Wednesday, May 26, 2021

Airships for city hops could cut flying’s CO2 emissions by 90%

Bedford-based blimp maker unveils short-haul routes such as Liverpool-Belfast that it hopes to serve by 2025

***Hybrid Air Vehicles hopes to produce 12 of its Airlander 10 airships a year by 2025,***

Wed 26 May 2021

For those fancying a trip from Liverpool to Belfast or Barcelona to the Balearic Islands but concerned about the carbon footprint of aeroplane travel, a small Bedford-based company is promising a surprising solution: commercial airships.

Hybrid Air Vehicles (HAV), which has developed a new environmentally friendly airship 84 years after the Hindenburg disaster, on Wednesday named a string of routes it hoped to serve from 2025.

The routes for the 100-passenger Airlander 10 airship include Barcelona to Palma de Mallorca in four and a half hours. The company said the journey by airship would take roughly the same time as aeroplane travel once getting to and from the airport was taken into account, but would generate a much smaller carbon footprint. HAV said the CO2 footprint per passenger on its airship would be about 4.5kg, compared with about 53kg via jet plane.

Other routes planned include Liverpool to Belfast, which would take five hours and 20 minutes; Oslo to Stockholm, in six and a half hours; and Seattle to Vancouver in just over four hours.

HAV, which has in the past attracted funding from Peter Hambro, a founder of Russian gold-miner Petropavlovsk, and Iron Maiden frontman Bruce Dickinson, said its aircraft was “ideally suited to inter-city mobility applications like Liverpool to Belfast and Seattle to Vancouver, which Airlander can service with a tiny fraction of the emissions of current air options”.

Tom Grundy, HAV’s chief executive, who compares the Airlander to a “fast ferry”, said: “This isn’t a luxury product it’s a practical solution to challenges posed by the climate crisis.”

He said that 47% of regional aeroplane flights connect cities that are less than 230 miles (370km) apart, and emit a huge about of carbon dioxide doing so.

“We’ve got aircraft designed to travel very long distances going very short distances, when there is actually a better solution,” Grundy said. “How much longer will we expect to have the luxury of travelling these short distances with such a big carbon footprint?”

Grundy said the hybrid-electric Airlander 10 could make the same connections with 10% of the carbon footprint from 2025, and with even smaller emissions in the future when the airships were expected to be all-electric powered.

“It’s an early and quick win for the climate,” he said. “Especially when you use this to get over an obstacle like water or hills.”

HAV said it was in discussions with a number of airlines to operate the routes, and expected to announce partnerships and airline customers in the next few months. The company has already signed a deal to deliver an airship to luxury Swedish travel firm OceanSky Cruises, which has said it intends to use the craft to offer “experiential travel” over the North Pole with Arctic explorer Robert Swan.

Grundy said the company was in the final stages of settling on a location for its airship production line, which he hoped would be in the UK. He said the company would hire about 500 people directly involved in building the craft, and it would support a further 1,500 jobs in the supply chain. The company currently employs about 70 people, mostly in design, at its offices in Bedford. He said the company aimed to produce about 12 airships a year from 2025.

The craft was originally designed as a surveillance vehicle for intelligence missions in Afghanistan. HAV claims independent estimates put the value of the airship market at $50bn over the next 20 years. It aims to sell 265 of its Airlander craft over that period.

The £25m Airlander 10 prototype undertook six test flights, some of which ended badly. It crashed in 2016 on its second test flight, after a successful 30-minute maiden trip. HAV tweeted at the time: “Airlander sustained damage on landing during today’s flight. No damage was sustained mid-air or as a result of a telegraph pole as reported.”

The aircraft, which can take off and land from almost any flat surface, reached heights of 7,000ft (2,100m) and speeds of up to 50 knots (57mph) during its final tests. The company has had UK government backing and grants from the European Union.

SEE LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for AIRSHIPS

Stefan Boscia

Dominic Cummings Gives Evidence To The Committee Inquiry Into Lessons Learnt From The COVID-19 Pandemic — Dominic Cummings said it was "crackers" Boris Johnson is Prime Minister (Getty Images)

Dominic Cummings has claimed Boris Johnson did not take the virus seriously even in February 2020, with the Prime Minister calling Covid-19 a “scare story”.

He said “senior officials and advisers such as me fell disastrously short” of expected standards during February and March of 2020 and that thousands died “unnecessarily” as the government had no plan at all for the pandemic.

