Earth

Half a Billion Cheap Electrical Items Go To UK Landfills in a Year, Research Finds (theguardian.com) 63

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
Almost half a billion small, cheap electrical everyday items from headphones to handheld fans ended up in landfill in the UK in the past year, according to research. The Guardian: The not-for-profit organisation Material Focus, which conducted the research, said the scale of the issue was huge and they wanted to encourage more recycling. More than half a billion cheaply priced electronic goods were bought in the UK in the past year alone -- 16 per second. Material Focus findings showed that of these items, 471m were thrown away. This included 260m disposable vapes, 26m cables, 29m LED, solar and decorative lights, 9.8m USB sticks, and 4.8m miniature fans.

Scott Butler, executive director at Material Focus, described it as "fast tech." He said: "People should think carefully about buying some of the more frivolous ... items in the first place." He said the items people bought were often "cheap and small," and that consumers may not realise they contain valuable materials that could be salvaged if recycled. Small electricals can contain precious materials including copper, lithium and stainless steel. These components can be recycled and used in wind turbines, medical devices and electric vehicles. Material Focus said that while people were used to the idea of recycling larger electrical items such as fridges, lots of smaller devices were left unused in houses.
Medicine

World-First Trial of Gene Therapy To Cure Form of Deafness Begins (ft.com) 14

Posted by BeauHD from the dawn-of-a-new-era dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Financial Times: A world-first trial of a gene therapy to cure a form of deafness has begun, potentially heralding a revolution in the treatment of hearing loss. Up to 18 children from the UK, Spain and the US are being recruited to the study, which aims to transform treatment of auditory neuropathy, a condition caused by the disruption of nerve impulses traveling from the inner ear to the brain. Participants will be monitored for five years to gauge whether their hearing improves, with initial results expected to be published next February.

Auditory neuropathy can be due to a variation in a single gene -- known as the OTOF gene -- which produces a protein called otoferlin. This protein typically allows the inner hair cells in the ear to communicate with the hearing nerve. Mutations in the OTOF gene can be identified by genetic testing. However, [Professor Manohar Bance, an ear surgeon at Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust who is leading the trial in the UK] said it was a condition often missed when newborn babies were screened for potential hearing problems. "This is one of the few conditions where everything works except the transmission between the hair cells and the nerve. So everything else looks fine when you test it, but they can't hear anything. So these poor kids' [difficulties] end up being missed," Bance added.

The new gene therapy aims to deliver a working copy of the faulty OTOF gene using a modified, non-pathogenic virus. It will be delivered via an injection into the cochlea under general anaesthetic. Bance estimates that about 20,000 people across the US and five European countries -- the UK, Germany, France, Spain and Italy -- have auditory neuropathy due to OTOF mutations, underlining the potential significance of a successful treatment.[...] "If it works, it's 'one and done'" but the cost to health systems "is something that worries me," he added, noting that gene therapies could be priced in "the million dollar range" per patient. However, he hoped that "economies of scale" as the technology developed further would ultimately allow them to be provided more cheaply.
Programming

Man Trains Home Cameras To Help Repel Badgers and Foxes (bbc.co.uk) 77

Posted by BeauHD from the pet-project dept.
Tom Singleton reports via the BBC: A man got so fed up with foxes and badgers fouling in his garden that he adapted cameras to help repel them. James Milward linked the Ring cameras at his Surrey home to a device that emits high frequency sounds. He then trained the system using hundreds of images of the nocturnal nuisances so it learned to trigger the noise when it spotted them. Mr Milward said it "sounds crazy" but the gadget he called the Furbinator 3000 has kept his garden clean.

