Month: May 2021

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On Wednesday, a court in the Netherlands ordered energy giant Royal Dutch Shell to cut its carbon emissions by 45 percent before the decade is over. Ruling on a suit filed by the Netherlands branch of Friends of the Earth, the court concluded that Royal Dutch Shell's current plans to reduce emissions are incompatible with the targets of the Paris agreement.

Shell has already announced that it intends to appeal the decision.

Not fast enough

Royal Dutch Shell is a large international energy conglomerate that made its name from oil extraction and processing. The company has recognized the need to diversify its energy portfolio, however, and has concluded that its oil production likely peaked in 2019. Emissions have been falling since 2018, and the company plans to hit net-zero emissions by 2050. A key intermediate step to that goal is to reach a 20 percent drop in carbon emissions by 2030.

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The European Commission is on the verge of opening a formal probe of Facebook and its free Marketplace service, according to reports from Reuters and the Financial Times.

While the scope of the investigation is still being determined, the European Commission, the bloc’s executive arm, has queried Facebook and its competitors on at least three separate occasions. Those questions aimed to determine whether, in pushing Marketplace on its users, Facebook abused its market power. Given that a formal probe seems imminent, it’s likely that EC officials believe there’s a decent chance the company did.

Facebook’s Marketplace first appeared in 2016, and at the time, it was mostly viewed as a competitor to Craigslist. Conceptually, Marketplace and Craigslist are similar in that both allow people to post free, local classified advertisements. Craigslist has been slow to update its core product—superficially, it still looks like a Web 1.0 product, and it didn’t offer an official app until 2019—but Facebook’s Marketplace was mobile-friendly out of the gate and was soon prominently featured both on Facebook's modern website and as a tab in its near-ubiquitous app.

Enlarge / Photo of the Starlink payload on top of a Falcon 9 rocket in Florida this week. (credit: SpaceX)

Update, 3:30 pm EDT: Under bright blue skies, the Falcon 9 rocket took off from Florida on Wednesday afternoon and promptly delivered its Starlink payload into orbit. This booster has truly become the workhorse of the global launch industry:

After learning to crawl, walk and run, the Falcon 9 is now sprinting. Today:

• 100th consecutive, successful launch of a Falcon 9

• 16th launch of 2021, a cadence of one rocket every nine days

• 6th launch during the last 33 days, once every five days pic.twitter.com/kmuBJwA82i

— Eric Berger (@SciGuySpace) May 26, 2021

Original post, 1:31 pm EDT: SpaceX will attempt to launch another batch of 60 Starlink satellites today at 2:59 pm ET (18:59 UTC) from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. This marks the 28th overall launch of operational Starlink satellites.

The most notable aspect of today's mission is that it would be the 100th consecutive successful flight for the Falcon 9 rocket. This record dates back to June 2015, when the Falcon 9 rocket's second stage failed during the launch of a cargo supply mission to the International Space Station. The Dragon capsule was lost after the second stage broke apart and sank into the Atlantic Ocean.