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    At COP28, More Than 20 Nations Pledge to Triple Nuclear Capacity

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    The group, including Britain, France and the United States, said the agreement was critical to meeting nations’ climate commitments.The United States and 21 other countries pledged on Saturday at the United Nations climate summit in Dubai to triple nuclear energy capacity by 2050, saying the revival of nuclear power was critical for cutting carbon emissions to near zero in the coming decades.Proponents of nuclear energy, which supplies 18 percent of electricity in the United States, say it is a clean, safe and reliable complement to wind and solar energy. But a significant hurdle is funding.Last month, a developer of small nuclear reactors in Idaho said it was canceling a project that had been expected to be part of a new wave of power plants. The cost of building the reactors had risen to $9.3 billion from $5.3 billion because of increasing interest rates and inflation.Britain, Canada, France, Ghana, South Korea, Sweden and the United Arab Emirates were among the 22 countries that signed the declaration to triple capacity from 2020 levels.Tripling nuclear energy capacity by 2050, which would also help Europe reduce its dependence on Russia oil and gas, would require significant investment. In advanced economies, which have nearly 70 percent of global nuclear capacity, investments has stalled as construction costs have soared, projects have run over budget and faced delays. On top of cost, another hurdle to expanding nuclear capacity is that plants are slower to build than many other forms of power.Addressing the issue of financing, John Kerry, President Biden’s climate envoy, said that there were “trillions of dollars” available that could be used for investment in nuclear. “We are not making the argument to anybody that this is absolutely going to be the sweeping alternative to every other energy source — no, that’s not what brings us here,” he said. But, he added, the science has shown that “you can’t get to net-zero 2050 without some nuclear.”Nuclear power does not emit carbon, and an International Energy Agency report last year that said nuclear was crucial to helping to reduce carbon emissions in line with the Paris Agreement goals outlined in 2015. President Emmanuel Macron of France said nuclear energy, including small modular reactors, was an “indispensable solution” to efforts to curb climate change. France, Europe’s biggest producer of nuclear power, gets about 70 percent of its own electricity from nuclear stations.Mr. Macron and other leaders, including Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson of Sweden, called on the World Bank and international financial institutions to help finance nuclear projects. Mr. Kristersson said that governments must “assume a role in sharing the financial risks to strengthen the conditions and provide additional incentives for investments in nuclear energy.”While world leaders on Saturday called nuclear the most effective alternative to fossil fuels, some climate activists said nuclear energy was not a panacea.David Tong, a researcher at Oil Change International, said the pledge was divorced from the reality of nuclear energy — that it was too costly and too slow. “It’s a self-serving political pledge that doesn’t reflect the role that nuclear is likely to play in the energy transition, which is menial,” he said. “There is very small growth in nuclear — certainly nothing like tripling.” He said he rejected the stance that there was no pathway to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, a goal set in the Paris Agreement to avoid the worst effects of global warming, without nuclear. Masayoshi Iyoda, an activist from Japan with 350.org, an international climate action campaign, cited the nuclear disaster at Fukushima in 2011 and said that nuclear power was a dangerous distraction from decarbonization goals. “It is simply too costly, too risky, too undemocratic, and too time-consuming,” he said in a statement.“We already have cheaper, safer, democratic, and faster solutions to the climate crisis, and they are renewable energy and energy efficiency,” Mr. Iyoda said.All but four of the 31 reactors that have begun construction since 2017 were designed by Russia or China, with China poised to become the leading nuclear power producer by 2030, the International Energy Agency said. This year, Germany shut its last three nuclear plants.Nuclear capacity rose in the 1980s, particularly in Europe and North America, but dropped sharply over the subsequent years after accidents at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979 and Chernobyl in 1986. New technology and tighter regulations have been put in place since then. Americans are conflicted about nuclear power, but a growing number favor expansion compared with a few years ago, according to a Pew Research Center study published in August. More

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    U.S. Gas Prices Drop Ahead of Thanksgiving Travel