Getting the camera system to understand what it was looking at was not straightforward though. "At first it recognised the badger as an umbrella," he said. "I did some fine tuning and it came out as a sink, or a bear if I was lucky. Pretty much a spectacular failure." He fed in pictures of the animals through an artificial intelligence process called machine learning and finally, the device worked. The camera spotted a badger, and the high frequency sound went off to send the unwanted night-time visitor on its way and leave the garden clean for Mr Milward's children to play in. The code for the Furbinator 3000 is open source, with detailed instructions available in Milward's Medium post.
AI

UK Opposition Leader Targeted By AI-Generated Fake Audio Smear (therecord.media) 49

Posted by BeauHD from the welcome-to-2023 dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Record: An audio clip posted to social media on Sunday, purporting to show Britain's opposition leader Keir Starmer verbally abusing his staff, has been debunked as being AI-generated by private-sector and British government analysis. The audio of Keir Starmer was posted on X (formerly Twitter) by a pseudonymous account on Sunday morning, the opening day of the Labour Party conference in Liverpool. The account asserted that the clip, which has now been viewed more than 1.4 million times, was genuine, and that its authenticity had been corroborated by a sound engineer.

Ben Colman, the co-founder and CEO of Reality Defender -- a deepfake detection business -- disputed this assessment when contacted by Recorded Future News: "We found the audio to be 75% likely manipulated based on a copy of a copy that's been going around (a transcoding). As we don't have the ground truth, we give a probability score (in this case 75%) and never a definitive score ('this is fake' or 'this is real'), leaning much more towards 'this is likely manipulated' than not," said Colman. "It is also our opinion that the creator of this file added background noise to attempt evasion of detection, but our system accounts for this as well," he said.
Crime

Man Jailed In UK's First Treason Conviction In 40 Years Was Encouraged By AI Chatbot (vice.com) 21

Posted by BeauHD from the world-we-live-in dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: A man who admitted attempting to assassinate Queen Elizabeth II with a crossbow after discussing his plan with an AI-powered chatbot has been sentenced to 9 years in prison for treason. It's the UK's first treason conviction in more than 40 years. Jaswant Singh Chail, who was 19 at the time of his arrest on Christmas Day, 2021, scaled the walls of Windsor Castle's grounds with a mask and a loaded high-power crossbow. He said his intent was, as a British Sikh, to assassinate the Queen in a Star Wars-inspired plan to avenge the 1919 Jallianwalla Bagh massacre, a colonial-era atrocity during British rule in India. Prosecutors said that Chail was encouraged to undertake this plot after discussing it at length with an AI-powered chatbot that egged him on and bolstered his resolve. [...] Chail is currently being held at Broadmoor high-security hospital and will remain there until he is psychologically well enough to serve his sentence.
AI

AI Beats Human Sleuth at Finding Problematic Images in Research Papers (nature.com) 12

Posted by msmash from the man-vs-machine dept.
An algorithm that takes just seconds to scan a paper for duplicated images racks up more suspicious images than a person. Nature: Scientific-image sleuth Sholto David blogs about image manipulation in research papers, a pastime that has exposed him to many accounts of scientific fraud. But other scientists "are still a little bit in the dark about the extent of the problem," David says. He decided he needed some data. The independent biologist in Pontypridd, UK, spent the best part of several months poring over hundreds of papers in one journal, looking for any with duplicated images. Then he ran the same papers through an artificial-intelligence (AI) tool. Working at two to three times David's speed, the software found almost all of the 63 suspect papers that he had identified -- and 41 that he'd missed. David described the exercise last month in a preprint, one of the first published comparisons of human versus machine for finding doctored images.

The findings come as academic publishers reckon with the problem of image manipulation in scientific papers. In a 2016 study, renowned image-forensics specialist Elisabeth Bik, based in San Francisco, California, and her colleagues reported that almost 4% of papers she had visually scanned in 40 biomedical-science journals contained inappropriately duplicated images. Not all image manipulation is done with nefarious intent. Authors might tinker with images by accident, for aesthetic reasons or to make a figure more understandable. But journals and others would like to catch images with alterations that cross the line, whatever the authors' motivation. And now they are turning to AI for help.

