Amazon launches "Climate Pledge Friendly" label in search results for more than 25K products that have one or more of 19 different sustainability certifications (Nick Statt/The Verge)

Nick Statt / The Verge:
Amazon launches “Climate Pledge Friendly” label in search results for more than 25K products that have one or more of 19 different sustainability certifications  —  The company is launching a new climate program for certified sustainable products

SEC filing: Peter Thiel and Richard Li have created a SPAC called Bridgetown Holdings Ltd., targeting SE Asia investment, and are seeking to raise $575M via IPO (Lizette Chapman/Bloomberg)

Lizette Chapman / Bloomberg:
SEC filing: Peter Thiel and Richard Li have created a SPAC called Bridgetown Holdings Ltd., targeting SE Asia investment, and are seeking to raise $575M via IPO  —  - Bridgetown also backed by Richard Li's Pacific Century  — SPAC aims to raise $575 million, according to filing

California looks to ban gas guzzlers – but legal hurdles abound

California Governor Gavin Newsom made a bold attempt today to ban sales of new gas-guzzling cars and trucks, marking a critical step in the state’s quest to become carbon neutral by 2045. But the effort to clean up the state’s largest source of climate emissions is almost certain to face serious legal challenges, particularly if President Donald Trump is re-elected in November.

Newsom issued an executive order that directs state agencies, including the California Air Resources Board, to develop regulations requiring every new passenger car and truck sold in the state to be zero-emissions vehicles by 2035. That pretty much limits future sales to electric vehicles (EVs) powered by batteries or hydrogen fuel cells. Similar rules would go into effect for most medium and heavy-duty vehicles by 2045.

If those rules are enacted, the roughly 2 million new vehicles sold in the state each year will all suddenly be EVs, providing a huge boost to the still nascent sector.

“California policy, especially automotive policy, has cascading effects across the US and even internationally, just because of the scale of our market,” says Alissa Kendall, professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Davis.

Indeed, the order would mean more auto companies will produce more EV lines, scaling up manufacturing and driving down costs. The growing market would, in turn, create greater incentives to build out the charging or hydrogen fueling infrastructure necessary to support it all.

The move also could make a big dent in transportation emissions. Passenger and heavy-duty vehicles together account for more than 35% of the state’s climate pollution, which has proven an especially tricky share to reduce in a sprawling state of car loving-residents (indeed, California’s vehicle emissions have been ticking up). 

But Newsom’s executive order only goes so far. It doesn’t address planes, trains, or ships, and it could take another couple decades for residents to stop driving all the gas-powered vehicles already on the road.

Whether the rules go into effect at all, and to what degree, will depend on many variables, including what legal grounds the Air Resources Board uses to justify the policies, says Danny Cullenward, a lecturer at Stanford’s law school focused on environmental policy.

One likely route is for the board to base the new regulations on tailpipe emissions standards, which California has used in the past to force automakers to produce more fuel-efficient vehicles, and nudge national standards forward. But that approach may require obtaining a new waiver from the Environmental Protection Agency allowing the state to exceed the federal government’s vehicle emissions rules under the Clean Air Act, the source of an already heated battle between the state and the Trump administration.

Last year, Trump announced he would revoke California’s earlier waiver to set tighter standards, prompting the state and New York to sue. So whether California can pursue this route could depend on how courts view the issue and who is sitting in the White House come late January.

It’s very likely that the automotive industry will challenge the rules no matter how the state goes about drafting them. And the outcome of those cases could depend on which court it lands in—and, perhaps eventually, who is sitting on the Supreme Court.

But whatever legal hurdles it may face, California and other states need to rapidly cut auto emissions to have any hope of combating the rising threat of climate change, says Dave Weiskopf, senior policy advisor with NextGen Policy in Sacramento.

“This is what science requires and it’s the next logical step for state policy,” he says.

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Apple launches its online store in India

For the first time in more than 20 years since Apple began its operations in India, the iPhone-maker has started selling its products directly to consumers in the world’s second largest smartphone market.

Apple launched its online store in India on Wednesday, which in addition to offering nearly the entire line-up of its products, also brings a range of services for the first time to consumers in the country. India is the 38th market for Apple where it has launched its online store.

Consumers in India can now purchase AppleCare+, which extends warranty on products, and access the trade-in program to get a discount on new hardware purchases. The company said it will also offer customers support through chat or telephone, and let users consult its team of specialists before they make a purchase.

The company is also offering customers the ability to pay for their purchases in monthly instalments. TechCrunch reported in January that the company was planning to open its online store in India in the quarter that ends in September. The company plans to open its first physical retail store in the country next year, it has said.