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    With OPEC Plus members in disarray over production levels, oil prices have fallen nearly 20 percent in three months.U.S. gasoline prices are plunging just in time for Thanksgiving, and with the OPEC Plus oil cartel in apparent disarray, they could be heading lower for Christmas.Lower prices at the pump have helped ease the inflation rate most of this year. But this week, they fell to levels not seen at this time of year since 2021, according to the AAA motor club, before the Russian invasion of Ukraine sent energy prices higher.“For consumers it’s a terrific tailwind,” said Tom Kloza, global head of energy analysis at Oil Price Information Service. “They are not going to have to spend an awful lot on travel in the next few months, and that should persist into the middle of the winter.”The national average price for a gallon of regular gasoline on Wednesday was $3.28, about 6 cents less than a week earlier and 27 cents less than a month ago. The price for a gallon of gas was $3.64 at the same time last year. Prices have dropped below $3 a gallon in more than a dozen states and are falling with particular speed in Montana, Florida and Colorado.The primary reason for lower gasoline prices is the recent weakness of oil prices, which have fallen by more than $15 a barrel, or nearly 20 percent, since early September. Demand for fuel has been weak in China and parts of Europe, while production has been strong in Brazil, Canada and the United States. Gasoline production at American refineries is running above demand in some parts of the country.Diesel prices have also eased, by about 23 cents a gallon over the last month and more than $1 a gallon in the last year. That should help reduce food prices because diesel is the primary fuel for agriculture and heavy transport.The drop in oil prices accelerated on Wednesday as reports emerged that the planned meeting of OPEC Plus, a group of 23 oil-producing countries led by Saudi Arabia, had been postponed from the weekend until next Thursday. Saudi Arabia had been expected to extend its cuts in production, while cajoling other countries to show restraint as well to bolster prices. But Nigeria and Angola are resisting, and lobbying for higher production quotas.“Reaching a new agreement to cut production will prove to be challenging,” said Jorge León, a senior vice president at Rystad Energy, a consulting firm.He said that although Russia and eight other members of the cartel agreed to cuts in June, “it would be difficult for these countries to accept even lower production quotas.”Energy experts say there could still be an agreement, especially if the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Iraq agree to voluntary cuts. Saudi Arabia might also be willing to go it alone with cuts because its government budget and ambitious economic plans depend on high prices.The uncertainty has served as a signal to traders to bail out of crude. “Savvy drivers will find savings on their way to a turkey dinner this year,” said Andrew Gross, a spokesman for AAA.AAA has predicted that more than 49 million Americans will drive to holiday destinations in the coming days, an increase of 1.7 percent from last year. Another 4.7 million will fly, a 6.6 percent increase from the last year and the highest number since 2005, according to the motor club.Airfares will be slightly more expensive than last year, the motor club said, but otherwise holiday travel should be cheaper. It said the average price for a domestic hotel stay is down 12 percent from last year, while rental car costs are 20 percent lower. More

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    U.A.W. Members at General Motors Ratify Contract

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    The United Automobile Workers union hopes the agreements with General Motors, Ford and Stellantis will help it make inroads at other companies.Members of the United Automobile Workers union have given their backing to new contracts with the three big U.S. automakers, agreements that deliver hefty wage increases and other gains that had eluded the union for more than 20 years.In the most closely contested vote, the tentative contract agreement at General Motors won the support of 55 percent of the nearly 36,000 members casting ballots, according to a tally from all the G.M. locals that the union posted on Thursday.Tentative agreements with Ford Motor and Stellantis, the maker of brands including Jeep and Chrysler, appeared headed for approval by more decisive margins, nearly complete results there showed.A spokesman for the union confirmed the accuracy of the tallies but declined to comment further.The agreements are similar across the three automakers and raise the top wage for production workers 25 percent, to more than $40 over four and a half years, from $32. They were reached last month after a six-week wave of strikes that hobbled the companies — a strategy spearheaded by the union’s new president, Shawn Fain, who had vowed to take a more adversarial approach to negotiations than his predecessors.Workers leaving the Ford Chicago Assembly Plant on Thursday.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesThe agreements appear to have quickly reverberated across the auto industry, with Toyota, Hyundai and Honda announcing significant wage increase at nonunion plants in the United States only days later.