Businesses leaders met in Denmark yesterday to try to unite behind a call for long-term climate policies on oil, power and technology ahead of a UN conference in December that aims to replace the Kyoto Protocol.
Many companies want clearer carbon emissions rules to plan investments around the world and capitalize on green technology. Some shareholders also want more climate-friendly business.
“We need a global decision” in December, said Philippe Joubert, president of Alstom Power, the electricity generation arm of the French firm that makes components for coal, gas and renewable energy power plants.
“We have to address the Chinese, Russian, US, the German markets all together,” he said.
The meeting of business leaders was expected to call for a clear, long-term price on carbon emissions. Companies reliant on fossil fuels may lose out from measures to boost low-carbon alternatives and want to be prepared.
Not all businesses believe that fighting climate change meant higher costs, organizers said.
“You hear people saying, ‘Oh, we can’t agree, it will be bad for our business.’ Well, here is a business voice that doesn’t think so,” said Tim Flannery, an Australian scientist and chairman of the Copenhagen Climate Council, among organizers of the talks to be addressed by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.
The UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December aims to agree on a treaty for after 2012 when the terms of the Kyoto Protocol expire.
Environment experts and lobbyists say “green” spending can help rebuild a leaner economy run on wind and solar power and avoid a climate crisis even worse then the current financial crisis.
CHIP RACE: Three years of overbroad export controls drove foreign competitors to pursue their own AI chips, and ‘cost US taxpayers billions of dollars,’ Nvidia said China has figured out the US strategy for allowing it to buy Nvidia Corp’s H200s and is rejecting the artificial intelligence (AI) chip in favor of domestically developed semiconductors, White House AI adviser David Sacks said, citing news reports. US President Donald Trump on Monday said that he would allow shipments of Nvidia’s H200 chips to China, part of an administration effort backed by Sacks to challenge Chinese tech champions such as Huawei Technologies Co (華為) by bringing US competition to their home market. On Friday, Sacks signaled that he was uncertain about whether that approach would work. “They’re rejecting our chips,” Sacks
It is challenging to build infrastructure in much of Europe. Constrained budgets and polarized politics tend to undermine long-term projects, forcing officials to react to emergencies rather than plan for the future. Not in Austria. Today, the country is to officially open its Koralmbahn tunnel, the 5.9 billion euro (US$6.9 billion) centerpiece of a groundbreaking new railway that will eventually run from Poland’s Baltic coast to the Adriatic Sea, transforming travel within Austria and positioning the Alpine nation at the forefront of logistics in Europe. “It is Austria’s biggest socio-economic experiment in over a century,” said Eric Kirschner, an economist at Graz-based Joanneum
BUBBLE? Only a handful of companies are seeing rapid revenue growth and higher valuations, and it is not enough to call the AI trend a transformation, an analyst said Artificial intelligence (AI) is entering a more challenging phase next year as companies move beyond experimentation and begin demanding clear financial returns from a technology that has delivered big gains to only a small group of early adopters, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) Taiwan said yesterday. Most organizations have been able to justify AI investments through cost recovery or modest efficiency gains, but few have achieved meaningful revenue growth or long-term competitive advantage, the consultancy said in its 2026 AI Business Predictions report. This growing performance gap is forcing executives to reconsider how AI is deployed across their organizations, it said. “Many companies
France is developing domestic production of electric vehicle (EV) batteries with an eye on industrial independence, but Asian experts are proving key in launching operations. In the Verkor factory outside the northern city of Dunkirk, which was inaugurated on Thursday, foreign specialists, notably from South Korea and Malaysia, are training the local staff. Verkor is the third battery gigafactory to open in northern France in a region that has become known as “Battery Valley.” At the Automotive Energy Supply Corp (AESC) factory near the city of Douai, where production has been under way for several months, Chinese engineers and technicians supervise French recruits. “They
RSS