Johnson’s former top aide, who apologised for the government’s slow pandemic response, said herd immunity was Downing Street’s strategy up until mid-March and that health secretary Matt Hanock lied when he said it was never the plan on 15 March 2020.

Cummings told MPs this morning that the government was not spending much time on Covid-19 in January or February last year, saying that Boris Johnson saw it as a “scare story” and “the new swine flu”.

He said other top Downing Street advisers “were literally skiing in the middle of February” and that “it wasn’t until the last week of February that there was any sense of urgency across the Cabinet Office”.

The Prime Minister reportedly said in February 2020: “I’m going to get Chris Whitty to inject me with Covid so everybody knows there’s nothing to be frightened of.”

Cummings is facing MPs on a joint session of parliament’s Health and Science committees in a marathon session in which Johnson, the Department of Health and Hancock have been blamed for Covid failures.

Cumming said the government’s initial Covid plan was herd immunity lock and to not lock down down hard as eventually happened.

The rationale behind this is that it a lockdown would prolong the first peak of Covid-19 in order to get herd immunity and avoid a second peak in winter 2020 that could be worse, he said.

He said “Hancock himself and the chief scientific and medical officers were briefing journalists on the week of the 9th [March] that this is what the plan is”.

The former Number 10 aide said “by 11 and 12 [March] we’d already gone terribly wrong” and that he had began to call for a lockdown.

“Me and others realised the system was delaying [stricter Covid measures], because there’s not a proper plan in place,” he said.

“The justification was ‘it doesn’t matter if it’s now or in a week’s time’. The logic doesn’t work – these things are being delayed because there isn’t preparation and planning being made.”

Cummings also recalled when former deputy cabinet secretary Helen McNamara stormed in to Number 10 during this period to say “I think we are absolutely f***ed, I think this country is heading for a disaster, I think we’re going to kill thousands of people”.

He said: “On the 14th we said ‘you are going to have to lockdown’, but there is no lockdown plan, it doesn’t exist. Sage hasn’t modeled it, the Department of Health don’t have a plan, we are going to figure it out and hack it together.”

Cummings also took aim at Hancock, saying that he should have been fired “for at least 15,20 things” including “lying to everybody in multiple occasions in meeting after meeting in the cabinet room and publicly”.

He said this included a time when Hancock said that NHS treatments were not being delayed when they in fact were.

Cummings also said it was “crackers” Johnson was Prime Minister.

“Any system which ends up giving a choice between [Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn] to lead is obviously a system that has gone extremely badly wrong,” he said.

“In any sensible rational government it is complete crazy that I should have been in such a senior position in my personal opinion.

“I’m not smart, I’ve not built great things in the world, it’s completely crackers that someone like me should have been in there just the same as it was crackers Boris Johnson was in there.”

Downing Street has said: “There is a huge task for this government to get on with. We are entirely focused on recovering from the pandemic, moving through the roadmap and distributing vaccines while delivering on the public’s priorities.

“Throughout this pandemic, the government’s priority has been to save lives, protect the NHS and support people’s jobs and livelihoods across the United Kingdom.”

Britain has promised net zero – but it’s on track to achieve absolutely nothing

George Monbiot

Despite producing ambitious targets, governments have failed to tackle the big environmental issues over the past 15 years

**‘We did the easy things first. Coal-burning power stations were replaced with gas, and some of the gas with renewables.’ Photograph: Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty Images**

Wed 26 May 2021

Every week governments make headline announcements about saving the planet, and every week their small print unsaves it. The latest puff by the G7 is a classic of this genre. Apparently, all seven governments have committed “to conserve or protect at least 30% of the world’s land and at least 30% of the world’s ocean by 2030”. But what does it mean? The UK, which says it secured the new agreement, claims already to have “conserved or protected” 26% of its land and 38% of its seas. In reality, it has simply drawn lines on the map, designating our sheepwrecked hills and trawler-trashed seas “protected”, when they’re nothing of the kind. This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a press release.

All governments do this, but Boris Johnson’s has perfected the art. It operates on the principle of commitment inflation: as the action winds down, the pledges ramp up. Never mind that it won’t meet the targets set by the fourth and fifth carbon budgets: it now has a thrilling new target for the sixth one. Never mind that it can’t meet its old commitment of an 80% cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Instead, it has promised us “net zero” by the same date. Yes, we need more ambition, yes, the government is following official advice, but ever higher targets appear to be a substitute for action.

