KTBB News, Weather, Talk

EVERETT, Wash. (AP) — Boeing reported a loss of more than $6 billion in the third quarter and immediately turned its attention to union workers who will vote Wednesday whether to accept a company contract offer or continue their crippling strike, which has dragged on for nearly six weeks.

New CEO Kelly Ortberg laid out his plan to turn Boeing around after years of heavy losses and damage to its reputation.

In remarks he planned to deliver later Wednesday to investors, Ortberg said Boeing needs “a fundamental culture change in the company.” To accomplish that, he said, company leaders need to spend more time on factory floors to know what is going on and “prevent the festering of issues and work better together to identify, fix, and understand root cause.”

Ortberg repeated that he wants to “reset” management’s relationship with labor “so we don’t become so disconnected in the future.” He expressed hope that machinists will vote to approve the company’s latest contract offer and end their strike.

“It will take time to return Boeing to its former legacy, but with the right focus and culture, we can be an iconic company and aerospace leader once again,” he said.

The strike is an early test for Ortberg, a Boeing outsider who became CEO in August.

Ortberg has already announced large-scale layoffs and a plan to raise enough cash to avoid a bankruptcy filing. He needs to convince federal regulators that Boeing is fixing its safety culture and is ready to boost production of the 737 Max — a crucial step to bring in much-needed cash.

Boeing can’t produce any new 737s, however, until it ends the strike by 33,000 machinists that has shut down assembly plants in the Seattle area.

Ortberg has “got a lot on his plate, but he probably is laser-focused on getting this negotiation completed. That’s the closest alligator to the boat,” said Tony Bancroft, portfolio manager at Gabelli Funds, a Boeing investor.

Boeing said Wednesday that it lost $6.17 billion in the period ended Sept. 30, with an adjusted loss of $10.44 per share. Analysts polled by Zacks Investment Research were calling for a loss of $10.34 per share.

Revenue totaled $17.84 billion, matching Wall Street estimates.

Shares were flat before the opening bell.

Boeing hasn’t had a profitable year since 2018, and Wednesday’s numbers represent the second-worst quarter in Boeing’s history. The long-profitable company’s fortunes soured after two of its 737 Max jetliners crashed in October 2018 and March 2019, killing 346 people. Safety concerns were renewed when a panel blew off a Max during an Alaska Airlines flight in January.

Ortberg said Boeing is at a crossroads.

“The trust in our company has eroded. We’re saddled with too much debt. We’ve had serious lapses in our performance across the company, which have disappointed many of our customers,” the new CEO said. But he also highlighted the company’s strengths, including a backlog of airplane orders valued at a half-trillion dollars.

Investors were looking for Ortberg to project calm, determination and urgency when he presides over an earnings call for the first time since he ran Rockwell Collins, a maker of avionics and flight controls for airline and military planes, in the last decade.

The biggest news of the day, however, is likely to come Wednesday evening, when the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers reveals whether striking workers are ready to go back to their jobs.

They will vote at union halls in the Seattle area and elsewhere on a Boeing offer that includes pay raises of 35% over four years, $7,000 ratification bonuses, and the retention of performance bonuses that Boeing wanted to eliminate.

Boeing has held firm in resisting a union demand to restore the traditional pension plan that was frozen a decade ago. However, older workers would get a slight increase in their monthly pension payouts.

At a picket line outside Boeing’s factory in Everett, Washington, some machinists encouraged colleagues to vote no.

“The pension should have been the top priority. We all said that was our top priority, along with wage,” said Larry Best, a customer-quality coordinator with 38 years at Boeing. “Now is the prime opportunity in a prime time to get our pension back, and we all need to stay out and dig our heels in.”

Best also thinks the pay increase should be 40% over three years to offset a long stretch of stagnant wages, now combined with high inflation.

“You can see we got a great turnout today. I’m pretty sure that they don’t like the contract because that’s why I’m here,” said another picketer, Bartley Stokes Sr., who started working at Boeing in 1978. “We’re out here in force, and we’re going to show our solidarity and stick with our union brothers and sisters and vote this thing down because they can do better.”

WASHINGTON (AP) – The unregulated carbon dioxide removal industry is calling on the U.S. government to implement standards and regulations to boost transparency and confidence in the sector that’s been flooded with billions of dollars in federal funding and private investment.