“We call that the U.A.W. bump, and that stands for ‘U Are Welcome,’” Mr. Fain said in testimony before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee this week. “And we’re very proud of that. And when these workers decide to organize and join the U.A.W., they’re going to realize the full benefit of union membership and get what they’re fully due.”The new contracts also included larger company contributions to workers’ retirement plans and the right to strike over plant closures. All three automakers declined to comment on the ratification votes.Mr. Fain said the union was seeking to capitalize on its momentum by waging muscular organizing campaigns at nonunion plants, and, in remarks submitted to the Senate committee, he added that thousands of workers were already contacting the union and signing union cards.But even Mr. Fain’s tough approach in the talks with the Big Three did not yield terms attractive enough to many union members. G.M. workers at several large plants voted against the tentative agreement by large margins.In contrast, members of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters recently approved a new contract at United Parcel Service with 86 percent support, while a new contract between the Writers Guild of America and Hollywood studios passed with 99 percent support.Rebecca Givan, a labor studies professor at Rutgers University, said Mr. Fain had achieved a major victory despite having taken office only a few months earlier with a goal of reorienting the union.Huey Harris, at the G.M. plant in Flint, said he had voted in favor of the contract despite his belief that it didn’t offer veteran workers like him enough gains.Nic Antaya for The New York TimesDr. Givan said the union’s approach of initially striking at one plant at each of the three automakers and ramping up over time had “really upended a lot of conventional wisdom” in the labor movement and had proved unusually successful at reversing some concessions that the union had accepted years earlier, like the suspension of a cost-of-living adjustment.“This shows that if workers build enough power, they can win things back,” she said.U.A.W. members at Mack Truck also ratified a contract on Wednesday, after rejecting an initial agreement with the company.Across the three automakers, skepticism toward the agreements arose in large part from veteran workers who felt that the proposed contracts did not go far enough to compensate them for years of concessions and weak wage growth, even given strong gains for newer workers. Wages for some newer workers will more than double over the next four years.Huey Harris, a G.M. employee at a large truck assembly plant in Flint, Mich., who has worked at the company for over 20 years, said the deal should have gone further in rewarding veteran workers, though he ultimately voted for it. “The traditional people didn’t think they were offered enough in the contract,” he said.Curtis March, who works at Ford’s Chicago plant and made the inflation-adjusted equivalent of more than $40 an hour in the early 1990s, will make about $36 in the first year of the new contract, he said.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesSeveral longtime employees of the Big Three automakers said that even after the large gains of the new contract, they would not be making more than when they started their careers.Curtis March, who works at Ford’s Chicago Assembly Plant, said he made about $18 an hour once he reached the top wage for production workers at the company in the early 1990s, equivalent to more than $40 today when adjusted for inflation. He will make about $36 in the first year of the new contract.Mr. March said the deal was likely to pass at Ford because it placated more recent employees, who outnumber veterans like him. Workers at his plant approved the deal after voting against several previous contracts.Despite the ultimate success, the path to ratifying the contracts has included some internal strains for Mr. Fain and the union. Unite All Workers for Democracy, a reform group that played a key role in electing Mr. Fain and six other members of the U.A.W. executive board to their positions, declined to formally recommend that union members approve the contract even after Mr. Fain urged the group to do so at a recent meeting, according to three people familiar with the meeting. Instead, Unite All Workers passed a resolution committing it to stay neutral during the ratification vote, though it stated that the group “celebrates the record gains made in this agreement.”Two of these people also said the union’s General Motors department had been less communicative and less proactive in distributing information about the contract to local union officials and members than the Ford and Stellantis departments.The union declined to comment on these developments.LaDonna Newman, a longtime Ford worker, said about the U.A.W.’s president, Shawn Fain, “I give him a lot of kudos for having the courage to go against the corporations.”Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesRatification could also bring political benefits to President Biden, who waded into the negotiations over the summer and fall, and who risked angering business leaders by increasingly siding with the union’s members.Administration officials were taken aback in August when Mr. Fain called for a 40 percent raise for autoworkers and a four-day workweek. Executives at the Big Three called the White House to ask if Mr. Fain was serious. A senior administration official said Biden aides had reassured them that the union wanted a deal, but acknowledged that the negotiations could go quite differently from the way the automakers were used to.In mid-September, when Mr. Biden was in New York for meetings at the United Nations General Assembly, he joined aides on a video call to make a decision that he and his team had been building toward for weeks: to join autoworkers on a picket line in Detroit. That decision infuriated executives, the administration official said, but the White House saw it as a victory for the president and for workers, by making a clear statement about where Mr. Biden stood in the negotiations.Some autoworkers argued that the union had erred by failing to expand the strike, which eventually included about one-third of the companies’ unionized workers in the United States, even more.LaDonna Newman, another longtime Ford worker who opposed the contract because of its limited gains for veteran workers, said she believed the union could have won more at the bargaining table had it been willing to escalate further.Still, she did not blame Mr. Fain for the outcome. “He walked into a burning building,” Ms. Newman said. “I give him a lot of kudos for having the courage to go against the corporations.”Jim Tankersley More

