Miscellaneous Notes -- T+138 -- June 7, 2017

Presidential tracking poll shows Trump's approval rating exceeds Bill Clinton's at same point in presidency.

Paris Agreement? Good riddance says op-ed in LA Times. One of the best op-eds I've seen on this issue, and to see it in the LA Times speaks volumes.

We would be the ones making real efforts and incurring real costs, yet we would be the ones chastised for failing to deliver.

This dynamic is already playing out. Pundits are lauding China for achieving peak emissions far sooner than they pledged, without interrogating whether this says more about the country’s progress or its pledge. Meanwhile, EU leaders look down their noses at the United States, even as their emissions rise and U.S. emissions fall.

Why would the United States remain party to such an agreement? We shouldn’t have accepted its terms in the first place, and in an important sense, we didn’t. The U.S. Constitution requires the Senate to approve any treaty by a two-thirds supermajority, in part to prevent a president from making rash, politically motivated promises on the international stage that lack consensus support back home. Obama, knowing he did not have the Senate’s consent, chose to push ahead anyway. If reversing that mistake enrages some foreign diplomats, they have only themselves and their former negotiating partners in the Obama administration to blame.

Oil, what bulls need: Cramer notes -

"Now, the one thing that's in the oil bulls' favor, and Schlumberger has been telling people this, is that most new deep-water projects around the world have stopped" since 2015, Cramer said. "That's a chief reason why Schlumberger's earnings have been so, I'd say, sub-par versus, say, Halliburton, which gets much more of its business from servicing on-shore drilling." 

Insanity: Tesla is spending billions for one gigafactory. Now it says it will scale to 10 - 20 gigafactories.

Assuming Tesla can sell its cars, the full manufacturing capacity of those Gigafactories will come straight out of the market share of existing automotive companies. If they do not respond to the inevitable shift of consumers to electric vehicles in time, Tesla will have more time to eat up their market share.

That clearly includes the market share of BMW, Audi, Mercedes, and Lexus, among others. Tesla estimating that it will build 10 to 20 Gigafactories is a statement that Tesla believes it will have to build at least 10 Gigafactories at the current pace before other manufacturers catch up.

If they respond slower, which seems to be the case with every automotive manufacturer today with the exception of perhaps Chevrolet and its Bolt, Tesla would have an even larger head start in the transition to electric vehicles and would be able to build more factories before there were enough competition to saturate the market. 

Say what? The head of the US patent office has abruptly resigned.