Business
After heated debate, California updates key climate limit. Critics say it’s a retreat
In a high-stakes decision that will shape California’s economy for years, air officials late Friday approved a sweeping overhaul of the state’s signature climate program, cap-and-invest.
The 10-3 vote from the California Air Resources Board determines how aggressively the Golden State will curb planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions in the years ahead — and how billions of dollars in revenue will flow through communities, businesses and public programs statewide.
Cap-and-invest was nation-leading when it launched in 2013. The program forces major polluters to pay for their share of emissions by buying allowances at auctions or being granted them for free. It uses the revenue to fund public transit projects, wildfire prevention, affordable housing, clean energy, electric vehicles and safe drinking water.
The pollution limit — or cap — declines each year, reducing the total amount of emissions in the state and helping California reach its ambitious climate targets, including 100% carbon neutrality by 2045.
The Legislature voted last year to extend cap-and-invest through 2045. Officials at the Air Resources Board then spent the last several months drafting and revising the plan voted on this week, which received considerable feedback from oil and gas companies, environmental groups, lobbyists and lawmakers all jockeying for different priorities.
Some 200 people testified in person during the marathon two-day meeting preceding the vote, and the final proposal received more than 1,000 written comments.
Industry groups warned that capping emissions too much and too quickly would push refineries out of the state and drive up already soaring energy costs. But environmentalists and other stakeholders said giving too many concessions to fossil fuel interests would defeat the program’s purpose, which is to drive down emissions along a pathway consistent with what scientists say could preserve a recognizable climate.
The program was always planned to become stricter as the years unfolded, to give businesses more time to make the stronger reductions in their emissions.
Officials were under legal, market and budgetary pressure to pass a plan without delay, and also said it’s important for California to signal market certainty.
“It is no secret that climate policy is at a crossroads — under attack by an openly hostile and well-funded opposition and upended by global economic upheaval,” CARB chair Lauren Sanchez said during the meeting. “At a moment of uncertainty at the federal and international levels, California has the opportunity to lead with consistency.”
Among the key updates to the program are the removal of 118 million pollution permits, or allowances, from the market by 2030, and 900 million after 2030. Officials say this will amount to a steep, 11% annual lowering of the cap by the end of this decade, and 7% from 2031 to 2045, in keeping with the state’s mandated targets.
Critically, however, the update will also create a new pool of 118 million allowances above the cap that polluters can apply for and receive if they invest in decarbonization projects, a program dubbed the Manufacturing Decarbonization Incentive.
The incentive program is intended to discourage regulated industries from leaving the state. Two major refineries have announced exit plans in recent years, including Valero’s Benecia refinery and Phillips 66’s Los Angeles refinery, which shut down in 2025.
But many critics — including transit, affordable housing, environmental justice and clean water groups — said this amounts to a dismantling of the program.
“CARB has proposed creating exactly 118.3 million additional allowances … outside the cap, the precise number of allowances that must be removed from the cap to keep us on track for our 2030 targets,” said Caroline Jones, a senior analyst with the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund. “This undermines the cap’s role in actually limiting climate pollution, which is the core function of this program.”
The board approved the decarbonization incentive but committed to additional workshops and evaluations of the program before issuing any allowances for it.
Other updates include more free allowances for industrial facilities and refineries, which regulators said will help reduce pressure on gasoline prices. Critics described the free permits as subsidies for oil and gas.
The update will also shift some allowances from gas to electric utilities, and increase funding for the California Climate Credit, a rebate that appears automatically on people’s utility bills.
But perhaps most controversial is how the update will affect the program’s multibillion-dollar revenue, which flows into the state’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund each year and is distributed to various programs. Cap-and-invest has delivered $35 billion for climate projects in California since its inception.
The new incentive pool will mean the loss of $2 billion annually to the fund, or roughly half the amount it has received in recent years, according to an analysis from the Legislative Analyst’s Office.
While the Air Resources Board does not determine how the fund is divvied up — that’s the Legislature — opponents warned that this could amount to significant cuts for the Affordable Housing and Sustainable Communities Program, the Low Carbon Transit Operations Program, the SAFER drinking water program and the Community Air Protection Program, among many others that rely on revenue from cap-and-invest.
“This could create serious consequences, including a potential zeroing out of the state’s support for critical emission reduction programs,” said Phillip Fine, executive officer at the Bay Area Air District. “Striking the right balance is critical, but all consequences must be fully considered.”