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    Caen las tarifas aéreas en EE. UU., para alivio de los pasajeros

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    Las aerolíneas están comenzando a ofrecer precios de rebaja, una señal de que tienen problemas para llenar los aviones.En fechas recientes en Estados Unidos, las tarifas aéreas a muchos destinos populares han caído a su nivel más bajo en meses; incluso los viajes durante la temporada festiva son mucho más baratos que el año pasado. Esto les ha dado un respiro a los consumidores, tras meses de frustración por los elevados precios de todo tipo de bienes y servicios.La abundancia de buenas ofertas hace pensar que quizá la vigorosa recuperación de la industria aérea tras la pandemia por fin va bajando el ritmo, ya que la oferta de boletos se empareja con la demanda, que parece relativamente firme, e incluso la supera en algunas rutas.Tengamos en cuenta las tarifas que consiguió hace poco Denise Diorio, maestra jubilada de Tampa, Florida. Gastó menos de 40 dólares en un boleto de ida y vuelta a Chicago y solo pagó 230 dólares por un viaje redondo de Nueva York a París, el cual planea hacer este mes.“Les he venido diciendo a todos mis amigos que si quieren ir a alguna parte, deben comprar sus boletos ahora”, comentó.Las gangas que encontró quizá sean excepcionales, pero Diorio está en lo correcto cuando asegura que hay muchas ofertas.Este mismo mes, el precio promedio de un vuelo nacional cerca del Día de Acción de Gracias estaba casi un 9 por ciento por debajo del nivel del año pasado. En cuanto a los vuelos cerca de la Navidad, eran aproximadamente un 18 por ciento más baratos, según la aplicación de reservaciones y rastreo de precios Hopper. Kayak, el motor de búsqueda de viajes, analizó un rango más amplio de fechas cerca de las fiestas y descubrió que los precios de los vuelos nacionales eran alrededor de un 18 por ciento más bajos por la fecha del Día de Acción de Gracias y un 23 por ciento por Navidad.“En muchos casos, observamos algunas de las tarifas más bajas desde que se reanudaron los viajes tras los recortes de 2020, en realidad”, afirmó Kyle Potter, editor ejecutivo del blog de viajes y servicio de alerta de ofertas Thrifty Traveler.El precio de los boletos para vuelos dentro de Estados Unidos bajó durante el verano, aseveró Potter, y en épocas recientes es más común encontrar ofertas para viajes internacionales, en particular a Europa.Las aerolíneas bajan sus tarifas cuando quieren tentar a más personas a reservar boletos porque la demanda es baja o la competencia es más fuerte. Sin duda, la competencia se ha intensificado en algunas rutas, pero los expertos en viajes indican que no hay certeza de que la demanda vaya en declive.Se espera que el Día de Acción de Gracias de este año establezca una cifra récord para los viajes aéreos, con predicciones de casi 30 millones de pasajeros, según Airlines for America, un grupo de la industria. Esta cifra sería un 9 por ciento más alta que la del año pasado y estaría un 6 por ciento por encima de la de 2019, antes de la pandemia.Pero algunas aerolíneas afirman que la demanda va en descenso en los periodos que no son de festividades o temporada alta. Además, algunos aeropuertos han manejado tal número de vuelos que las compañías de transporte se han visto obligadas a reducir las tarifas para llenar los aviones.Ese no había sido un problema durante la mayor parte del periodo de recuperación tras la pandemia. El clima y otras perturbaciones limitaron la oferta de vuelos el año pasado y en 2021, al igual que la escasez de pilotos capacitados, repuestos y aviones, entre otros factores. Esas condiciones provocaron un alza en el precio de los boletos, mantuvieron llenos los aviones y ayudaron a las aerolíneas a obtener excelentes ganancias.“La industria de la aviación nunca había registrado el tipo de márgenes de ganancias y rendimiento sobre capital visto en los últimos 2 años y medio”, señaló John Grant, principal analista de la empresa consultora y de datos de aviación OAG. “Casi estamos de nuevo en una industria más normal”.Para las principales aerolíneas estadounidenses continúan los buenos tiempos, impulsados en particular por una gran demanda de vuelos internacionales. Pero las compañías más pequeñas y de bajo costo han comenzado a sufrir. Varias revelaron resultados financieros decepcionantes para el trimestre concluido en septiembre. Los ejecutivos de esas aerolíneas han dicho que la demanda va en descenso, las tarifas han caído y los costos se han mantenido elevados. También señalan que el mal clima y la escasez de controladores de tráfico aéreo les han complicado la operación aérea.Por ejemplo, JetBlue Airways perdió 153 millones de dólares en el tercer trimestre, en contraste con las ganancias de 57 millones de dólares registradas en el mismo periodo el año pasado. La empresa indicó hace poco que planea cambiar algunos vuelos de mercados abarrotados, como Nueva York, a otros en los que espera un mejor desempeño, como el Caribe. Las compañías de transporte económicas Spirit Airlines y Frontier Airlines les informaron hace poco a los inversionistas que buscaban recortar decenas de millones de dólares en costos.La competencia ha sido aguerrida en algunos mercados importantes, lo que ha impulsado a la baja las tarifas y las utilidades.En Denver, donde se encuentran las oficinas generales de Frontier, este verano hubo un 14 por ciento más asientos disponibles que en el verano de 2019, según la proveedora de datos de aviación Cirium. Miami y Orlando, Florida, dos destinos populares a los que vuelan muchas empresas, experimentaron aumentos en capacidad todavía mayores.No obstante, mientras que las aerolíneas añadieron vuelos en mercados populares en busca de captar pasajeros, en aeropuertos de otras ciudades, como Los Ángeles, un centro de actividades de muchas aerolíneas importantes, se observaron reducciones considerables en la capacidad con respecto al verano de 2019.“Es evidente que existe una enorme correlación entre las aerolíneas que funcionan bien y aquellas que tienen dificultades, en términos de sus márgenes, cuando comparamos dónde están sus concentraciones”, señaló el mes pasado Barry Biffle, director ejecutivo de Frontier, durante una teleconferencia para presentar los resultados de la aerolínea correspondientes al tercer trimestre.En cuanto a las rutas internacionales, los analistas no saben con tanta certeza por qué las tarifas van a la baja ni si se mantendrán así. Gangas como las que consiguió Diorio para su viaje a París podrían ser señal de que las aerolíneas más grandes pronto enfrentarán presiones financieras o sencillamente que la industria va regresando a una normalidad prepandémica.“Por lo regular, la demanda de viajes a Europa baja durante el invierno”, explicó Steve Hafner, director ejecutivo de Kayak. “Así que me parece que eso refleja las tendencias normales”.Pero la demanda de viajes internacionales podría enfrentar obstáculos, en parte debido a las guerras de Medio Oriente y Ucrania. Los analistas también advierten que muchos consumidores quizá estén menos dispuestos a derrochar dinero en viajes o tengan menos posibilidades de hacerlo ahora que en los dos años pasados, cuando contaban con el dinero que habían ahorrado durante la pandemia. Incluso si la demanda se mantiene firme, las aerolíneas corren el riesgo de ofrecer demasiados asientos en rutas populares al extranjero.Cualquiera que sea la causa de la reciente caída de las tarifas, las ofertas son un bienvenido alivio para los viajeros después de sufrir años de precios altos, dijo Potter.“En cualquier caso, la receta para vuelos baratos está ahí”, afirmó. “Si se trata solo de un pequeño exceso de capacidad, es una victoria para los consumidores. Si la demanda de viajes está cayendo, en cierto modo es una ganancia aún mayor para las personas que nunca van a renunciar a viajar”.Niraj Chokshi escribe sobre la aviación, los ferrocarriles y otras industrias del transporte. Más de Niraj Chokshi More

