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Wins and losses

Superficial diplomacy?

A question of leverage

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A former UK energy industry lobbyist has been appointed to the influential role of leading the government’s climate policy watchdog as it prepares to set a new legal limit on the country’s greenhouse gas emissions.

The Climate Change Committee said Emma Pinchbeck, head of trade body Energy UK, would take over in November, ahead of its publication of a new “carbon budget” next year for the 2038-42 period.

The UK was the first major economy to set a legally binding target five years ago to reach net zero by 2050, but the committee has since advised bluntly and repeatedly that it was not moving fast enough.

The 38-year-old Pinchbeck represented the interests of Energy UK’s approximately 100 members across the heat, electricity, transport and tech sectors, which it said generated about 80 per cent of the UK’s power through wind, solar, hydro, nuclear, biomass and gas.

While it also represents some members involved in oil and gas extraction, UK Energy says it does not advocate for these parts of their business and agrees only to cover specific activities such as renewables.

The trade group said Pinchbeck had been a “powerful advocate” of the transition to clean energy. In the role, she also spoke in favour of burning biomass for power generation and promoted carbon capture, storage and utilisation, which some scientists and environmentalists believe is being promoted by the oil and gas industry to prolong fossil fuel production.

The government announced £21.7bn in support spread for the country’s first carbon capture and storage projects last week, being developed by Italian oil group Eni, BP, Equinor and TotalEnergies. The programme will run for 25 years, relying on a mix of taxpayer funding and higher energy bills.

Pinchbeck also has experience in the non-profit sector as former head of climate change and energy at WWF-UK. But it was her private sector background that CCC interim chair Piers Forster, a professor of climate physics, said would help in assessing the UK’s plans to decarbonise energy.

The committee has been without a permanent head since its outspoken former chief, Chris Stark, stepped down in April. He then warned the UK was losing out on green investment because of the policy rollbacks under Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. Stark is now leading the new government’s “mission control” attempt to decarbonise the electricity system by 2030.

Ed Miliband, UK energy secretary, said Pinchbeck was “well placed to advise and challenge government” on its net zero goals, ensuring it meets its climate commitments with “ambition and urgency”.

Within its first weeks in office, the Labour government also selected former Siemens UK chief executive Jürgen Maier to chair the £8.3bn state-owned GB Energy, which will own, manage and operate clean power projects and support carbon capture and hydrogen development.

It also recently appointed the new UK climate envoy, Rachel Kyte, who has extensive experience in climate policy after working at the World Bank and as a professor at Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government.

Kyte’s appointment was the subject of opposition questions in parliament this week surrounding a donation by Quadrature Capital, the investment arm of a hedge fund group that funds the independent Quadrature Climate Foundation, where Kyte is co-chair of an advisory board.

Miliband said “all the proper processes were followed” and Kyte was esteemed for her climate leadership. QCF said it was focused on “funding and supporting science-led solutions to climate change”, adding that its donation was “values-based” and that it was “non-partisan and apolitical”.

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THE POST Office could scrap two in three jobs in a cost-cutting drive.

Some of the estimated £200million savings will be used to improve sub-postmasters’ pay, it was reported last night.

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A review — announced in the wake of the Horizon IT scandal — may see staff cut from 3,100 to around 1,000.

Roles at the London HQ could go.

Sub-postmasters, who run most of the 11,500 Post Office branches, will not be affected.

Similarly, posties – employed by Royal Mail – would not be affected.

But grants to rural Post Offices could be cut, raising the risk of closures.

The Post Office said the priorities of its interim chairman are “remediation for post-masters affected by the IT scandal” and boosting their income.

Its recommendations were currently under discussion with the government.

More than 900 sub-postmasters were wrongly prosecuted based on faulty data.

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Pfizer chief executive Albert Bourla plans to meet Starboard Value, said people familiar with the matter, as the activist investor’s $1bn stake in the pharmaceutical group puts pressure on its board to revive its share price.

Bourla and at least one other director will hold talks with Starboard next week, after it emerged this weekend the fund had taken a $1bn stake, equivalent to about 0.6 per cent of the $165bn company. The Financial Times previously reported the activist investor is calling for a strategy shift.

While engagement between companies and activist investors is not unusual, the planned meeting shows Starboard’s demands are getting a hearing at the highest levels of the company. It has created an extensive slide deck on its turnaround plans but has yet to circulate it.

Starboard’s exact recommendations could not immediately be ascertained and the firm declined to comment. Pfizer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Starboard’s campaign comes after the Covid-19 vaccine maker’s shares have sunk to below pre-pandemic levels. People briefed on the activist’s thinking said it believed Pfizer had been mismanaged as the pandemic receded, notably in spending its $92bn Covid windfall on a costly $70bn acquisition spree. Pfizer’s market value has roughly halved since its pandemic peak.

Starboard will be represented at next week’s meeting by its chief executive Jeff Smith and partner Patrick Sullivan, who runs its healthcare investments, said two people familiar with the matter. Pfizer’s lead independent director, Shantanu Narayen, is expected to accompany Bourla, one person said.