Some 200 universities, publishers and scientific societies already rely on Imagetwin, the tool that David used for his study. The software compares images in a paper with more than 25 million images from other publications -- the largest such database in the image-integrity world, according to Imagetwin's developers. Bik has been using Imagetwin regularly to supplement her own skills and calls it her "standard tool," although she emphasizes that the AI has weaknesses as well as strengths -- for instance, it can miss duplications in images with low contrast.
Cloud

Amazon and Microsoft's Cloud Dominance Referred for UK Competition Probe (cnbc.com) 6

Posted by msmash from the up-next dept.
Britain's anti-competition regulators have been tasked with investigating Microsoft and Amazon's dominance of the cloud computing market. From a report: Media watchdog Ofcom on Thursday referred its inquiry for further investigation to the Competition and Markets Authority, kickstarting the process. Ofcom said that it had identified features which make it more difficult for U.K. businesses to switch cloud providers, or use multiple cloud services, and that it is "particularly concerned" about the position of market leaders Amazon and Microsoft. "Some UK businesses have told us they're concerned about it being too difficult to switch or mix and match cloud provider, and it's not clear that competition is working well," Fergal Farragher, Ofcom's director responsible for the market study, said in a statement Thursday.

"So, we're referring the market to the CMA for further scrutiny, to make sure business customers continue to benefit from cloud services." Ofcom is concerned that so-called "hyperscalers" like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure are limiting competition in the cloud computing market. These are companies that allow businesses of all stripes to carry out critical computing tasks -- like storage and management of data, delivery of content, analytics and intelligence -- over the internet, rather than through servers stored on site, or "on premise."
Transportation

Kidnapped By a Runaway Electric Car (bbc.co.uk) 351

Posted by BeauHD from the catastrophic-malfunctions dept.
Long-time Slashdot reader RockDoctor writes: Regardless of their other potential benefits, modern cars, and modern electric cars in particular, involve complex networks of computer code, hardware, and servo systems cooperating (?) to deliver services to the user, like acceleration, steering and braking. Slashdot nerderati know better than most that such complex networks can never show unexpected, non-designed behavior, due to the infallibility of hardware, program coders and system designers... Yeah. Right. "I'll have some of what he's been smoking!" That's Musk-grade optimism.

On Sunday evening, a middle-aged driver in a "brand new" vehicle found it would not decelerate below 30mph (50kmph). He retained steering control, and avoided crashing until police vehicles "boxed in" his vehicle and helped him exit into a police van (most have sliding side doors) from the moving vehicle. The police then "carried out a controlled halt" on the unmanned vehicle, stopping it from driving away with the van's brakes until a roadside assistance technician arrived 3 hours later and managed to shut it down. "[W]hen the [technician] got to me [...] later, he plugged in the car to do a diagnostic check and there was pages of faults," said the "kidnapped" driver from Glasgow. "He said he had never seen anything like it and decided he was not willing to turn the engine on to see what was wrong."

By inference, the vehicle did not have a mechanical brake ("hand brake": English; "parking brake": American), which should have been able to keep the vehicle halted regardless of the motor's actions (even if a "clutch" did get burned out). From the only time I've been inside an electric car, I can't say if that is normal; it's certainly something I'll look for if I ever rent another. Had the failure happened at 10 a.m. in the morning, not 10 p.m. in the evening, the body count could have been ... substantial.

A dumb question, stemming from my only use of an electric car: do they have a weight sensor under the driver's seat that locks-out the main motor unless there is (say) 30kg in the driver's seat? Most have some such sensors -- they trigger the "seatbelt not fastened" alarm or silence it for empty seats -- but whether they can override the drive system ... ?
United Kingdom

UK Universities Take $50 Million in Fossil Fuel Funding Since 2022 (theguardian.com) 32

Posted by msmash from the gravity-of-the-situation dept.
Major fossil fuel companies have committed tens of millions of pounds in funding to UK universities since 2022, it can be revealed, despite many of these institutions having actively pledged to divest from oil and gas. From a report: According to freedom of information requests submitted by the climate journalism site DeSmog, more than $50m in research agreements, tuition fees, scholarships, grants and consultancy fees have been pledged to 44 UK universities by 32 oil, coal and gas companies since 2022. The largest contributors were Shell, the Malaysian state-owned oil company Petronas, and BP. These three companies account for more than 76% of the total figure awarded, having given $25.5m, $6.30m and $5.94m respectively.