It was a sentiment echoed by many who delivered comments during the board meeting.
“These additional allowances would not only endanger our emissions targets, they would also flood the auction market and depress cap-and-invest revenues,” said Pam Odell of the group Climate Action California. “These revenues fund vital programs, promote climate resilience, clean transit and transportation, and public health, especially in the most heavily exposed front-line communities.”
Some groups came out in support of the update, however, including Southern California Edison and Pacific Gas & Electric. The plan strikes a “balance between program stringency and affordability,” Fariya Ali, air and climate policy manager with PG&E, said during the meeting.
Assemblymember Jacqui Irwin (D-Thousand Oaks), who authored the bill that reauthorized the program last year, was cautiously supportive, noting that she would like to see more guardrails around the incentive program to ensure it aligns with state climate targets. But delaying the update would only create more uncertainty at a time when the Trump administration is already canceling clean energy funds and revoking California’s authority to set clean vehicle standards, she said.
“If we fail now to adopt the proposed amendments to cap-and-invest, it would be without a doubt the greatest victory that the Trump administration could possibly hope for to achieve against California’s climate policies this year,” Irwin said.
Oil and gas groups were tepid. Jodie Muller, chief executive of the Western States Petroleum Assn., said the update provides some near-term relief for refineries, but leaves too much uncertainty after 2030 to drive continued investment.
Brian McDonald, regulatory affairs manager with Marathon Petroleum Corp., said similarly that the oil company is “deeply concerned that the current proposal does not go far enough to provide the regulatory certainty needed to sustain in-state fuel production.”
In a briefing ahead of the vote, California climate economist Danny Cullenward said the update threatens both the “cap” aspect of the program by introducing the new allowance pool, and the “invest” aspect by threatening to reduce the program’s revenues.
The proposal is “being presented as a compromise when in fact it is sacrificing both of the key goals of the program,” he said.
The new plan is slated to go into effect Sept. 1.
Netflix is going bite-sized. In a pivot toward the short-form content dominating TikTok and YouTube, the streaming giant announced it will start hosting three- to 20-minute videos from top digital publishers right on its homepage starting Aug. 3.
The streamer said U.S. customers will see “fan-favorite videos” from brands run by digital publishers, including BuzzFeed Studios, Condé Nast, Hearst Magazines, PMX (a subdivision of Penske Media), People Inc. and Tastemade. The videos will cover a variety of topics, including gardening tips, travel and celebrity profiles.
The rollout comes as Netflix competes for audience time from YouTube and social media platforms such as TikTok that have viral videos that can occupy users for hours. By bringing series such as BuzzFeed Celeb’s “30 Questions,” on which celebrities provide answers, or Vanity Fair’s “Lie Detector,” on which celebrities are hooked up to polygraph machines, Netflix users can learn more information about the people they already watch on the streamer, but in shorter videos.
“Members don’t just want to watch a show or film and move on. They want to keep exploring the stories and personalities they love long after the final credits roll,” said John Derderian, a Netflix vice president overseeing the initiative. “These partnerships help us deepen fandom and create more ways for members to carry those stories with them throughout their day.”
Netflix said it will offer licensed archival and ongoing series, including Harper’s Bazaar’s “Burning Questions,” Billboard’s “24 Hrs With” and People’s “My Life in Pictures” that provide an inside look at celebrities.
The videos from digital publishers will also be available to Netflix customers in Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand on Aug. 3.
The Los Gatos, Calif., streamer over time has been expanding its library of content, adding games, live programming such as boxing matches and football games, alongside movies and TV shows.
Business
Commentary: While Trump declares that U.S. is enjoying ‘best economy ever,’ manufacturing jobs have been disappearing
Based on the words of President Trump, America is well on the way to becoming a “global superpower in manufacturing” — indeed, as he declared in a Father’s Day social media post, we are already experiencing the “BEST ECONOMY EVER.” (Capitalization’s his.)
Here’s what the government’s own statistics tell us: Manufacturing investment has crashed during his watch, with construction spending in the manufacturing sector down 26.4% from Trump’s inauguration through May, to $174.8 billion. That’s the lowest figure since February 2023, when the economy was in the midst of a post-pandemic recovery.
