I get tons of incidental exercise, save money and don’t have to worry about parking. But other people look at me aghast

My wife and I tick a lot of “minority” boxes: we’re a same-sex Jewish-Palestinian couple with an ethnically ambiguous child. But you know what really makes us stand out? You know what always seems to cause people to look aghast at our lifestyle? The fact that we don’t own a car.

Being car-free was nothing unusual when we lived in New York, an outlier in the US when it comes to vehicle ownership. But when we moved to Philadelphia (one of the most walkable cities in the US), it set us apart. Whenever our lack of a car comes up, people do a double take. You can almost see the wheels turning in their head. Are they financially destitute? Are they radical environmental activists? Are they just weird?

Continue reading...

In part eight of our series exploring myths surrounding EVs, we examine whether they will break our infrastructure

• Do electric cars really produce fewer carbon emissions?
• Are EVs too costly to tempt drivers?
• Is it right to have range anxiety?

Cars have a weight problem. Consider the Mini, designed to save precious fuel during rationing ; it has ballooned in size. It is not alone. Cars have got bigger and bigger, with the rise of the SUV only accelerating the trend.

Electric cars might look the same ( for now ) but they have one important difference: a heavy battery.

Continue reading...

Utilitarian as they may be, some civic projects are so monumental they approach the sublime. And one of the most elegant is hidden inside a mountain in Wales. By Deb Chachra

Archive: NASA

Continue reading...

NIST has released version 2.0 of the Cybersecurity Framework:

The CSF 2.0, which supports implementation of the National Cybersecurity Strategy , has an expanded scope that goes beyond protecting critical infrastructure, such as hospitals and power plants, to all organizations in any sector. It also has a new focus on governance, which encompasses how organizations make and carry out informed decisions on cybersecurity strategy. The CSF’s governance component emphasizes that cybersecurity is a major source of enterprise risk that senior leaders should consider alongside others such as finance and reputation.

[…]

The framework’s core is now organized around six key functions: Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond and Recover, along with CSF 2.0’s newly added Govern function. When considered together, these functions provide a comprehensive view of the life cycle for managing cybersecurity risk.

The updated framework anticipates that organizations will come to the CSF with varying needs and degrees of experience implementing cybersecurity tools. New adopters can learn from other users’ successes and select their topic of interest from a new set of implementation examples and quick-start guides designed for specific types of users, such as small businesses, enterprise risk managers, and organizations seeking to secure their supply chains.

This is a big deal. The CSF is widely used, and has been in need of an update. And NIST is exactly the sort of respected organization to do this correctly.

Some news articles .

New analysis finds money from Biden’s $1.2tn infrastructure bill has overwhelmingly been spent on widening highways for cars

Roads, roads and more roads. The US is continuing to spend billions of dollars on expanding enormous highways rather than fund public transport, with a landmark infrastructure bill lauded by Joe Biden only further accelerating the dominance of cars at the expense, critics say, of communities and the climate.

Since the passage of the enormous $1.2tn bipartisan infrastructure law in 2021, hailed by Biden as a generational effort to upgrade the US’s crumbling bridges, roads, ports and public transit, money has overwhelmingly poured into the maintenance and widening of roads rather than improving the threadbare network of bus, rail and cycling options available to Americans, a new analysis has found.

Continue reading...

Shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves tells business summit of measures to boost investment, productivity and certainty

• Business live – latest updates

Labour will not raise corporation tax above its current rate of 25% during the next parliament, the party has pledged, in an attempt to offer businesses greater certainty.

The shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, said the tax pledge included maintaining full expensing, which allows businesses that invest in IT equipment and machinery to claim back up to 100% of the cost of the investment by writing it off against tax on their profits. She said Labour would also maintain the annual investment allowance introduced by Jeremy Hunt.

Continue reading...

The industry pushed back :

Despite the EPA’s willingness to provide training and technical support to help states and public water system organizations implement cybersecurity surveys, the move garnered opposition from both GOP state attorneys and trade groups.

Republican state attorneys that were against the new proposed policies said that the call for new inspections could overwhelm state regulators. The attorney generals of Arkansas, Iowa and Missouri all sued the EPA—claiming the agency had no authority to set these requirements. This led to the EPA’s proposal being temporarily blocked back in June.

So now we have a piece of our critical infrastructure with substandard cybersecurity. This seems like a really bad outcome.

Prospective investors will be subject to ‘strict national security checks’, minister vows

Prospective investors in the proposed Sizewell C nuclear power plant in Suffolk will undergo “strict national security checks”, the government has said, as it formally kicked off a hunt for outside investment.

The project, led by the French state-backed energy company EDF and backed by the UK government, aims to produce 3.2 gigawatts of electricity – enough to power about 6m homes – and was approved in July last year .

Continue reading...

Leeds-based bank may finally be in position to support regional development and net zero climate ambitions

It is not every day that the former boss of HSBC is found trudging through the mud of a Cornish mining site. But this was a special occasion.

On an overcast day in early August, John Flint, now head of the UK Infrastructure Bank (UKIB), descended on Trelavour Downs in black wellies and a hi-vis jacket, alongside the Treasury minister Andrew Griffith, to mark the government-owned bank’s £24m investment in Cornish Lithium: the company hoping to jump-start a local lithium supply chain for electric vehicles and the wider renewable energy sector.

Continue reading...