A further 10 companies made up nearly 21% of the remaining contributions during this period: Sinopec, Equinor, BHP Group, Total Energies, Eni SPA, Saudi Aramco, ExxonMobil, Scottish Power, Kellas Midstream and Ithaca Energy. Previous reporting from openDemocracy and the Guardian found that between 2017 and December 2021, $108.1m in funding was given to UK universities by some of the world's biggest fossil fuel companies. These partnerships have shown no sign of abating, and DeSmog's research shows an additional $50m has been pledged since 2022, even after 102 higher education institutions promised to stop taking funding from the fossil fuel industry.
United Kingdom

Report Claiming Net Zero Will Cost UK Trillions Retracted Due To 'Factual Errors' 118

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
A report that hugely overestimated the cost to the UK of reaching net zero emissions has been retracted by the thinktank that published it. From a report: The Civitas pamphlet published on Thursday claimed to offer a "realistic" estimate of the cost -- $5.4tn -- and said "the government needs to be honest with the British people." However, factual errors were quickly pointed out after publication. The most serious error was the confusion by the report's author, Ewen Stewart, between power capacity in megawatts (MW) with electricity generation in megawatt hours (MWh). As a result, he presented an unrealistic "$1.57m per MWh" figure for the cost for onshore wind power. The true number is more than 10,000 times lower at about $60.3 to $84 per MWh. Another error was mixing up billions with trillions. A statement on the Civitas website said: "This report has been taken down from the website because it was found to contain factual errors, it is undergoing revision and a fresh process of peer review. A revised report will be released when this process is completed."
Privacy

UK Passport Images Database Could Be Used To Catch Shoplifters (theguardian.com) 67

Posted by BeauHD from the Orwellian-nightmare dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Britain's passport database could be used to catch shoplifters, burglars and other criminals under urgent plans to curb crime, the policing minister has said. Chris Philp said he planned to integrate data from the police national database (PND), the Passport Office and other national databases to help police find a match with the "click of one button." But civil liberty campaigners have warned the plans would be an "Orwellian nightmare" that amount to a "gross violation of British privacy principles".

Foreign nationals who are not on the passport database could also be found via the immigration and asylum biometrics system, which will be part of an amalgamated system to help catch thieves. The measures have been deemed controversial by campaigners as the technology could get a match even if images are blurred or partially obscured. Speaking at a fringe event of the Conservative party conference hosted by the Policy Exchange thinktank, Philp said: "I'm going to be asking police forces to search all of those databases -- the police national database, which has custody images, but also other databases like the passport database -- not just for shoplifting but for crime generally to get those matches, because the technology is now so good that you can get a blurred image and get a match for it.

"Operationally, I'm asking them to do it now. In the medium term, by which I mean the next two years, we're going to try and create a new data platform so you can press one button [and it] lets you search it all in one go. Until the new platform is created, he said police forces should search each database separately. [...] Philp said he has already ordered police forces that have access to the passport database to start searching it alongside the police national database, which stores custody images. Officers will be able to compare those facial images against CCTV, dashcam and doorbell technology to help find a match for criminals as prosecution rates are at record lows. He later added: "I would also just remind everyone that the wider public, including shop staff and security guards, do have the power of citizen's arrest and where it's safe to do so I would encourage that to be used. Because if you do just let people walk in and take stuff and walk out without proper challenge, including potentially a physical challenge, then it will just escalate."
Robotics

Robot 'Monster Wolves' Try to Scare Off Japan's Bears (bbc.co.uk) 44

Posted by EditorDavid from the big-bad-robot dept.
"Bear attacks in Japan have been rising at an alarming rate, so the city of Takikawa [about 570 miles from Tokyo] installed a robot wolf as a deterrent," reports the BBC. "The robot wolf was originally designed to keep wild animals from farmlands, but is now being used by local governments and managers of highways, golf courses, and pig farms." Digital Trends describes the "Monster Wolf" as "complete with glowing red eyes and protruding fangs." [T]he solar-powered Monster Wolf emits a menacing roar if it detects a nearby bear. It also has a set of flashing LED lights on its tail, and can move its head to appear more real... The robot's design is apparently based on a real wolf that roamed part of the Asian nation more than 100 years ago before it was hunted into extinction.