A report Wednesday by the Carbon Removal Alliance, a nonprofit representing the industry, outlined recommendations to improve monitoring, reporting, and verification. Currently the only regulations in the U.S. are related to safety of these projects. Some of the biggest industry players, including Heirloom and Climeworks, are alliance members.

“I think it’s rare for an industry to call for regulation of itself and I think that is a signal of why this is so important,” said Giana Amador, executive director of the alliance. Amador said monitoring, reporting and verification are like “climate receipts” that confirm the amount of carbon removed as well as how long it can actually be stored underground.

Without federal regulation, she said “it really hurts competition and it forces these companies into sort of a marketing arms race instead of being able to focus their efforts on making sure that there really is a demonstrable climate impact.”

The nonprofit defines carbon removal as any solution that captures carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and stores it permanently. One of the most popular technologies is direct air capture, which filters air, extracts carbon dioxide and puts it underground.

The Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law have provided around $12 billion for carbon management projects in the U.S. Some of this funding supports the development of four Regional Direct Air Capture Hubs at commercial scale that will capture at least 1 million tons of carbon dioxide annually. Two hubs are slated to be built in Texas and Louisiana.

Some climate scientists say direct air capture is too expensive, far from being scaled and can be used as an excuse by the oil and gas industry to keep polluting.

Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia Business School at Columbia University, said this is the “moral hazard” of direct air capture — removing carbon from the atmosphere could be utilized by the oil and gas industry to continue polluting.

“It does not mean that the underlying technology is not a good thing,” said Wagner. Direct air capture “decreases emissions, but in the long run also extends the life of any one particular coal plant or gas plant.”

In 2023, Occidental Petroleum Corporation purchased the direct air capture company, Carbon Engineering Ltd, for $1.1 billion. In a news release, Occidental CEO Vicki Hollub said, “Together, Occidental and Carbon Engineering can accelerate plans to globally deploy (the) technology at a climate-relevant scale and make (it) the preferred solution for businesses seeking to remove their hard-to-abate emissions.”

Jonathan Foley, executive director of Project Drawdown, doesn’t consider carbon dioxide removal technologies to be a true climate solution.

“I do welcome at least some interventions from the federal government to monitor and verify and evaluate the performance of these proposed carbon removal schemes, because it’s kind of the Wild West out there,” said Foley.

“But considering it can cost ten to 100 times more to try to remove a ton of carbon rather than prevent it, how is that even remotely conscionable to spend public dollars on this kind of stuff?” he said.

Katharine Hayhoe, chief scientist of The Nature Conservancy and a distinguished professor at Texas Tech University, said standards for the direct carbon capture industry “are very badly needed” because of the level of government subsidies and private investment. She said there’s no single fix for the climate crisis, and many strategies are needed.

Hayhoe said these include improving the efficiency of energy systems, transitioning to clean energy, weaning the world off fossil fuels and maintaining healthy ecosystems to trap carbon dioxide. On the other hand, she said, carbon removal technologies are “very high hanging fruit.”

“It takes a lot of money and a lot of energy to get to the top of the tree. That’s the carbon capture solution,” said Hayhoe. “Of course we need every fruit on the tree. But doesn’t it make sense to pick up the fruit on the ground to prioritize that?”

Other climate scientists are entirely opposed to this technology.

“It should be banned,” said Mark Z. Jacobson, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University.

Carbon removal technologies indirectly increase the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, Jacobson said. The reason, he said, is that even in cases where direct air capture facilities are powered by renewable energy, the clean energy is being used for carbon removal instead of replacing a fossil fuel source.

“When you just look at the capture equipment, you get a (carbon) reduction,” Jacobson said. “But when you look at the bigger system, you’re increasing.”

NEW YORK (AP) – Federal regulators gave a strong push to electric-powered air taxis Tuesday by issuing a final rule for operating the aircraft and how pilots will be trained to fly them.

The head of the Federal Aviation Administration, Mike Whitaker, said the rule recognizes air taxis as an entirely new type of aircraft that will soon join airplanes and helicopters in the sky.

These aircraft take off and land vertically, like helicopters, but fly like fixed-wing planes. Many companies are working to get them on the market, but they have been held back by the lack of clarity over regulations to govern their use.