Fifteen years ago, I wrote a book called Heat. I tried to work out how far we would have to cut greenhouse gases to fulfil our international obligations fairly, and how we could do it without destroying the prosperity and peace on which success depends. The best estimates at the time suggested that if the UK were justly to discharge its responsibility for preventing climate breakdown, we would need to cut our emissions by 90% by 2030.

Researching the preface for a new edition, I wanted to discover how much progress we’ve made. An article in the journal Climate Policy uses a similar formula for global fairness. Its conclusion? If the UK were justly to discharge its responsibility for preventing climate breakdown, we would need to cut our emissions by 90% by 2030. And by 2035, it says, our emissions should reach “real zero”. In other words, in terms of the metric that really counts, we have gone nowhere. The difference is that we now have nine years in which to make the 90% cut, instead of 24.

How could this be true, given that the UK has reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by 49% since 1990? Surely we’ve been a global leader on climate action?

It’s partly because we now know that limiting global heating to 2C commits us to a dangerous world. In theory, governments have accepted a more stringent target of 1.5C. But it’s also because, if we ignore the impact of the pandemic, our reduction of greenhouse gases has stalled.

We did the easy things first. Coal-burning power stations were replaced with gas, and some of the gas with renewables. This makes no difference to most people: when we flick the switch, the lights still come on. But almost all the other reductions must involve us directly. They won’t happen unless the government mobilises the nation: encouraging us to drive less and use our feet, bicycles and public transport more; taxing frequent flyers; refitting our homes; reducing the amount of meat we eat; reducing the emissions embedded in the stuff we buy. On these issues, the government’s commitment to action amounts to zero. Not net zero. Absolute zero.

Road transport in the UK releases the same amount of greenhouse gases as it did in 1990: a shocking failure by successive governments. Yet Johnson intends to spend another £27bn on roads. Every major airport in the UK has plans to expand.

Buildings release more greenhouse gases than they did in 2014, and the schemes intended to green them have collapsed. The green homes grant, which the government outsourced to a private company, has been a total fiasco, meeting roughly 8% of its target. At the current rate of installation, the UK’s homes will be equipped with low-carbon heating in a mere 700 years.

When I wrote Heat, we were promised that all new homes would soon be green ones. It still hasn’t happened, and the date has been pushed back yet again, this time to 2025. Rubbish homes are still being built, which will either require a much more expensive refit or will lock in high emissions for the rest of their lives.

And no one in government wants to touch the biggest issue of all: the greenhouse gases embedded in the stuff we buy, which account for some 46% of our emissions. Government ministers urge China to cut its greenhouse gases, but our economic model depends on us buying junk we don’t need with money we don’t have. Because the fossil fuels required to produce most of it are burned overseas and don’t appear in our national accounts, the government can wash its hands of the problem.

But something has changed for the better: us. In 2006, climate campaigners beat their heads against public indifference. Now, at last, we have mass movements, and some highly effective actions, such as the successful shutdown of the McDonald’s network by Animal Rebellion last week. If there is hope, this is where it lies.

Exclusive: Labour launches ‘just transition’ climate working group

Elliot Chappell

Matthew Pennycook has launched a ‘just transition’ working group with unions, industry leaders and members of the climate movement to ensure fairness is at the heart of the party’s approach to decarbonisation, LabourList can reveal.

Commenting ahead of its first meeting today, which will be joined by Keir Starmer, Pennycook said the transition to a net-zero economy cannot be left to “the whims of the market, as was the case with the deindustrialisation of the 1980s”.

“Social justice must be at the centre of our response to the climate and environment emergency and fairness must shape our approach to the green transition here at home,” the shadow climate change minister told LabourList this morning.

“We have to actively shape the green transition so that people and places are protected throughout, its promised economic benefits realised here at home and public support sustained. This working group will help us meet that challenge.”

Labour explained the initiative’s aim is to provide a forum for dialogue with workers and trade unions, non-governmental organisations, business and industry leaders as well as communities on the process of decarbonising the economy.

Membership of the just group includes shadow ministers Pennycook and Alan Whitehead, representatives from Unite, GMB, UNISON, Prospect and Community, as well as from Green New Deal UK and the New Economics Foundation.

The group will consider the “practical, feasible, affordable and fair policy responses” required with a focus on what transition means for individual sectors such as oil and gas, steel, offshore wind, hydrogen, heat and buildings, and agriculture.

Labour has said that the body will “further develop Labour’s distinctive approach” to the transition to a net-zero economy and feed into the party’s wider policy development processes.