White House spokesman Kush Desai told me by email that “the last two jobs reports” showed manufacturing job growth. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported a seasonally-adjusted decline of 2,000 manufacturing workers in May and a gain of 3,000 in June. But the June 2026 figure was 38,000 jobs, or about 0.3% below the level in June 2025, and 75,000 or about 0.6% below the level in January 2025, when Trump took office.
Desai said that “thanks to President Trump’s proven agenda of tariffs, deregulation, and tax cuts, American manufacturing will continue to rebound.”
There’s little mystery about what has come between Trump’s ambition and the real world. To a large extent it’s Trump’s economic program, particularly his tariff policies and, more recently, his war with Iran. Those have injected a level of uncertainty for corporate managements pondering whether to spend money on expansion that they haven’t had to confront in years.
From where we’re standing, we are not seeing signs of a manufacturing renaissance in the U.S.
— Didi Caldwell, Global Location Strategies
The tariffs and the war have driven up manufacturers’ costs for raw materials and overseas shipping. The general economic atmosphere doesn’t help. U.S. gross domestic product growth came in at a 2.1% annualized rate in the first quarter of this year, but the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta expects it to have fallen to 1.3% in the second quarter ended June 30.
Meanwhile, the University of Michigan consumer confidence index reached 44.8 in May, its lowest level ever (though it improved to 49.5 in June). Wages have been rising modestly, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but those gains have been eaten up by higher prices, especially for gasoline and food.
To put things another way, the actual figures show the U.S. economy to be sputtering, and the “vibe economy” as measured by consumer confidence is doing even worse.
Now that Trump’s second term is about to reach its 18-month mark, let’s unpack the factors causing the discrepancy between his ambitions and claims, and the reality.
Trump declared economic victory just as his term was starting. On March 20, 2025, he proclaimed a “manufacturing renaissance” in the U.S. That was based on what he said were “trillions of dollars in new investments” he had “already secured in tech-based manufacturing.”
A White House statement said “the list of manufacturing wins is endless.” The provided list was a roster of announcements, not groundbreakings, much less completed ventures.
Business executives quite properly have taken these pledges with mounds of salt. “Announcements are what people say they’re going to do, but dollars spent is what’s actually happening,” Didi Caldwell, chief executive of a firm that helps companies find factory sites, told the Financial Times. “From where we’re standing, we are not seeing signs of a manufacturing renaissance in the U.S.”
Indeed, at least some of these announcements have had the flavor of performative efforts to satisfy Trump’s amour propre and extract government concessions.
For example, Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook appeared with Trump at the White House in August to announce a $600-billion U.S. spending plan to take place over four years. That was a $100-billion increase over its previously-announced program.
More to the point, however, it incorporated spending with suppliers that Apple had been working with for years. Mentioned in the news announcement was a commitment to buy cover glass for iPhones from Corning. But Corning has been supplying that glass since the first iPhone appeared in 2007. In any case, the announcement appeared to secure a commitment from Trump to exempt Apple from tariffs imposed on imported chips.
Apple’s announcement Wednesday that it will spend $30 billion to buy chips from Broadcom was similarly ambiguous. The announcement didn’t provide details about the terms of the commitment or the timing of its expenditures. I asked Apple for details and whether the deal was related to a desire to remain in Trump’s favor, but didn’t hear back.
A similar phenomenon occurred during Trump’s first term; Trump had built much of his 2016 presidential campaign on a promise to increase manufacturing jobs in the United States. He blamed shrinkage in the manufacturing sector on trade agreements such as NAFTA and the policies of the Chinese, and took credit when an American manufacturer agreed to create or save jobs in the United States.
As I reported in 2019, many of those arrangements turned out to be exaggerated or bogus, or predated Trump’s claim. Some disappeared as soon as public attention turned elsewhere, or were outweighed by job cuts made elsewhere by the same companies.
Trump’s tariffs appear to have had a direct effect on manufacturing employment in the U.S. Since Trump’s inauguration, the manufacturing sector has shed about 75,000 jobs, or 0.6%. After April 2, 2025, when he announced global “liberation day” tariffs supposedly as a response to years of unfair treatment of American exports, the decline picked up pace, with a shrinkage of 68,000 manufacturing jobs.
The Supreme Court invalidated those tariffs in February, but others are still in place, including tariffs on imported steel and aluminum and on goods from China. Nor has he ceased threatening partners with trade wars. As recently as Tuesday, he said he would cut off all trade with Spain because of that country’s disagreement with him over its defense spending and its criticism of his Iran war.