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    Sharp Drop in Airfares Cheers Inflation-Weary Travelers

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    Airfares to many popular destinations have recently fallen to their lowest levels in months, and even holiday travel is far cheaper than it was last year, providing some welcome relief to consumers who have been frustrated for months by high prices for all manner of goods and services.The glut of deals suggests that the airline industry’s supercharged pandemic recovery may finally be slowing as the supply of tickets catches up and, on some routes, overtakes demand, which appears relatively robust.Consider the fares that Denise Diorio, a retired teacher in Tampa, Fla., recently scored. She spent less than $40 on flights to and from Chicago and paid just $230 for a round-trip ticket from New York to Paris and back, a trip she plans to take this month.“I’ve been telling all my friends, ‘If you want to go somewhere, get your tickets now,’” she said.The bargains she found may be exceptional, but Ms. Diorio is right that deals abound.Early this month, the average price for a domestic flight around Thanksgiving was down about 9 percent from a year ago. And flights around Christmas were about 18 percent cheaper, according to Hopper, a booking and price-tracking app. Kayak, the travel search engine, looked at a wider range of dates around the holidays and found that domestic flight prices were down about 18 percent around Thanksgiving and 23 percent around Christmas.“In a lot of cases, we’re seeing some of the lowest fares that we’ve seen really since travel started coming back after the drop-off in 2020,” said Kyle Potter, executive editor of Thrifty Traveler, a travel blog and deal-watching service.Domestic ticket prices fell over the summer, Mr. Potter said, and deals on international travel, particularly to Europe, have become more common recently.Airlines lower their fares when they are trying to get more people to book tickets as demand is slowing or they are facing stiffer competition. There’s little question that competition has intensified on some routes, but travel experts say it’s not clear whether demand is waning.Thanksgiving this year is expected to set a record for air travel, with nearly 30 million passengers forecast, according to Airlines for America, an industry group. That would be about 9 percent more than last year and 6 percent more than in 2019, before the pandemic.But some airlines say demand is slowing outside of holiday and other peak travel periods. In addition, some airports have been so flooded with flights that carriers have been forced to cut fares to fill planes.That hadn’t been much of a problem for most of the recovery from the pandemic. Weather and other disruptions limited the supply of flights last year and in 2021, as did shortages of trained pilots, parts and planes, among other factors. That drove up ticket prices, kept planes full and helped airlines take in strong profits.Thanksgiving this year is expected to set a record for air travel, with nearly 30 million passengers anticipated.Stefani Reynolds for The New York Times“The airline industry has never delivered the types of profit margins and return on capital that it has done over the last 2.5 years,” said John Grant, chief analyst with OAG, an aviation advisory and data firm. “We’re getting back to a more normal industry.”For the largest U.S. airlines, the good times have continued, fueled in particular by thriving demand for international travel. But smaller and low-fare carriers have started to suffer. Several reported disappointing financial results for the three months that ended in September. Executives at those airlines have said demand is weakening, fares are falling and costs remain high. They also say bad weather and a shortage of air traffic controllers have made flying more difficult.JetBlue Airways, for example, lost $153 million in the third quarter, compared with a $57 million profit in the same period last year. The company said recently that it was moving flights away from crowded markets, such as New York, to those where it expected stronger performance, such as the Caribbean. The budget carriers Spirit Airlines and Frontier Airlines recently told investors that they were looking to cut costs by tens of millions of dollars.Competition has been fierce in some important markets, driving down fares and profits.In Denver, where Frontier is based, about 14 percent more seats were available on flights this summer than in the summer of 2019, according to Cirium, an aviation data provider. Miami and Orlando, Fla., two popular destinations served by many budget carriers, saw even larger increases in capacity.But while airlines added flights in popular markets as they chased passengers, airports in other cities, including Los Angeles, a hub for several major airlines, had large declines in capacity from the summer of 2019.“You’ll find that there’s a large correlation between the airlines that are doing well and the ones that are struggling, margin-wise, when you compare where their concentrations are,” Barry Biffle, Frontier’s chief executive, said last month on a conference call to discuss the airline’s third-quarter results.When it comes to international routes, analysts are less certain of why fares are falling and whether they will remain low. The kinds of deals that Ms. Diorio got for her Paris trip could mean that larger airlines soon find themselves facing a financial squeeze or merely that the industry is returning to a prepandemic normal.“Historically, demand to Europe softens in the winter,” said Steve Hafner, Kayak’s chief executive. “So I think that reflects normal trends.”But demand for international travel could face challenges, partly because of the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine. Analysts also warn that many consumers may be less willing or able to splurge on travel than they were in the last couple of years, when they had pandemic savings to draw from. Even if demand remains strong, airlines risk offering too many seats on popular overseas routes.Whatever the cause of the recent drop in fares, the deals are a welcome break to travelers from years of high prices, Mr. Potter said.“Either way the recipe is there for cheap flights,” he said. “If it’s just a little bit of overcapacity, that’s a win for consumers. If travel demand is dropping, in some ways that’s an even bigger win for people who are never going to give up on travel.” More