“Tackling the climate emergency and realising the enormous potential that transitioning to a green economy holds, is the defining challenge of the next decade,” Keir Starmer said today.

“By putting Labour values at the heart of the solutions, we can tackle the climate crisis, protect our natural environment, generate highly skilled sustainable jobs and investment in every region, as well as tackling sustained inequalities that are holding people back.

“Underpinning the drive to decarbonise our country must be both ambition and fairness. The Labour Party will ensure that is the case.”

Labour set out its plan for a drive towards a clean economy focusing on the UK manufacturing sector last November, calling for a rapid stimulus package of at least £30bn over the next 18 months with dedicated funding to low-carbon industries.

The programme is aimed at recovering jobs, retraining workers via an emergency training programme to equip those affected by Covid unemployment, and rebuilding business with the creation of a national investment bank.

The green-conscious investment bank, a policy promoted by John McDonnell when he was Shadow Chancellor, would work similarly to those in other countries and ensure that investment always supported the path to net zero.

The Conservative government sold the UK’s green investment bank in 2017, five years after it was formed, to Australian financial group Macquarie. The move was criticised at the time by activists and MPs as “deeply regrettable”.

The proposals were developed after a consultation launched in June last year invited businesses, sector associations, trade unions, workers, campaign groups and the public to submit ideas for a green new deal in the wake of Covid-19.

Then Shadow Chancellor Anneliese Dodds told conference in September that the UK needed a “broader perspective on our environment” and that green employment is “not just about high-technology jobs in renewable energy”.

In a speech earlier this year, Starmer argued that pepole are looking for a government that “puts tackling the climate emergency at the centre of everything we do”. “That’s what I mean when I talk of a future where Britain can be the best place to grow up in and the best place to grow old in,” he added.

Below is the full list of members of the just transition working group.

Shadow climate change minister: Matthew Pennycook MP, chair
Shadow minister for energy and the green new deal: Alan Whitehead MP, vice-chair
Unite: Jim Mowatt, director of education (covering energy)
UNISON: Matt Lay, national officer (energy)
GMB: Andy Prendergast, acting national secretary
Community: Alasdair McDiarmid, operations director
Prospect: Sue Ferns, deputy general secretary
Energy UK: Emma Pinchbeck, chief executive
RenewableUK/GWEC: Rebecca Williams, head of policy and regulation
Green New Deal UK: Fatima Ibrahim, executive director
New Economics Foundation: Chaitanya Kumar, head of environment and green transition

Ransomware Moves from 'Economic Nuisance' to National Security Threat

Tanker trucks are parked near the entrance of Colonial Pipeline Company May 12, 2021, in Charlotte, N.C. The operator of the nation’s largest fuel pipeline has confirmed it paid $4.4 million to a gang of hackers.

WASHINGTON - The recent cyberattack on Colonial Pipeline, the operator of the largest petroleum pipeline in the U.S., shows how internet criminals are increasingly targeting companies and organizations for ransom in what officials and experts term a growing national security threat.

These hackers penetrate victims’ computer systems with a form of malware that encrypts the files, then they demand payments to release the data. In 2013, a ransomware attack typically targeted a person’s desktop or laptop, with users paying $100 to $150 in ransom to regain access to their files, according to Michael Daniel, president and CEO of Cyber Threat Alliance.

“It was a fairly minimal affair,” said Daniel, who served as cybersecurity coordinator on the National Security Council under U.S. President Barack Obama, at the RSA Cybersecurity Conference this week.

In recent years, ransomware has become a big criminal enterprise. Last year, victim organizations in North America and Europe paid an average of more than $312,000 in ransom, up from $115,000 in 2019, according to a recent report by the cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Networks. The highest ransom paid doubled to $10 million last year while the highest ransom demand grew to $30 million, according to Palo Alto Networks.

“Those are some very significant amounts of money,” Daniel said. “And it’s not just individuals being targeted but things like school systems.”

Last year, some of the largest school districts in the U.S., including Clark County Public Schools in Nevada, Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia and Baltimore County Public Schools in Maryland, suffered ransomware attacks.

The attacks have continued to surge this year, as cybercriminals who once specialized in other types of online fraud have gotten into the lucrative criminal activity. According to a May 12 report by Check Point Research, ransomware attacks increased by 102% this year compared with the beginning of 2020, with health care and utilities the most common target sectors.

