New York To Paris In 90 Minutes. Can This Startup Make It Happen? | Israel Must Destroy Hamas’s Tunnels | Planes, Trains And Climate Change | One Huge Contradiction Is Undoing Our Best Climate Efforts

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� � � � � � New York To Paris In 90 Minutes. Can This Startup Make It Happen? - Forbes    Earlier this month, a curved aluminum skeleton 40 feet long sat waiting in Hermeus’ cavernous Atlanta factory. It was the prototype of a drone called Quarterhorse. It will never fly. Instead, it’s scheduled for ground-testing starting in September. Hermeus CEO AJ Piplica and his cofounders believe it’s the first step on a long road to an audacious goal: building a plane capable of carrying 20 passengers at hypersonic speed — five times faster than sound, or 3,850 miles per hour. Imagine New York to Paris in 90 minutes. Quite an upgrade from the seven-and-a-half hours of a commercial flight today. It’s been 20 years since the last flight of Concorde, the groundbreaking but money-losing supersonic jetliner. So far, none of a parade of startups that have tried to bring back supersonic travel have left the ground. Piplica acknowledges that Hermeus is taking on even harder technical challenges in building an airliner that can fly for long periods of time in the intense heat and weird dynamics created the farther you climb above the speed of sound. But he says that’s not the biggest problem. “The business challenges are actually the real hard ones,” Piplica, 35, tells Forbes. “You’re not just going to raise billions of dollars to develop a passenger aircraft.” Continued here � � � � � � Don't like ads? Go ad-free with TradeBriefs Premium Israel Must Destroy Hamas's Tunnels - Foreign Affairs    Continued here � � � � � � Planes, Trains And Climate Change - Forbes    Travelers in Europe, China, Japan and other places with high-speed trains have options to continue their journeys when flights are cancelled. Air travel generates a lot of carbon pollution, contributing to a climate crisis whose worsening weather also makes air travel more turbulent and unpleasant. As those conditions intensify in the years ahead, research suggests high-speed trains — which don’t exist in the U.S. — would be a resilient alternative. So far this year, there have been over 1 million flight arrival delays, accounting for about 23% of all flights, the highest rate in a decade, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. Scientific consensus suggests a contributor to the spike in disruptions is ever-worsening weather associated with the climate crisis. Continued here � � � � � � One Huge Contradiction Is Undoing Our Best Climate Efforts - The Atlantic    You’d be forgiven for thinking that the fight against climate change is finally going well. The clean-energy revolution is well under way and exceeding expectations. Solar is set to become the cheapest form of energy in most places by 2030, and the remarkable efficiency of heat pumps is driving their own uptake now. Sales of electric vehicles could surpass those of gas-burning cars in the next six years. The world’s biggest powers are putting huge sums toward infrastructure to usher in some form of energy transformation. Pledges are being made; legislation is being passed. The world, it seems, is finally lurching in the right direction. But none of that is enough, practically speaking, because of one enormous hitch: The world is still using more energy each year, our consumption ticking ever upward, swallowing any gains made by renewable energy. Emissions are still rising—more slowly than they used to but, nonetheless, rising. Instead of getting pushed down, that needle is fitfully jiggling above zero, clawing into the positive digits when it needs to be deeply pitched into the negative. We are, in other words, simply not making a dent. And so we are now in climate purgatory. In this zone, countries and companies are doing the right things to steer away from the damages of climate change, but are at the very same time making deliberate choices that swamp the effect of those other, better things. The International Energy Agency predicts that demand for fossil fuels will peak by 2030. Yet a report released by the United Nations and several climate organizations this week found that governments in aggregate still plan to increase coal production until 2030, and oil and gas production until at least 2050, global net-zero agreements be damned. In total, countries that hold the world’s oil, gas, and coal deposits still plan to produce 69 percent more fossil fuels than is compatible with keeping warming under 2 degrees Celsius, the riskier cousin to the 1.5-degree-Celsius goal each of those countries pledged to aim for. Many experts now consider that goal impossible, because of global reluctance to phase out fossil fuels. One expert who worked on the UN report called this “insanity,” a “climate disaster of our own making.” The climate math is not adding up. Continued here

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