Whitaker said the FAA is stressing safety as it works to fold the new aircraft into the nation’s airspace. He said “powered-lift aircraft” are the first new category of aircraft in nearly 80 years, since the dawn of helicopters, and the rule will allow for their widespread operation.

Air taxi supporters call them a cleaner alternative to passenger planes that burn jet fuel. So far, however, current technology limits their size and likely means that they will be used most often in urban areas. Companies envision carrying people and cargo.

One of the companies in the new field, California-based Joby Aviation, praised the FAA regulation. CEO JoeBen Bevirt said the rules “will ensure the U.S. continues to play a global leadership role in the development and adoption of clean flight.”

Airlines see air taxis as a way to deliver passengers to airports. Delta Air Lines said in 2022 it would invest $60 million in Joby, and this month Toyota announced a $500 million investment. United Airlines is backing another California-based company, Archer Aviation, with an order for 200 aircraft that Archer said could be worth $1 billion with an option for $500 million more.

SAN DIEGO (AP) — Arrests for illegally crossing the border from Mexico fell 7% in September to a more than four-year low, authorities said Tuesday. It was likely the last monthly gauge during a presidential campaign in which Republican nominee Donald Trump has made immigration a signature issue.

The Border Patrol made 53,858 arrests, down from 58,009 in August and the lowest tally since August 2020, when arrests totaled 47,283, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

Mexicans accounted for nearly half of arrests, becoming a greater part of the mix. In December, when arrests reached an all-time high of 250,000, Mexicans made up fewer than 1 in 4. Arrests for other major nationalities seen at the border, including Guatemalans, Hondurans, Colombians and Ecuadoreans, have plunged this year.

San Diego was again the busiest corridor for illegal crossings in September, followed by El Paso, Texas, and Tucson, Arizona.

For the government’s fiscal year ended Sept. 30, the Border Patrol made 1.53 million arrests after topping 2 million in each of the previous two years for the first time.

The White House touted the numbers as proof that severe asylum restrictions introduced in June were having the intended effect, and blamed congressional Republicans for opposing a border security bill that failed in February. Vice President Kamala Harris has used that line of attack against Trump to try to blunt criticism that the Biden administration has been weak on immigration enforcement.

“The Biden Harris Administration has taken effective action, and Republican officials continue to do nothing,” said White House spokesman Angelo Fernández Hernández.

The Federation for American Immigration Reform, a frequent administration critic and advocate for immigration restrictions, attributed recent declines to more enforcement by Mexican officials within their own borders, saying the White House “essentially outsourced U.S. border security to Mexico in advance of the 2024 election — policies that can be reversed at any time that the government of Mexico chooses.”

Arrests fell sharply after Mexico increased enforcement in December, and took a steeper dive after the U.S. asylum restrictions took effect in June. U.S. officials haven’t been shy about highlighting Mexico’s role.

Mexican authorities are encountering more migrants this year while deportations remain relatively low, creating a bottleneck. Panamanian authorities reported an increase in migrants walking through the notorious Darien Gap during September, though numbers are still well below last year.

Troy Miller, acting CBP commissioner, said last week that the administration is working with Mexico and other countries to jointly address migration.

“We continue to be concerned about any bottlenecks, we continue to look at those, we continue to address them with our partners,” Miller said at a news conference in San Diego.

The Biden administration has promoted new and expanded legal pathways to enter the country in an effort to discourage illegal crossings. In September, CBP allowed more than 44,600 people to enter with appointments on an online system called CBP One, bringing the total to 852,000 since it was introduced in January 2023.

Another Biden policy allows up to 30,000 people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela with financial sponsors to enter monthly through airports. More than 531,000 people from those four countries have entered that way up through September.

EVERETT, Wash. (AP) — Wednesday is shaping up as one of the most significant days in a volatile year for Boeing, which is expected to report a huge third-quarter loss, introduce its new CEO on his first earnings call, and learn if machinists will end a strike that has crippled the company’s aircraft production for more than a month.

The strike is an early test for Kelly Ortberg, a Boeing outsider who became CEO in August.

Ortberg has already announced large-scale layoffs and a plan to raise enough cash to avoid a bankruptcy filing. He needs to convince federal regulators that Boeing is fixing its safety culture and is ready to boost production of the 737 Max — a crucial step to bring in much-needed cash.

Boeing can’t produce any new 737s, however, until it ends the five-week-old strike by 33,000 machinists that has shut down assembly plants in the Seattle area.