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    Solar Manufacturing Lured to U.S. by Tax Credits in Climate Bill

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    A combination of government policies is finally succeeding in reversing a long decline in solar manufacturing in the United States.Six years ago, an executive from Suniva, a bankrupt solar panel manufacturer, warned a packed hearing room in Washington that competition from companies in China and Southeast Asia was causing a “blood bath” in his industry. More than 30 U.S.-based solar companies had been forced to shut down in the previous five years alone, he said, and others would soon follow unless the government supported them.Suniva’s pleas helped spur the Trump administration to impose tariffs in 2018 on foreign-made solar panels, but that did not reverse the flow of jobs in the industry from going overseas. Suniva’s U.S. factories remained shuttered, with dim prospects for reopening.That is, until now. Last month, Suniva announced plans to reopen a Georgia plant, buoyed by tariffs, protective regulations and, crucially, lavish new tax breaks for Made-in-America solar manufacturing that President Biden’s signature climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act, created.Solar companies have long been the beneficiaries of government subsidies and trade protections, but in the United States, they have never been the object of so many simultaneous efforts to support the industry — and so much money from the government to back them up.The combination of billions of dollars of tax credits for new facilities and tougher restrictions on foreign products appears to be driving a wave of so-called reshoring of solar jobs. Those efforts are succeeding where more modest approaches did not, although critics argue that the gains come at a high cost to taxpayers and may not hold up in the long run.In the year since the climate law was passed, companies have announced nearly $8 billion in new investments in solar factories across the United States, according to data from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Rhodium Group, a nonpartisan research firm. That is more than triple the amount of total investment announced from 2018 through the middle of 2022.Suniva plans to reopen and expand a factory to make solar cells in Norcross, Ga., by spring. REC Silicon will restart this month a polysilicon plant in Moses Lake, Wash., that it shut down in 2019. Maxeon, a Singapore-based producer of solar cells and modules, will start work next year on a $1 billion site in New Mexico.In each of those cases, executives cited the incentives in the climate law as a driving factor in their investment decisions.In recent years, China overtook foreign competitors through huge government investments that allowed it to build factories 10 times as large as American ones.Gilles Sabrie for The New York Times“It was kind of exactly what we had in mind in terms of what would be needed, to pull these kinds of manufacturing initiatives forward,” said Peter Aschenbrenner, Maxeon’s chief strategy officer.China has loomed large over the industry for more than a decade. American demand for solar power has grown sharply since 2010 — by about 24 percent each year in that time, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association, a trade group. But much of that spending went to cheaper foreign solar panels, often made by Chinese companies or with Chinese parts. That raised concerns of American overreliance on China, which is restricting supplies of other key products and whose solar production has been troubled by human rights concerns.U.S. solar manufacturing employment peaked in 2016, with just over 38,000 workers. By 2020, nearly one-fifth of those jobs were gone.Factory solar jobs have begun to grow again.E2, an environmental nonprofit organization, estimated that new investments announced in the first year of the climate law would create 35,000 temporary construction jobs and 12,000 permanent jobs across the entire solar industry in the years to come. Thousands of those permanent jobs are related to manufacturing, including an expected 2,000 at Maxeon’s planned plant in New Mexico.Economists and executives said that surge was largely due to public subsidies that flipped the economics of the solar industry in favor of domestic production.Mr. Aschenbrenner said Maxeon’s cost of domestic solar manufacturing would fall roughly 10 percent, just through a new manufacturing tax credit in the climate law that targets the production of both solar cells and solar modules. That is enough to offset the higher wage and construction costs of American factories, he said.The law also includes credits for customers, like homeowners and utilities, that install solar panels and begin generating electricity from them. If the customer buys panels that are sourced from the United States, like the ones Maxeon is planning, the value of that credit grows 10 percent.Those incentives could be enough to build an American industry that, within a matter of years, could be large and efficient enough to compete with China even without subsidies, Mr. Aschenbrenner said.Others are more skeptical. Analysts at Wood Mackenzie, an energy consultancy, estimate that nearly half the solar module capacity announced by 2026 will not materialize, given that some manufacturers announce long-term plans to gauge feasibility and interest.The recent embrace of subsidies and tariffs by politicians of both parties also irks some economists, who say that while such programs can save or create jobs, they do so at an extremely high cost.A 2021 study by the Peterson Institute of International Economics of past industrial policy programs found that the Obama administration’s 2009 investment in Solyndra, a solar company that ultimately went bankrupt, cost taxpayers about $216,000 for each job created, more than four times prevailing industry wages. Other programs were even more expensive.REC Silicon, a Norwegian maker of polysilicon, entered into a deal with QCells to supply that company’s planned U.S. plants.Megan Varner/Reuters“With certain kinds of technology, you can subsidize and protect your way to having factories,” said Scott Lincicome, who studies trade policy at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. “The question is always about at what cost?”In addition to the costs incurred to taxpayers, protections for the U.S. industry are making solar products more expensive in the United States than in other countries, Mr. Lincicome said. That slows the adoption of solar technology, in contrast to climate goals.Trends in the global solar industry have often been closely linked with government action. The industry started booming over a decade ago when Germany and Japan began offering subsidies for solar power.In recent years, China overtook foreign competitors through huge government investments that allowed it to build factories 10 times as large as American ones. Since 2011, China has invested more than $50 billion in the sector, ultimately capturing more than 80 percent of the global share of every stage in the manufacturing process, according to the International Energy Agency.Tariffs also shaped the industry’s evolution. The United States imposed levies on Chinese solar products in 2012. The next year, China retaliated with tariffs of up to 57 percent on U.S. polysilicon, a raw material for solar panels.That proved to be the death knell for the factory that REC Silicon, a Norwegian maker of polysilicon, was operating in Washington State, said Chuck Sutton, the company’s vice president of global sales and marketing. With few companies still standing outside China, REC Silicon “basically didn’t have any customers left,” he said.REC Silicon worked with the Trump administration to get China to commit to buying more American polysilicon as part of a 2019 trade deal. But China never followed through on those purchases.The turnaround for REC Silicon came, Mr. Sutton said, with the new tax credits this year. The manufacturer entered into a deal with QCells to supply its polysilicon to QCells’ planned U.S. plants. The deal allowed REC Silicon to reopen its Washington site, Mr. Sutton said.To compete with China, the industry needed “a whole-of-government approach,” Mr. Card of Suniva said, that included both tariffs and tax credits for domestic manufacturing.“They are not opposing forces,” he said. “They work together and make each other stronger.” More

