Free Republic

What we have witnessed so far is just the beginning of the story. The global response to the COVID pandemic during 2020 and 2021 created the most epic supply chain crisis in modern times, and now “black swan events” such as the war in Ukraine and the bird flu pandemic are making that supply chain crisis even worse. Unfortunately, more global difficulties are coming. There will be more war, there will be more pestilences, there will be more natural disasters, and even the United Nations is admitting that we are heading into the worst global food crisis since World War...

White House National Economic Council director Brian Deese on Wednesday addressed the notion of increasing the use of domestic energy to stem the rising gas prices. Deese argued on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” that “no amount of domestic production we can do to reduce” global prices. He suggested the only way to fix prices would be “shifting to cleaner sources of energy.”

Tesla co-founder and CEO Elon Musk called on the United States to increase its domestic oil output in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, while also acknowledging that his electric car company would be negatively affected by that move. "Hate to say it, but we need to increase oil & gas output immediately," Musk tweeted Friday. "Extraordinary times demand extraordinary measures."

On Thursday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports,” Sens. Mark Warner (D-VA) and Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) argued that oil companies are not producing as much as oil as they could to keep the price high and these companies need to increase production to help combat Russia’s energy wealth. After both Senators called for an embargo on Russian oil, Shaheen said, “I know there’s hardship on the American people and on everybody who is affected by these high gas prices, but the other thing we need to do is we need to call on our CEOs of the major oil companies...

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week” that calls for the United States to increase fossil fuel production and open up the Keystone Pipeline in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was a “misdiagnosis.” Anchor George Stephanopoulos said, “Senator Tom Cotton says the United States should be doing more to crack down on the Russian energy sector.”

Johnson & Johnson has quietly stopped its production of COVID-19 vaccines at a facility in the Netherlands late last year, New York Times reported. The facility in Leiden, Netherlands was the only known location that was creating usable doses of the J&J COVID-19 vaccine. According to the report, the halt is temporary and will resume production again after a few months. The NYT reported that the facility has instead been making an experimental but potentially more profitable vaccine to protect against an unrelated virus. New York Times reported:The American company, which has already fallen far behind on its deliveries to...

Difficulties in obtaining semiconductor chips will prompt Ford Motor to temporarily halt or scale back auto production at eight plants in North America, the company said Friday, according to reports. The announcement by the major U.S. automaker – set to take effect next week -- continued a series of supply-chain setbacks that have affected the nation’s economy in recent months. Ford had warned Thursday that a lack of chip availability would likely hurt production in the company’s current financial quarter, Reuters reported.

General Motors (GM) has committed to spending $35 billion to bring 30 new fully electric vehicles (EVs) to its market worldwide by the end of 2025 — just four years from now. And the company says that two-thirds of those models will be available in the United States. About 40 percent of GM’s U.S. production will consist of battery-powered vehicles, including crossovers, SUVs and trucks. Set aside for a moment whether or not that’s a good goal; it may well be. The real issue is whether it’s an achievable goal. Just look at the manufacturing and sales challenge.

Joe Biden announced that he will tap into the U.S. Strategic Oil Reserve in order to lower the price of gasoline — this after deliberately cutting production by shutting down pipelines and refusing to grant drilling permits in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico.It’s unknown how Biden can promote his climate agenda while increasing fossil fuel production. Environmental activists are puzzled — and angry.Washington Post:“There is a huge contradiction right now in their actions,” said Jean Su, who directs the Energy Justice Program at the Center for Biological Diversity, which has sued to stop the oil rights auction. “It’s really...

The Supreme Court on Friday agreed to hear a challenge to the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate power plant emissions, in a case that legal scholars say could undermine Congress’s constitutional authority to delegate power to federal agencies. Some argue that such regulation — not just by the EPA, but in President Biden’s vaccine mandate as well — is unconstitutional because of a somewhat arcane legal doctrine called the “nondelegation doctrine.” This theory holds that Congress cannot delegate broad policymaking authority to government agencies. Why does this argument matter? Our research finds that if the Supreme Court were to...

<p>"It's a combination of the coronavirus and semiconductors, but at the moment it is the coronavirus that is having the overwhelming impact," Kazunari Kumakura, an executive at the world's biggest car maker, said after the company revised its production target.</p>

From the onset of the pandemic to fluctuations in cost and efficiencies, a growing number of companies have been thinking about bringing their overseas operations closer to home.Among North American manufacturers, 83 percent state they are likely or extremely likely to reshore, according to the “2021 State of North American Manufacturing Annual Report” by Thomas, an industrial sourcing platform. That percentage is significantly up from March 2020, when 54 percent of manufacturers reported that they were considering taking steps to reshore.Shifting operations to the United States could spark an influx of funds and jobs throughout the country. If manufacturers that...

