Removal

A federal appeals court Monday blocked Florida from enforcing the bulk of a new state law that sought to make social-media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook potentially liable for removing political candidates and political content from their sites. A three-judge panel of the Atlanta-based 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled unanimously that Florida’s Republican-backed law intruded on the First Amendment rights of social-media companies to moderate and curate content on their…

Canada has banned the use of Huawei and fellow Chinese tech giant ZTE’s equipment in its 5G networks, its government has announced. In a statement, it cited national security concerns for the move, saying that the suppliers could be forced to comply with “extrajudicial directions from foreign governments” in ways that could “conflict with Canadian laws or would be detrimental to Canadian interests.” Telcos will be prevented from procuring new 4G or 5G equipment from the companies by September this year, and must…

As part of its ambitions to move to a net-zero economy by 2050, the US Department of Energy (DOE) has been ramping up its plans to facilitate removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and drive down the cost of the technology required to do so. These efforts are set to receive a massive cash injection, with the Biden administration announcing US$3.5 billion in funding for a set of regional direct air capture hubs.The announcement follows a string of far smaller investments that began with $22 million in 2020 and a…

The Department of Energy (DOE) just launched a new $3.5 billion program to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and store it away. The program focuses on developing four “hubs” across the country focused on direct air capture, the technology that draws CO2 out of the air. Each of the hubs is ultimately supposed to be able to capture and store at least a million metric tons of CO2. That’s a massive endeavor. Currently, all the direct air capture facilities in the world only have the capacity to capture about 0.01…

An S&P Dow Jones Indices executive told the Reuters news agency it had removed Tesla from the widely followed S&P 500 ESG Index because of issues including claims of racial discrimination and crashes linked to its autopilot vehicles while Tesla CEO Elon Musk responded with harsh tweets including “ESG is a scam”. The news agency said the “back and forth” over index changes reflected a wider debate about the metrics used to judge…

An unprecedented XPrize competition designed to develop solutions to the mounting levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has progressed to its next phase, with 15 teams from around the world each awarded US$1 million to continue developing their technologies. Teams working on ultra-thin CO2-soaking membranes and techniques that bury plant matter in the ground are among those to earn recognition from the judges, and will now press ahead with efforts to massively scale up their approaches.Launched last February, the…