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First Things First
Northeast Pays High Price for Limiting Access to Natural Gas

A few years ago, CBS ran a show called Under the Dome about a town mysteriously trapped inside a dome. Nothing could get in or out.

The Northeast faces something a little like that when it comes to natural gas. While the United States is awash in natural gas thanks to fracking, much of that abundance is prevented from going to customers in the Northeast, the Wall Street Journal reports <[link removed]>:
U.S. gas production rose to a record of more than 37 trillion cubic feet last year, up 44% from a decade earlier. Yet the infrastructure needed to move gas around the country hasn’t kept up. Pipelines aren’t in the right places, and when they are, they’re usually decades old and often too small.

Some effects from this include,
Earlier this year, two utilities that service the New York City area stopped accepting new natural-gas customers in two boroughs and several suburbs. Citing jammed supply lines running into the city on the coldest winter days, they said they couldn’t guarantee they’d be able to deliver gas to additional furnaces. Never mind that the country’s most prolific gas field, the Marcellus Shale, is only a three-hour drive away.

As you might remember from a previous Taking Care of Business, last winter Massachusetts natural gas customers received liquefied natural gas shipments <[link removed]> from Trinidad and Tobago and Russia.

A lack of energy infrastructure means the Northeast pays some of the highest energy prices <[link removed]> in the U.S.

This situation is occurring because, while anti-energy activists failed to stop the fracking boom, they’ve been more successful in blocking the construction of pipelines.

These “keep it in the ground” advocates built a virtual force field – a dome – locking out plentiful natural gas.

They’ve done this with the help of political allies like New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo whose administration has blocked projects like the Constitution pipeline from transporting shale gas from Pennsylvania into the Empire State.

Similar blockades to energy infrastructure are occurring at the local level <[link removed]> in Massachusetts and Vermont.

The federal government makes it tough to build energy infrastructure at the same time. The process <[link removed]> is overly-complicated and time consuming.

As U.S. Chamber CEO Tom Donohue testified before Congress in March <[link removed]>, “It shouldn’t take longer to approve a project than to build it. Environmental reviews and public input remain important parts of the process – but they can’t go on and on forever. Let’s stop holding private investment hostage while projects are held up by permitting delays.”

These obstacles to pipelines and other energy infrastructure have significant costs: nearly $92 billion in lost GDP and 728,000 job opportunities lost, according to a Global Energy Institute study <[link removed]>.

Reduced access to affordable energy means reduced economic development.

“It will basically put economic growth at a halt,” Keith Rooney of National Grid PLC, a utility company serving residents in Long Island, put it bluntly in the WSJ story. “It’s going to start with the big customers and go all the way down to mom-and-pops.”

Matt Letourneau of the U.S. Chamber’s Global Energy Institute put it well <[link removed]>, “America’s ability to realize its competitive potential depends on making smart infrastructure choices – and that includes critical energy infrastructure.”
Diving In
Here's the story of how two computer security experts became accidental heroes for stopping the WannaCry cyberattack in 2017 <[link removed]>:
Hutchins and Hankins knew if the kill switch went down, the malware would pick up where it left off, infecting thousands of computers every minute. Puffy eyed and sleep deprived, they knew the domain had to stay up at all costs. The researchers fended off several attacks from an angry operator of a botnet trying to knock the domain offline with junk internet traffic. And, at one point, law enforcement seized two of their servers from a datacenter in France amid confusion that the domain was helping to spread WannaCry and not preventing it.
With the pressure on but running on empty, Hankins — who was also only pseudonymously known as @2sec4u — fought to stay awake, and would fall asleep on his couch where he worked for hours at a time, laptop still open, only to be jolted awake by messages on Slack or Skype, which the researchers used to talk.
Every time he heard an alert, he feared the kill switch had gone offline.
Have a business-related long read you want to share? Please email me <[link removed]>.
The Big Picture
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FCC Chairman Ajit Pai visited the U.S. Chamber and announced draft regulations to streamline the licensing system for small satellites <[link removed]>.
Looking Ahead
July 16, 2019: C_TEC will go to Columbus, OH, on their TecNation <[link removed]> tour. Blockchain, smart cities, data privacy, and more will be discussed.

July 16, 2019: The U.S. Chamber's Center for Capital Markets Competitiveness will host an event discussing corporate governance issues <[link removed]> affecting public companies. Topics will include proxy advisory firms, special interest activists and shareholder proposals, and increasing focus on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues.

July 22, 2019. C_TEC will visit Seattle, WA, on their TecNation <[link removed]> tour. The event is focused on the transformative nature of technology and how it affects rural America.
To Play Us Out
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We’re almost upon the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Enjoy this song from The Police <[link removed]>.
Have a song recommendation? Please email me <[link removed]>.
Please forward this newsletter to a friend. And don’t forget to send me <[link removed]> your tips and comments. Also, keep up with latest business policy issues by bookmarking Above the Fold <[link removed]> and following @seanhackbarth <[link removed]> and @uschamber <[link removed]> on Twitter.

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