U.S. producers are facing sharply higher input costs as prices surge on everything from oil to transportation. The Labor Department’s producer-price index rose 1% in March from a month earlier, double the rate reported in February as well as double the rate of increase economists had anticipated for March. From a year earlier, wholesale prices jumped 4.2%. That’s versus a 2.8% rate in February and versus the 3.8% gain economists projected. Excluding the effects of food and energy, so-called core inflation rose a much higher-than-expected 0.7% month-over-month and 3.1% year-over-year. The figures follow a hotter-than-anticipated PPI report from China on...

With critical test and evaluation work still unfinished, the full-rate production decision will be left to the future Biden administration. In a setback for the Lockheed Martin F-35 stealth fighter program, the U.S. Department of Defense has formally decreed that a decision on full-rate production of the jet is on indefinite hold. The Milestone C decision on whether or not to ramp up the manufacture of Joint Strike Fighters had been due in or before March 2021, but has now been on hold pending completion of the final phase of operational testing of the F-35. ... more than 600 F-35s...

Apple disappointed Wall Street in October when it reported a 20% drop in YOY iPhone revenue during its Q4 (remember, Apple runs on its own quarterly timeline) earnings report, something management tried to dismiss as simply a lull before the 5G upgrade "supercycle" was unleashed by the iPhone 12 generation of phones.As Tim Cook has been saying for years now, Apple is no longer all about the iPhone. The company finding more and more ways to diversify away from its dependence on the iPhone, the most revolutionary consumer tech product of the 21st Century (so far, at least), including investing...

In his new book, Unbelievers, British historian Alec Ryrie observes that the only moral standard people agree on these days is “don’t be like Nazi Germany.” Since firms such as Mercedes Benz, Volkswagen, and Bayer used forced labor from concentration camps during World War II, that should mean we could all agree that forced labor is bad.Tragically, at least if it involves new laptops in time for the new school year, it doesn’t.Recently, the Intercept reported that Lenovo, the world’s largest manufacturer of laptops, “has imported an estimated 258,000 laptops” built by a certain Chinese manufacturer named Hefei Bitland. Through...

FRANKFURT, April 29 (Reuters) - German auto supplier and technology company Robert Bosch on Wednesday said it expects automotive production to fall by at least 20 percent this year, as the coronavirus pandemic slams the brakes on factory production lines and saps demand. "We are bracing ourselves for a global recession that will also have a considerable impact on our own performance in 2020," Bosch CFO Stefan Asenkerschbaumer said in a statement. "Given the many imponderables, we feel unable to make a reasonable forecast for the Bosch Group for the year as a whole. It will take a supreme effort...

Yesterday, Donald Trump signed the Defense Production Act as a back-up measure, in case of a breakdown in production of critical supplies. “”Hopefully there will be no need,” Trump later tweeted, “but we are all in this TOGETHER!” The measure is in place only for “a worst case scenario in the future.”This morning, Nancy Pelosi and fifty-six other House Democrats said that the worst case scenario is already upon us. In a statement released to the media this morning, Pelosi demanded that Trump take control over domestic production to address shortages in the first weeks of the coronavirus pandemic:...

Image courtesy Dean Weingarten The claim has been made that the Marlin 39A has been in continuous production the longest of any rifle in existence. The rifle has been in production, in one form or another, since 1891. The model 39A appellation was given in 1939, according to a display at the Remington/Marlin exhibit at the SHOT Show in January 2020. My attention was attracted to a display celebrating 150 years of Marlin firearms production. On the display were a Marlin model 60 and a Marlin .444 lever gun. Both are iconic Marlin firearms.It seemed strange there was no Marlin...

SNC was one of three companies, along with incumbents SpaceX and Orbital ATK (now Northrop Grumman Innovation Systems), to receive CRS-2 contracts from NASA in January 2016. Each company is guaranteed at least six missions to the ISS under the contracts. To carry out the missions, SNC proposed a cargo version of the Dream Chaser spacecraft it had been developing for NASA’s commercial crew program. Although the vehicle was not selected by NASA when it awarded contracts instead to Boeing and SpaceX in 2014, SNC adapted the design with foldable wings, allowing it to fit within many existing payload fairings,...