Japanese news outlet NHK reported earlier this month that bear attacks in the country are at their highest level since records began in 2007. The environment ministry said 53 cases of injuries as a result of such attacks were reported between April and July this year, with at least one person dying following an attack in Hokkaido in May.
China

Will EVs Send OPEC Into a Death Spiral? (telegraph.co.uk) 206

Posted by EditorDavid from the oil's-well-that-ends-well dept.
This week the UK's conservative Daily Telegraph newspaper published an interesting perspective from their world economy editor.

"Saudi and OPEC officials self-evidently do not believe their own claim that world oil demand will keep growing briskly for another generation as if electric vehicles had never been invented, and there was no such thing as the Paris Accord." OPEC had to slash output last October in order to shore up prices. It had to cut again in April. The Saudis then stunned traders with a unilateral cut of one million barrels a day (b/d) in June. All told, the OPEC-Russia cartel has had to take 2m b/d of production off the table at a high point in the economic cycle, after China's post-Covid reopening and at a time when the US economy has been running hot with a fiscal expansion roughly equal to Roosevelt's world war budget.

That 2m b/d figure happens to be more or less the amount of crude currently being displaced by EV sales worldwide, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

Yet the mood was all defiance and plucky insouciance at the 24th World Petroleum Congress in Calgary this month... This skips over the awkward detail that EVs are already on track to reach 60pc of total car sales in the world's biggest car market within two years (not a misprint). The cartel is being hit from two sides. Petrol and diesel cars are becoming more efficient, gradually displacing 1.4bn vintage models disappearing into the scrap yard. BP says that alone will cut up to a tenth global oil demand by 2040. With a lag, EVs are now starting to take a material bite, with an S-curve trajectory likely to go parabolic this decade.

China's EVs sales hit 38pc this summer, even though subsidies have mostly been scrapped. This is far ahead of schedule under Beijing's New Energy Vehicle Industry Development Plan. China's Chebai think tank says the emerging consensus is that EV sales will hit 17m or 60pc of total Chinese share by 2025, rising to 90pc by 2030, assuming that the grid can keep up... Vietnam is a few years behind but with similar ambitions. Its EV start-up, VinFast Auto, became the world's third most valuable carmaker after it launched on Nasdaq last month, briefly worth as much as the German car industry before the share price came back down to earth...

OPEC's central premise has long been that the rise of a billion-strong middle class in emerging Asia will more than offset declining oil use in the OECD bloc. That notion is 'withering under scrutiny'... The International Energy Agency (IEA) says global oil demand will peak at 105.5m b/d in 2028 and then flatten for a few years before going into decline... The IEA pulls its punches. The Rocky Mountain Institute argues in its latest report — End of the ICE Age — that half of global car sales could be EVs by 2026, reaching 86pc later this decade.
The article closes by citing "the breathtaking pace of global electrification. The decline of oil in car and bus transport may be closer than almost anybody imagined. OPEC as we know it may be on the cusp of a death spiral."
Earth

Heat Pumps Twice As Efficient As Fossil Fuel Systems In Cold Weather (theguardian.com) 196

Posted by EditorDavid from the hot-air dept.
Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shared this report from the Guardian: Heat pumps are more than twice as efficient as fossil fuel heating systems in cold temperatures, research shows. Even at temperatures approaching -30C, heat pumps outperform oil and gas heating systems, according to the research from Oxford University and the Regulatory Assistance Project thinktank...

Reports have spread that they do not work well in low temperatures despite their increasing use in Scandinavia and other cold climates. The research, published in the specialist energy research journal Joule, used data from seven field studies in North America, Asia and Europe. It found that at temperatures below zero, heat pumps were between two and three times more efficient than oil and gas heating systems.

The authors said the findings showed that heat pumps were suitable for almost all homes in Europe, including the UK, and should provide policymakers with the impetus to bring in new measures to roll them out as rapidly as possible.
"The Guardian and the investigative journalism organisation DeSmog recently revealed that lobbyists associated with the gas boiler sector had attempted to delay a key government measure to increase the uptake of heat pumps."
The Almighty Buck

Canonical's Snap Store Restricts Uploads Following Possible Security Issue (snapcraft.io) 29

Posted by EditorDavid from the crackle-pop dept.
Yesterday the "temporary suspension" of automatic Snap registrations was announced on Canonical's Snapcraft forum by developer advocate Igor Ljubuncic, after what was described as a "security incident". On September 28, 2023, the Snap Store team was notified of a potential security incident. A number of snap users reported several recently published and potentially malicious snaps. As a consequence of these reports, the Snap Store team has immediately taken down these snaps, and they can no longer be searched or installed. Furthermore, the Snap Store team has placed a temporary manual review requirement on all new snap registrations, effectively immediately...