Ortberg has “got a lot on his plate, but he probably is laser-focused on getting this negotiation completed. That’s the closest alligator to the boat,” said Tony Bancroft, portfolio manager at Gabelli Funds, a Boeing investor.

Boeing hasn’t had a profitable year since 2018, and the situation is about to get worse before it gets better.

Analysts expect Boeing to announce Wednesday that it lost about $6 billion in the third quarter, including $3 billion in charges related to airline jets and $2 billion in losses for its defense and space programs.

Investors will be looking for Ortberg to project calm, determination and urgency as he presides over an earnings call for the first time since he ran Rockwell Collins, a maker of avionics and flight controls for airline and military planes, in the last decade.

The biggest news of the day, however, is likely to come Wednesday evening, when the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers reveals whether striking workers are ready to go back to their jobs.

They will vote at union halls in the Seattle area and elsewhere on a Boeing offer that includes pay raises of 35% over four years, $7,000 ratification bonuses, and the retention of performance bonuses that Boeing wanted to eliminate.

Boeing has held firm in resisting a union demand to restore the traditional pension plan that was frozen a decade. However, older workers would get a slight increase in their monthly pension payouts.

At a picket line outside Boeing’s factory in Everett, Washington, some machinists encourage co-workers to vote no on the proposal.

“The pension should have been the top priority. We all said that was our top priority, along with wage,” said Larry Best, a customer-quality coordinator with 38 years at Boeing. “Now is the prime opportunity in a prime time to get our pension back, and we all need to stay out and dig our heels in.”

Best also thinks the pay increase should be 40% over three years to offset a long stretch of stagnant wages, now combined with high inflation.

“You can see we got a great turnout today. I’m pretty sure that they don’t like the contract because that’s why I’m here,” said another picketer, Bartley Stokes Sr., who started working at Boeing in 1978. “We’re out here in force, and we’re going to show our solidarity and stick with our union brothers and sisters and vote this thing down because they can do better.”

WASHINGTON (AP) — Democrats in Texas will once again wait on Election Day to find out whether this is the year they can win a statewide race after three decades of losing to Republicans.

They’re pinning their hopes on the U.S. Senate, where Republican incumbent Ted Cruz faces a challenge from U.S. Rep. Colin Allred, a former NFL linebacker and civil rights attorney who flipped a competitive U.S. House seat to take office in 2018.

With so many Democrats defending Senate seats nationwide, Texas is one of the only states where a Republican senator is in a competitive race. Spending on the contest has topped $100 million, according to AdImpact, which tracks ad spending, swamping the money spent on the presidential election in Texas.

It’s been 30 years since Democrats won a statewide race in the Lone Star State, but that’s not for lack of effort. In 2002, Democrats were excited to run a “dream team” of candidates for Senate, governor and lieutenant governor in hopes that the racially diverse ticket would harness a new generation of Texas voters who could flip the state. They didn’t.

More recently, in 2018, Democrat Beto O’Rourke broke fundraising records in his race against Cruz. He lost. Two years later, Democrats hoped that M.J. Hegar would build upon O’Rourke’s momentum to defeat Sen. John Cornyn. She lost, too.

No Democrat has won Texas in a presidential election since Jimmy Carter in 1976, although Bill Clinton ran close in three-way contests in both 1992 and 1996. A unexpected win in Texas for Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris would all but end Republican former President Donald Trump’s bid to return to the White House.

Texas has 38 U.S. House seats, but only three districts — all in South Texas — are considered competitive.

In the state’s 28th Congressional District, Democratic U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar seeks reelection following his indictment on charges of bribery and money laundering earlier this year. In the nearby 34th District, Democratic U.S. Rep. Vicente Gonzalez faces Republican Mayra Flores in a rematch of a 2022 contest that Gonzalez won by about 9 percentage points. In the Rio Grande Valley, Republican Rep. Monica De La Cruz will again face 2022 Democratic nominee Michelle Vallejo in the 15th District.

The Associated Press doesn’t make projections and will declare a winner only when it has determined there is no scenario that would allow the trailing candidates to close the gap. If a race hasn’t been called, the AP will continue to cover any newsworthy developments, like candidate concessions or declarations of victory. In doing so, the AP will make clear it hasn’t declared a winner and explain why.