Last week, the southern U.S. city of Tulsa, Oklahoma, fell victim to a ransomware attack that rendered the city’s websites inaccessible after officials refused to pay a ransom.

In the span of eight years, ransomware has moved from being an “economic nuisance” to a national security threat, Daniel said.

“This is not putting just an economic burden on society but imposing a real public health and safety threat, and essentially a national security threat,” Daniel said.

Colonial Pipeline Co. CEO Joseph Blount confirmed on Wednesday that he had authorized a ransom payment of $4.4 million on May 7 just hours after a cyberattack took the company’s computer systems offline, disrupting petroleum supplies along the East Coast of the United States.

In this Sept. 12, 2019 photo, County Sheriff Janis Mangum stands in a control room at the county jail, in Jefferson, Ga. A… — FILE - In this Sept. 12, 2019, photo, County Sheriff Janis Mangum stands in a control room at the county jail in Jefferson, Georgia. A ransomware attack in March took down the office's computer system.

Colonial’s payment wasn’t the largest ransom paid by a single organization. Last year, Garmin, the maker of the popular fitness tracker, reportedly paid a record $10 million in ransom.

In September, cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike found a ransom demand for a whopping $1.4 billion, according to Executive Vice President Adam Meyers.

While Blount, the Colonial Pipeline CEO, defended his decision to pay a ransom as “the right thing to do for the country,” law enforcement officials and cybersecurity experts say such hefty payments embolden cyber criminals to carrying out more attacks.

“Cybercriminals know they can make money with ransomware and are continuing to get bolder with their demands,” according to a recent report by Palo Alto Networks.

Moreover, researchers at cybersecurity firm Sophos warn that paying a ransom doesn’t pay off. Just 8% of organizations that pay a ransom get back all their encrypted data, according to a new Sophos report based on a global survey of 5,400 IT professionals.

Ransomware victims often pay in cryptocurrencies. A recent analysis found that ransomware victims paid a total of $406 million in cryptocurrencies last year, up 341% from the previous year.

But ransomware is not just about money, say cybersecurity experts and law enforcement officials.

“It is about mayhem,” U.S. Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said at the Munich Cyber Security Conference last month.

“When the victim is a hospital, we’re talking life and death,” Monaco said. “When the victim is a critical infrastructure, we’re talking the main avenues (for) how we power our grid, how we get our water supply, you name it.”

FILE - In this Aug. 22, 2019, file photo, signs on a bank of computers tell visitors that the machines are not working at the… — FILE - In this Aug. 22, 2019, file photo, signs on a bank of computers tell visitors that the machines are not working at the public library in Wilmer, Texas. Twenty-two local governments in Texas were hit by ransomware in August 2019.

Last month, the U.S. Justice Department created a task force to develop strategies to combat ransomware.

“This is something we’re acutely focused on,” Monaco said.

In a report to the Biden administration last month, an industry-backed task force called for a more aggressive response to ransomware.

“It will take nothing less than our total collective effort to mitigate the ransomware scourge,” the task force wrote.

In a typical ransomware attack, hackers lock a user's or company's data, offering keys to unlock the files in exchange for a ransom.

But over the past year, hackers have adopted a new extortion tactic. Instead of simply encrypting a user's files for extortion, cyber actors "exfiltrate" data, threatening to leak or destroy it unless a ransom is paid.

Using dedicated leak sites, the hackers then release the data slowly in an effort "to increase pressure on the victim organization to pay the extortion, rather than posting all of the exfiltrated data at once."

In March, cybercriminals used this method when they encrypted a large Florida public school district’s servers and stole more than 1 terabyte of sensitive data, demanding $40 million in return.

“If this data is published you will be subject to huge court and government fines,” the Conti cybercrime gang warned a Broward County Public Schools official.

The district refused to pay.

Cybersecurity experts have a term for this tactic: double extortion. The method gained popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic as cyber criminals used it to extort hospitals and other critical service providers.

“They’re looking to increase the cost to the victim,” Meyers said at the RSA conference.

Recent attacks show cyber criminals are upping their game. In October, hackers struck Finnish psychotherapy service Vastaamo, stealing the data of 400 employees and about 40,000 patients. The hackers not only demanded a ransom from Vastaamo but also smaller payments from individual patients.

This was the first notable case of a disturbing new trend in ransomware attacks, according to researchers at Check Point.

“It seems that even when riding the wave of success, threat groups are in constant quest for more innovative and more fruitful business models,” the researchers wrote.