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause our snap publishers and developers. However, we believe it is the most prudent action at this moment. We want to thoroughly investigate this incident without introducing any noise into the system, and more importantly, we want to make sure our users have a safe and trusted experience with the Snap Store. Please bear with us while we conduct our investigation. We will provide a more detailed update in the coming days.
Some background from the Linux blog OMG Ubuntu: This isn't the first time the Snap Store has had issues with icky uploads. In 2018 an innocuous-sounding app hid crypto-mining capabilities unbeknownst to users. Not disclosing this in its description rendered it malware (Canonical later clarified to say crypto-miners are allowed so long as they're disclosed).

In this instance it appears that folks have uploaded apps purporting to be official apps/tools for crypto ledger tool Ledger and these apps were able to get folks backups codes (which people enter thinking it's legit) and ...the bad actors can use that to extract funds.
Earth

Six Young People Take 32 Countries To Court Over Climate Change 219

Posted by BeauHD from the David-vs-Goliath dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: What I felt was fear," says Claudia Duarte Agostinho as she remembers the extreme heatwave and fires that ripped through Portugal in 2017 and killed more than 100 people. "The wildfires made me really anxious about what sort of future I would have." Claudia, 24, her brother Martim, 20, and her sister Mariana, 11, are among six young Portuguese people who have filed a lawsuit against 32 governments, including all EU member states, the UK, Norway, Russia, Switzerland and Turkey. They accuse the countries of insufficient action over climate change and failing to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions enough to hit the Paris Agreement target of limiting global warming to 1.5C. The case is the first of its kind to be filed at the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg. If it is successful, it could have legally-binding consequences for the governments involved. The first hearing in the case is being held on Wednesday.

Aged from 11 to 24, the six claimants argue that the forest fires that have occurred in Portugal each year since 2017 are a direct result of global warming. They claim that their fundamental human rights -- including the right to life, privacy, family life and to be free from discrimination -- are being violated due to governments' reluctance to fight climate change. They say they have already been experiencing significant impacts, especially because of extreme temperatures in Portugal forcing them to spend time indoors and restricting their ability to sleep, concentrate or exercise. Some also suffer from eco-anxiety, allergies and respiratory conditions including asthma. None of the young applicants is seeking financial compensation.

Lawyers representing the six young claimants are expected to argue in court that the 32 governments' current policies are putting the world on course for 3C of global warming by the end of the century. [...] In separate and joint responses to the case, the governments argue that the claimants have not sufficiently established that they have suffered as a direct consequence of climate change or the Portuguese wildfires. They claim there is no evidence to show climate change poses an immediate risk to human life or health, and also argue that climate policy is beyond the scope of the European Court of Human Rights jurisdiction. "These six young people from Portugal, who are ordinary individuals concerned about their future, will be facing 32 legal teams, hundreds of lawyers representing governments whose inaction is already harming them," says Gearoid O Cuinn, director of Global Legal Action Network (GLAN).

"So this is a real David vs Goliath case that is seeking a structural change to put us on a much better track in terms of our future."
Earth

How a Thinktank Got the Cost of Net Zero for the UK Wildly Wrong (theguardian.com) 124

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
An anonymous reader shares a report: Imagine demanding an "honest" debate over the cost of net zero in a report full of errors that even a schoolboy would be embarrassed about. Then imagine getting coverage of your report in the Sun, Times, Daily Mail, Daily Express and Spectator. Sound impossible? Well, let me tell you how Civitas, one of the thinktanks housed at 55 Tufton Street in London, did exactly that, and nearly got away with it. On Wednesday, Civitas published a pamphlet on net zero by Ewen Stewart, whose consultancy, Walbrook Economics, works on "the interaction of macroeconomics, politics and capital markets." Stewart is also a climate sceptic, having written in 2021 that human-caused warming is a "contested theory." Along with Civitas, 55 Tufton Street also houses the climate-sceptic lobby group the Global Warming Policy Foundation and its campaigning arm Net Zero Watch. These groups previously attempted to spark an "honest debate about the cost of net-zero" in 2020.

