focused on stronger background checks and red flag laws.
Red flag laws allow family members, co-workers or police to petition a court to seize an individual’s weapons for a set amount of time if the person is deemed to be a threat to themselves or the public.

The bipartisan Senate ideas — while far less stringent — are Democrats’ best shot to send any gun legislation to the desk of President Joe Biden for signature into law. The president, who has called upon federal lawmakers to pass any tighter gun laws, met with Murphy on Tuesday to discuss the bipartisan negotiations.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Tuesday that Biden supports red-flag laws and more-rigorous background checks.
“We understand not every component of what the president is calling for is going to stop every tragedy,” Jean-Pierre said. “But we have to take the steps, and we have to move forward, and we have to do something.”
Despite overwhelming support from congressional Democrats and the White House, new gun legislation faces difficult odds in the Senate, aides say, since the vast majority of Republicans would never vote for even slightly-more-strict gun bills.
Cornyn acknowledged that political reality from the Senate floor Wednesday afternoon, but struck an upbeat tone on the cross-party talks.
“I’m glad to say on this topic we are making steady progress. It is early in the process, but I’m optimistic about where things stand right now,” he said. “What am I optimistic about? I’m optimistic that we can pass a bill in the Senate, it can pass the House and it will get a signature by President Biden. And it will become the law of the land.”
The Texas Republican said he’s focused on the importance of ensuring young adults have access to mental health services and that schools have sufficient security protocols.
He also noted that another idea under consideration is a law that would require states to upload juvenile records into the National Instant Criminal Background Check System.
“Because this young man in Uvalde turned 18 and there was no lookback at his juvenile record, he passed a background check. It’s as if he were born on his 18th birthday and that nothing that had happened before was important,” Cornyn said. “That’s obviously a problem.”

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Volkswagen is “actively” looking to establish new assembly and battery facilities in the U.S., Volkswagen of America CEO Scott Keogh told CNBC on Wednesday.
Keogh declined to discuss potential locations for such operations.
The German automaker currently has North American assembly plants in Tennessee and Mexico.

Scott Keogh, VW, in San Francisco, California, Sept. 18, 2018.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. – Volkswagen is “actively” looking to establish new assembly and battery facilities in the U.S., Volkswagen of America CEO Scott Keogh told CNBC on Wednesday.
Keogh declined to discuss potential locations for such operations. The German automaker’s electrification efforts are currently based in Tennessee, including localized production of the VW ID.4 crossover EV, which is set to begin later this year.

“We are actively in the process of looking at another production facility and also looking at a battery facility,” Keogh said in an interview.
Volkswagen is still discussing and evaluating its options, and no decisions have been made, a company spokesperson said.

Such facilities, whether new or expansions, would mean a significant decision and likely billions of dollars in new U.S. investment for VW, which currently has North American assembly plants in Tennessee and Mexico.
Any investment would follow similar moves by other companies to increase EV production in the U.S. – a major goal of the Biden administration.
The potential for new VW electric vehicle facilities in the U.S. was previously reported by European media.

Keogh’s comments followed the grand opening of the German automaker’s new $22 million electric vehicle battery lab, which is located near its sole American assembly plant in Chattanooga. It’s part of a $7.1 billion commitment to boost its EV efforts in North America.
The new 32,000-square-foot battery lab will test and optimize batteries for electric vehicles for the U.S. market. It’s one of four such facilities that VW has announced globally.

