French cities sue Total over ‘carbon emission’

Bloomberg Oil giant Total SA is being sued by 14 local governments and a handful of non-governmental organisations in France for not doing enough to reduce its carbon emissions and fight global warming. The legal challenge is the latest sign that the biggest oil companies are coming under increasing pressure from activists, investors and governments to cut emissions as the ...

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Old electric car batteries may help cut costs of storing power

Bloomberg As major players jostle for market share in large-scale power storage, American Electric Power and Nissan Motor Co are testing new technology that re-uses old electric vehicle batteries to slash costs. The pilot study in Ohio will road test technology that could lower system costs by about a half and extend the life of lithium-ion batteries by about a ...

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France to use batteries for renewables

Bloomberg France’s grid operator will test storing excess wind and solar power in batteries to reduce the need to build new transmission lines that involve heavy construction work and take longer to complete. Network operators across Europe are seeking ways to both minimise the cost and environmental impact of the energy transition. Reseau de Transport d’Electricite estimates that France will ...

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FBI abused its powers with intrusive spying on Page

As America weighs abuses of power in this season of impeachment and trial, it’s worth taking a careful second look at the FBI’s behaviour in its “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation of the Trump campaign in 2016. Republicans are outraged by what happened, and Democrats should be, too. It’s not that the FBI’s misdeeds excuse those of Donald Trump’s. Quite the opposite: ...

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Comcast’s bad omen for the AT&T

Cord-cutting isn’t stopping. As it turns out, that’s not such bad news for cable giants like Comcast Corp. It is, however, for AT&T Inc. The streaming wars intensified in the fourth quarter amid Walt Disney Co.’s advertising blitz for its new Disney+ service that overtook billboards, shopping malls, public transit and Twitter feeds. At the same time, Apple Inc. began ...

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Airfare transparency made free market freer

Have you ever shopped online for something (say, a hotel room) and selected an option with an excellent price only to learn, at the time of checkout, that the price is much higher than originally advertised? That happens a lot. A key reason is that advertised prices often exclude taxes and fees. Even if there is some disclosure of that ...

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Oil was sick even before China’s coronavirus hit

Oil succumbed to the coronavirus because its immune system was compromised already. Amid headlines about quarantined Chinese cities and dozens of potential cases showing up in the US, Brent crude closed on January 24 at $60 and change, its lowest since Halloween. This is all the more remarkable when you consider January has seen several geopolitical shocks stretching from Libya ...

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‘Global warming’ was a better term than ‘climate change’

As scientific terms go, “climate change” is lame. It sounds like something created by committee. And it’s hard to understand as a crisis when we also hear scientists talking about ice ages and other natural changes to the climate happening throughout earth’s history. “Global warming” is something people have worried about for years, though. It’s essentially another term for the ...

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Intel can’t win another round in the chip fight

Intel Inc. closed out 2019 learning the hard lesson that making cutting-edge semiconductors is truly difficult. Like a prizefighter who refuses to admit he just hit the mat, the world’s biggest chipmaker is coming out swinging. And it should, because how it gets through 2020 could decide the company’s fate. Once the most advanced supplier of semiconductors, Intel struggled last ...

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A few thousand Teslas won’t fix China’s problems

Tianqi Lithium Corp. had everything going for it: generous subsidies, Beijing’s blessing on the electric-vehicle industry it supplies, and the hype of Tesla Inc. getting its sedans off the production line in China. The only thing interrupting this nice fairy tale is the reality of demand and making money. Over the past few years, China has supported its electric-car industry ...

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