As it happens, Spain is one of the few countries with which the U.S. has a trade surplus. That means that any cutoff, which trade experts think will be unlikely, would come at a cost to the U.S.
One might have hoped that Trump had learned a lesson from his first-term trade war with China. That conflict provoked a sharp contraction in the manufacturing economy, with the Institute for Supply Management’s purchasing managers index falling to 49.1 by mid-2019. (A reading below 50 signifies contraction.)
The ISM index began to recover toward the end of Trump’s term but fell again during the pandemic. Lately it has been falling again, to 53.3 in June from 54 in May.
The Iran war is another deadweight on domestic manufacturing. That’s partially the consequence of blockages of the Strait of Hormuz, the crucial thoroughfare not only for middle eastern oil, but also for such industrial inputs as fertilizer and aluminum. Cement, concrete, olive oil and spices are also among commodities produced in the region that use the strait as an outlet to reach the outside world.
Uncertainties in the region, tensions between the U.S. and China, and heightened concerns over the safety of shipping overall have driven up shipping costs between the far east and the U.S. The price of shipping a benchmark 40-foot container from China to the West Coast has nearly quadrupled to $6,687 now from about $1,700 just before the Iran war began, according to an index maintained by the cargo firm Freightos — even though shipping prices typically decline during this time of year.
There can be little doubt that the U.S. would benefit from an industrial policy — if it’s coherent. China supplanted America as the world’s leading exporter of manufactured goods in 2010, and the gap has only widened since then. China’s dominance may be hard to reverse, as it’s built on lower labor costs and transport infrastructure that enjoys focused government investment.
Tariffs could be a component of a new industrial policy, but Trump’s tariffs aren’t rationally geared to protecting domestic industries that need protection. They’re expressions of his whims, and as such they’re totally ineffective. If there are government investment policies targeting industries that need assistance, they’re not apparent to economists or industrialists.
Trump can talk as much as he likes about a golden age for U.S. manufacturing, but from his first term through this one, it’s nothing but talk. And talk, of course, is cheap.
Walt Disney Co.’s “Moana” lost its way at the box office this weekend as the company’s latest live-action remake opened to a sluggish $43 million in the U.S. and Canada.
The domestic haul for “Moana” underperformed studio expectations, which ranged from $60 million to $65 million. Globally, the film brought in a total of $95 million on a production budget of about $250 million.
Despite its lackluster debut, the film still came in first at the box office during a weekend where it had few new competitors in the family film space.
The “Moana” franchise has been a box-office and streaming juggernaut. The original 2016 animated movie brought in more than $643 million worldwide and is the most-watched movie on Disney+, while a 2024 sequel grossed more than $1 billion at the global box office. On the merchandise side, more than 22 million “Moana”-themed toys have been sold. “Moana” also appears in the Disney theme parks.
But the theatrical reception for the live-action film may signal that audiences think there’s been too much “Moana” in just 10 years. (The 2024 film sequel was originally set to be a streaming series before it was moved to Disney’s theatrical calendar.)
Most of Disney’s previous live-action remakes have come decades after the original animated movie, such as 2025’s “Lilo & Stitch,” which arrived 23 years after its animated predecessor and grossed more than $1 billion in worldwide box office receipts.
The theatrical haul for the latest “Moana” may also have suffered from poor reviews — the film got a 34% on aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, with several critics highlighting its nearly frame-by-frame similarity to the original film. The audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, however, was 90%.
Still, as the last of this summer’s major family films, “Moana” could see a longer tail in theaters, particularly with many children still on break from school. Disney’s live-action “Mufasa: The Lion King” opened in 2024 to a middling $35 million, but ended up grossing more than $722 million globally through the holiday season.
Universal Pictures and Illumination’s “Minions & Monsters” came in second at the domestic box office this weekend with $20.5 million. Disney and Pixar’s “Toy Story 5” continued its strong run with an $18.5-million haul, enough for third place and contributing to a total global gross of $879.1 million.
Warner Bros.’ “Evil Dead Burn” ($13.7 million) and Angel Studios’ “Young Washington” ($6.4 million) rounded out the top five.
Also notable this weekend: Lionsgate’s musical biopic “Michael” crossed $1 billion in worldwide box office revenue, the first time that the studio has reached that milestone and the second film this year after “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” to hit that mark.
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