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    U.A.W. Reaches Tentative Deal With Stellantis, Following Ford

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    The United Automobile Workers union announced the deal with Stellantis, the parent of Chrysler, Jeep and Ram. It also expanded its strike against G.M.The United Automobile Workers union announced on Saturday that it had reached a tentative agreement on a new labor contract with Stellantis, the parent company of Chrysler, Jeep and Ram.The agreement came three days after the union and Ford Motor announced a tentative agreement on a new contract. The two deals contain many of the same or similar terms, including a 25 percent general wage increase for U.A.W. members as well as the possibility for cost-of-living wage adjustments if inflation flares.“We have won a record-breaking contract,” the U.A.W. president, Shawn Fain, said in a video posted on Facebook. “We truly believe we got every penny possible out of the company.”Shortly after announcing the tentative agreement with Stellantis, the union expanded its strike against General Motors, calling on workers to walk off the job at the company’s plant in Spring Hill, Tenn. The plant makes sport utility vehicles for G.M.’s Cadillac and GMC divisions.Under the tentative new contract with Stellantis, Mr. Fain said, the company has agreed to reopen a plant in Belvidere, Ill., to produce a midsize pickup truck and to rehire enough workers to staff two shifts of production.The union also won commitments to keep an engine plant in Trenton Mich., open, and to keep and expand a machining plant in Toledo, Ohio. According to the union, these moves will create up to 5,000 new U.A.W. jobs.The union also won the right to strike if the company closes any plant and if it fails to follow through on its promised investment plans, Mr. Fain said.“If the company goes back on their words on any plant, we can strike the hell out of them,” he said.Mr. Fain said Stellantis workers would now return to their jobs.In a statement, Stellantis said, “We look forward to welcoming our 43,000 employees back to work and resuming operations to serve our customers.”The tentative agreement with Stellantis will require approval by a union council that oversees negotiations with the company, and then ratification by U.A.W. members. The council will meet on Thursday, Mr. Fain said.The deal with Stellantis means that only General Motors has not yet reached an agreement with the U.A.W.Erik Gordon, a business professor at the University of Michigan who follows the auto industry, said the new contracts impose higher labor costs on the Detroit manufacturers as they are ramping up production of electric vehicles and are competing with rivals who operate nonunion plants.“The Detroit Three enter a new, dangerous era,” he said. “They have to figure out how to transition to EVs and do it with a cost structure that puts them at a disadvantage with global competitors.”The union’s contracts with the three automakers expired on Sept. 15. Since then, the union has called on more than 45,000 autoworkers at the three companies to walk off the job at factories and at 38 spare-parts warehouses across the country.The most recent escalation of the strike at Stellantis came on Monday when the U.A.W. told workers to go on strike at a Ram plant in Sterling Heights, Mich., that makes the popular 1500 pickup truck. The strike has halted the production of Jeep Wranglers and Jeep Gladiators at a plant in Toledo, Ohio, and 20 Stellantis parts warehouses.For decades, the union has negotiated similar contracts with all three automakers, a method known as pattern bargaining. Like the contract it hammered out with Ford, the tentative Stellantis deal would lift the top U.A.W. wage from $32 an hour to more than $40 over four and a half years. That would allow employees working 40 hours a week to earn about $84,000 a year.Stellantis, G.M. and Ford began negotiating with the U.A.W. in July. The companies have sought to limit increases in labor costs because they already have higher labor costs than automakers like Tesla, Toyota and Honda that operate nonunion plants in the United States.The three large U.S. automakers are also trying to control costs while investing tens of billions of dollars to develop new electric vehicles, build battery plants and retool factories.Stellantis, which is based in Amsterdam, was created in 2021 by the merger of Fiat Chrysler and Peugeot, the French automaker. The company’s North American business, based near Detroit, is its most profitable.Stellantis surprised analysts recently by posting much stronger profits than G.M., which is the largest U.S. automaker by sales. Stellantis earned 11 billion euros ($11.6 billion) in the first half of the year while G.M. made nearly $5 billion.Noam Scheiber More