The Civitas report claims to offer a "realistic" $5.5tn estimate of the cost of reaching net zero emissions by 2050 and says "the government need to be honest with the British people." This estimate is much higher than the figure produced by the government's official adviser, the Climate Change Committee (CCC), which has said that reaching net zero would require net investments of $1.71tn by 2050. Note the difference between Civitas's "costs" and the CCC's "net investments." The CCC also found that reaching net zero would generate savings in the form of lower fossil fuel bills worth $1.34tn, resulting in a net cost of $0.37tn. In his report for Civitas, Stewart adopts the well-worn climate-sceptic tactic of simply ignoring these savings. He also ignores what the Office for Budget Responsibility has called the potentially "catastrophic economic and fiscal consequences" of unmitigated climate change. The report was timed to follow hot on the heels of Rishi Sunak's big climate speech, in which he called for an "honest" approach to net zero that ends "unacceptable costs."
Transportation

Nissan To Go All-Electric By 2030 Despite UK's Petrol Ban Delay (bbc.com) 240

Posted by BeauHD from the right-thing-to-do dept.
"Nissan will make the switch to full electric by 2030 in Europe. We believe it is the right thing to do for our business, our customers and for the planet," said Nissan's chief executive Makoto Uchida. The announcement comes despite the UK postponing its 2030 ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars to 2035. The BBC reports: In an interview with the BBC, Mr Uchida said the company was aiming to bring down the cost of electric vehicles for customers, so that they were no more expensive than petrol and diesel cars. "It may take a bit of time, but we are looking at the next few years," he said. "We are looking at it from the point of view of the technology, from the point of view of cooperating with suppliers, and of course working with the government on how we can deliver that kind of cost competitiveness to the consumer," Mr Uchida added. Will that price parity happen by 2030? "That's what we're aiming for," confirmed Mr Uchida.

Mr Uchida also said that the company was fast-tracking a different kind of battery technology, known as all-solid-state batteries (ASSB), which are lighter, cheaper, and quicker to charge. "We are going to have a pilot plant for ASSB in Japan from next year, and we want to ensure they can be mass produced by 2028," he said. "There are a lot of challenges with this, but we do have a solution, and we are on track [to meet that target]", he added.
Facebook

Meta Pays a Lot of Money To Break Lease On London Office Building (standard.co.uk) 25

Posted by BeauHD from the cost-cutting-moves dept.
"As a result of the move to working from home, Meta has walked away from one of its offices in London at the cost of 149 million pounds," writes Slashdot reader Bruce66423. The London Evening Standard reports: Meta paid the FTSE 250 developer 149 million pounds on Monday in order to break the lease on the building, 1 Triton Square. The tech firm, which also owns Instagram, let the space from 2021 following a refurbishment but never moved into the space. Meta has three open London sites including a neighbouring building in Regent's Place, near Warren Street in central London.

Analysts at BNP Paribas Exane claimed Meta has another 18 years on its lease at the site. British Land said it will receive the one-off payment to end the lease but the agreement would also reduce its earnings per share by 0.6% over the six months to next March.
United Kingdom

Chase UK To Ban Cryptocurrency Purchases Over Fraud Fears (ft.com) 60

Posted by msmash from the tussle-continues dept.
An anonymous reader writes: Chase UK, JPMorgan's UK Bank, has told its customers that it will not carry out transactions related to crypto assets.

The Financial Times writes:

JPMorgan's UK bank will stop customers buying cryptocurrencies from next month to combat rising numbers of criminals using digital assets to target victims.

The ban by Chase UK, which notified customers by email on Tuesday, marks a step up as British lenders try to stop their networks being used for scams and frauds.

While several banks, including HSBC and NatWest, have set restrictions on their customers' purchases for crypto, outright bans are rare.

Chase said its UK block, which will come into effect from October 16, had been informed by data showing the high rate of crypto scams and fraud in the UK, including fake investments and false celebrity endorsements.

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