In an unusual twist, two of Pfizer’s top former executives are working with Starboard. The FT on Monday reported Pfizer’s former chair and CEO Ian Read and its former finance chief Frank D’Amelio called at least four Pfizer directors to ask them to consider collaborating with the activist investor.

Read, who served as CEO for eight years before becoming executive chair, promoted Bourla to the top job. Read and D’Amelio’s involvement is a rare example of former executives collaborating with an activist investor to push for strategy or management changes.

Starboard’s investment in Pfizer is not its first brush with the healthcare sector. It unsuccessfully urged pharmaceutical manufacturer Bristol Myers Squibb to drop its $74bn acquisition of cancer drugmaker Celgene in 2019. The same year, it entered into an agreement to add four directors to the board of Cerner, a health tech company now known as Oracle Health.

Some analysts doubt Starboard can transform the valuation of Pfizer, which has already announced $5.5bn of cost cuts through till 2027 to help restore investor confidence.

Vamil Divan, an analyst at Guggenheim Securities, said in a note on Monday that many of his conversations have “focused on investors wondering if we could see a change in Pfizer’s management team”. While that was “certainly possible”, it is unclear what that would mean for the company’s dividend, an important support for the stock.

Two investors told the FT on Monday they would be receptive to management changes.

Pfizer’s directors are in Ireland for tours of local manufacturing facilities and board meetings, with the main meeting scheduled for Wednesday.

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — Homes knocked off their foundations, piles of wet carpet, wood and pipes rotting in the sun, and abandoned cars and trucks littering roads glazed with mud and blocked by debris.

With one of the most powerful hurricanes in a century barreling toward Florida on Tuesday, the Twin City mobile home park was already a scene of devastation because of Hurricane Helene.

Now, as Hurricane Milton stays on track to hit the state Wednesday, residents of Twin City say they’re unprepared for the double whammy of nearly back-to-back hurricanes.

While millions of Floridians living in the path of the storm were heeding urgent evacuation orders, a few holdouts were still hanging around the wreckage of the low-lying mobile home park.

Mark Prompakdee, a 71-year-old retiree who has lived in the park for five years with his older brother, said they survived Helene by packing everything they could into their minivan and camping out for two days in a nearby high school parking lot on higher ground.

He said they plan to do the same before Milton arrives because they have nowhere else to go and no family or friends to stay with.

“They’re saying, ‘Get out of here,’” Prompakdee said. “Where?”

Several of the homes in the park were deemed uninhabitable by local officials after Hurricane Helene made landfall in Florida on Sept. 26. They were marked with signs that read “Unsafe” and “Do not enter or occupy” in bright red lettering.

The home of Jesse Hancock, 39, and Ria Blaight, 34, was flooded by Helene’s surge, but unlike their neighbors, they have someplace to go — Blaight’s father’s house in nearby Pinellas Park.

But Pinellas Park, just north of St. Petersburg, is also in a mandatory evacuation area. As Hancock and Blaight loaded a borrowed car with whatever belongings they could salvage from their wrecked home, they were still weighing the pros and cons of evacuating.

“You’re picking and pulling straws here,” Hancock said.

“Stay with your ship and stick with it or abandon ship and go somewhere else that might be worse,” Blaight said. “It’s a two-headed coin. Scary either way.”

Walter Smutz, a disabled 47-year-old military veteran, said he and his wife have been sleeping in their cars since Helene flooded their mobile home. All the furniture inside was either destroyed or infested with maggots.

“Right now, I’m homeless and scared to death,” said Smutz, who returned to Twin City to salvage what he could before Milton hit. “I’m worried about getting on my feet. I just want a home. I don’t care what kind of home.”

Smutz said Lakeshore Management, the company that manages the mobile home park, deceived them about the potential for flooding when they rented the plot where they parked their home.

“When I bought this place a year ago, the guy scammed me,” Smutz said. “He lied to me about the floods and everything.”

Smutz and other tenants also said Lakeshore Management is making them pay the $750 monthly plot rental fee, even though their homes are now uninhabitable.

An unidentified woman who answered the phone at the Twin City office said, “That’s not what’s happening,” when NBC News asked to speak to a representative for Lakeshore Management about the tenants’ complaints.

Officials at Lakeshore Management’s headquarters in Skokie, Illinois, did not respond to a request for comment.

Tenant Ninda Menegias, who has lived at the Twin City mobile home park for 11 years, said she reluctantly returned to the nearby hotel where she stayed when Helene came through.

“We had to get a boat to get out,” Menegias, 70, said by phone. “The water was about 4 feet. The water was in my home.”

After the floodwaters receded, Menegias said she went back to her home and camped out in the only semi-habitable room of her “castle,” a bedroom that stunk of mold.

That lasted for only a few days, as residents were ordered to evacuate again.

“It’s a mobile home, but I paid a lot of money,” she said, her voice cracking with emotion. “I lost everything. I don’t know what to do.”

Matt Lavietes reported from St. Petersburg and Corky Siemaszko from New York City.

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com