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    American Household Wealth Jumped in the Pandemic

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    Pandemic stimulus, a strong job market and climbing stock and home prices boosted net worth at a record pace, Federal Reserve data showed.American families saw the largest jump in their wealth on record between 2019 and 2022, according to Federal Reserve data released on Wednesday, as rising stock indexes, climbing home prices and repeated rounds of government stimulus left people’s finances healthier.Median net worth climbed 37 percent over those three years after adjusting for inflation, the Fed’s Survey of Consumer Finances showed — the biggest jump in records stretching back to 1989. At the same time, median family income increased 3 percent between 2018 and 2021 after subtracting out price increases.While income gains were most pronounced for the affluent, the data showed clearly that Americans made nearly across-the-board financial progress in the three years that include the pandemic. Savings rose. Credit card balances fell. Retirement accounts swelled.Other data, from both government and private-sector sources, hinted at those gains. But the Fed report, which is released every three years, is considered the gold standard in data about the financial circumstances of households. It offers the most comprehensive snapshot of everything from savings to stock ownership across racial, wealth and age groups.This is the first time the Fed report has been released since the onset of the coronavirus, and it offers a sense of how families fared during a tumultuous economic period. People lost jobs in mass numbers in early 2020, and the government tried to soften the blow with multiple relief packages.More recently, the job market has been booming, with very low unemployment and rapid wage growth that has helped to bolster incomes. At the same time, rapid inflation has eroded some of the gains by making everyday life more expensive.Without adjusting for inflation, median income would have risen 20 percent, for instance, based on the report released Wednesday.The job market has been booming, and at the same time, rapid inflation has eroded some of the gains by making everyday life more expensive.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesThe financial progress, particularly for poorer families, is especially remarkable when compared with the aftermath of the last recession, which lasted from 2007 to 2009. It took years for household wealth to rebound fully after that crisis, and for some families it never did.Income climbed across all groups between 2019 and 2022, though gains were biggest toward the top — meaning that income inequality widened.That made for a big difference between median income — the number at the midpoint among all households — and the average, which tallies all earnings and divides them by the number of households. Average income climbed 15 percent, one of the largest three-year pops on record.Wealth inequality was more complicated. Because the rich hold such a large share of financial assets in America, wealth gaps tend to grow in absolute terms when stocks, bonds and houses are climbing in price. True to that, wealth climbed much more in dollar terms for rich families.But in the three years covered by the survey, growth in wealth was actually the largest in percentage terms for poorer families. People in the bottom quarter had a net worth of $3,500 in 2022, up from $400 in 2019. Among families in the top 10 percent, median net worth climbed to $3.79 million, up from $3.01 million three years earlier.Because of the way the data is measured, it is difficult to break out just how much pandemic-related payments would have mattered to the figures. To the extent that families saved one-time checks and other help they received during the pandemic, those would have been included in the measures of net worth.Families were also still receiving some pandemic payments when the income measures were collected in 2021, which means that things like enhanced unemployment insurance probably factored into the data.Some Americans appear to have taken advantage of their improved financial positions to invest in stocks for the first time: 21 percent of families owned stocks directly in 2022, up from 15 percent in 2019, the largest change on record. Many of those new stock owners appear to have been relatively small investors, likely reflecting at least in part Americans’ enthusiasm for “meme stocks” like GameStop during the pandemic.The Fed’s newly released figures show that significant gaps in income and wealth persist across racial groups, although Black and Hispanic families saw the largest percentage gains in net worth during the pandemic period.Black families’ median net worth climbed 60 percent, to $44,900. That was a bigger jump than the 31 percent increase for white families, which lifted their household wealth to $285,000. Hispanic families saw a 47 percent increase in net worth.At the same time, racial and ethnic minorities saw slower income gains in the period through 2021. Black and Hispanic households saw small declines in earnings after adjusting for inflation, while white families saw a modest increase.For the first time, the report included data on Asian families, who had the highest median net worth of any racial or ethnic group.While the data in the report is slightly dated, it underscores what a strong position American families were in as they exited the pandemic. Solid net worth and growing incomes have helped people to continue spending into 2023, which has helped to keep the economy growing at a solid pace even when the Fed has been lifting interest rates to cool it down.That resilience has stoked hope that the Fed might be able to pull off a “soft landing,” one in which it slows the economy gently without crushing consumers so much that it plunges America into a recession. More