ID.4 production ramp

A VW EV ID.4 cross-over at the VW plant in Chattanooga, TN, June 8, 2022.
Michael Wayland | CNBC

Keogh said Volkswagen expects to significantly increase its U.S. availability and sales of electric vehicles during the second half of this year, as it prepares to ramp up American production of its ID.4 crossover.
Volkswagen has been importing the ID.4 from Germany since last year in limited quantities of between 800 and 2,000 cars per month. Localized production at its Chattanooga plant is expected to ramp up quickly to about 7,000 ID.4 models by the end of this year, Keogh said.
“We don’t want to launch with 100 cars. We want to launch with a few thousand built up,” he said. “This is huge.”
Pre-production models of the vehicle, used for testing, validation and other purposes, are currently being assembled at the plant. Official production is expected to begin as early as next month. The vehicles are expected to flow into dealerships with significant availability as early as September, Keogh said.
Such a production ramp-up would be significantly faster than many new EVs hitting the market, including those from start-ups like Rivian as well as other traditional automakers like General Motors.
VW only sold 2,755 models of the ID.4 during the first quarter of this year. It sold 16,742 of the vehicles last year.
Keogh said the Chattanooga plant is eventually expected to reach production capacity of up to 10,000 ID.4 EVs per month once it’s fully up and running with three shifts of workers — a first for the plant.
Current imports of the roughly $41,000 EV, excluding any federal or state incentives, have not been enough to meet customer demand, Keogh said. The vehicles, he said, are “completely sold out.” More

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It’s that time again! “Mad Money” host Jim Cramer rings the lightning round bell, which means he’s giving his answers to callers’ stock questions at rapid speed.

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CNBC’s Jim Cramer on Wednesday advised investors to think twice before investing in digitization stocks while the possibility of a recession looms over the market.
“You can’t justify owning these unless you believe the [Federal Reserve] will quickly beat inflation without needing to do much more to damage the economy,” the “Mad Money” host said.

CNBC’s Jim Cramer on Wednesday advised investors to think twice before investing in digitization stocks while the possibility of a recession looms over the market.
“You can’t justify owning these unless you believe the [Federal Reserve] will quickly beat inflation without needing to do much more to damage the economy. I think that’s a real possibility, but I wouldn’t want to bank on it by owning too many enterprise service companies,” he said.

The “Mad Money” host’s comments come after the three major indices recorded slight declines on Wednesday, as investors continue to grow fearful of the possibility of an economic slowdown.
Cramer said that while digitization is inevitable and the current turmoil facing the economy is not on the same scale as the dotcom crash, a recession could deliver an unforgiving blow to the industry.
“If the economy goes into a real recession – I mean a big stagflation tailspin – the pool of potential clients will indeed shrink. The digitizers can’t make as much money if their customers are strapped for cash,” he said.
Cramer added that a frozen IPO market could also lead to “serious shortfalls.”
“There won’t be enough new clients, many of the existing ones won’t have enough money and there are too many competitors in this space fighting, perhaps, over a shrinking pie,” he said.

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CNBC’s Jim Cramer broke down why oil’s skyrocketing price has Wall Street worried about a recession, pointing to the fall in oil stocks on Wednesday even as crude hit record levels.
“As long as oil prices keep climbing, it’s hard to make the case for a soft landing. Oil’s a nightmare for the Fed. It reverberates throughout the whole economy, and there seems to be no stopping it,” the “Mad Money” host said.

CNBC’s Jim Cramer broke down why oil’s skyrocketing price has Wall Street worried about a recession, pointing to the fall in oil stocks on Wednesday even as crude hit record levels.
“As long as oil prices keep climbing, it’s hard to make the case for a soft landing. Oil’s a nightmare for the Fed. It reverberates throughout the whole economy, and there seems to be no stopping it,” the “Mad Money” host said. “Every time crude goes up, so do the odds of a recession,” he added.

Oil prices reached a 13-week high on Wednesday. While energy names in the S&P 500 recorded a slight gain, only a handful of the stocks were positive.
“I don’t believe in the stagflation thesis,” Cramer said, referring to when the economy undergoes a slowdown while inflation and unemployment run high. “Ideally, we can wangle our way out of energy inflation with more supply” from American producers.
Cramer said that if prices continue to climb, that could lead to demand destruction, which in turn could lead to a recession as consumers pull back on spending overall — which means trouble for the economy and policymakers.
“Even if we don’t get a lot more supply, the price of oil will eventually come down simply from demand destruction. But if it’s done that way, we could be in for a miserable, long, hot summer,” he added.

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