Jayanth Kolla, chief analyst at consultancy firm Convergence Catalyst, argued that the launch of the Apple’s online store in India is a bigger deal for the company than the consumers in the country.

Apple typically starts investing in marketing, brand building and other investments in a market only after it launches a store there, he told TechCrunch.

Apple does oversee billboards and ads of iPhones and other products that are displayed in India, but it’s the third-party partners that are running and bankrolling them, said Kolla. “Apple might provide some marketing dollars, but those efforts are always led by their partners,” he said.

In recent years, Apple has visibly grown more interested in India, one of the world’s fastest growing smartphones markets. The company’s contract manufacturers today locally assemble the latest generation of iPhone models and some accessories — an effort the company kickstarted two years ago.

The move has allowed Apple to lower prices of some iPhone models in India, where for years the company has passed custom duty charges to customers. The starting price of iPhone 11 Pro Max is $1,487 in India, compared to $1,099 in the U.S. The AirPods Pro, which sells at $249 in the U.S., was made available in India at $341 at the time of launch.

 

More to follow…

China says it won’t approve TikTok sale, calls it ‘extortion’

The September 20 deadline for a purported TikTok sale has already passed, but the parties involved have yet to settle terms on the deal. ByteDance and TikTok’s bidders Oracle and Walmart presented conflicting messages on the future ownership of the app, confusing investors and users. Meanwhile, Beijing’s discontent with the TikTok sale is increasingly obvious.

China has no reason to approve the “dirty” and “unfair” deal that allows Oracle and Walmart to effectively take over TikTok based on “bullying and extortion,” slammed an editorial published Wednesday in China Daily, an official English-language newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party.

The editorial argued that TikTok’s success — a projected revenue of about a billion dollars by the end of 2020 — “has apparently made Washington feel uneasy” and prompted the U.S. to use “national security as the pretext to ban the short video sharing app.”

The official message might stir mixed feelings within ByteDance, which has along the way tried to prove its disassociation from the Chinese authority, a precondition for the companies’ products to operate freely in Western countries.

Beijing has already modified a set of export rules to complicate the potential TikTok deal, restricting the sale of certain AI-technologies to foreign companies. Both ByteDance and China’s state media have said the agreement won’t involve technological transfers.

The Trump Administration said it would ban downloads of TikTok, which boasts 100 million users in the country, if an acceptable deal was not reached. It also planned to shut down Tencent’s WeChat, a decision just got blocked by a district court in San Francisco.

TikTok has collected nearly 198 million App Store and Google Play installs in the U.S. while WeChat has been installed by nearly 22 million users in the U.S. since 2014, according to market research firm Sensor Tower. Unlike TikTok, which has a far-reaching user base in the U.S., WeChat is mainly used by Chinese-speaking communities or those with connections in China, where the messenger is the dominant chat app and most Western alternatives are blocked.

Right before the proposed September 20 deadline for the app bans, China’s Commerce Ministry called on the U.S. to “give up its bullying acts” towards the video app and messenger or face Beijing’s countermeasures to “safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese companies.”

After the U.S. announced a series of detrimental curbs on telecoms equipment giant Huawei last year, China vowed to publish an “unreliable entity list” targeting foreign companies and individuals that “do not comply with market rules” and “seriously damage the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese enterprises,” but it has yet to reveal the list.

Oracle announces updates to its Cloud Compute instances, including support for Nvidia's A100 accelerator, Arm-powered processors, and updated pricing schemes (Ryan Smith/AnandTech)

Ryan Smith / AnandTech:
Oracle announces updates to its Cloud Compute instances, including support for Nvidia's A100 accelerator, Arm-powered processors, and updated pricing schemes  —  When the name “Oracle” is thrown around, hardware isn't typically the first thing that comes to mind for most people.

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Acesso Digital, a developer of facial recognition and identification technology, raises $107.25M from private equity firm General Atlantic and SoftBank (Reuters)

Reuters:
Acesso Digital, a developer of facial recognition and identification technology, raises $107.25M from private equity firm General Atlantic and SoftBank  —  SAO PAULO (Reuters) - U.S. private equity firm General Atlantic LLC and Japan's SoftBank Group Corp 9984.T are leading a 580 million reais …

Syfe, a Singapore-based robo-advisor startup, raises $18.6M Series A led by Valar Ventures as it eyes expansion into other Asian countries (Catherine Shu/TechCrunch)

Catherine Shu / TechCrunch:
Syfe, a Singapore-based robo-advisor startup, raises $18.6M Series A led by Valar Ventures as it eyes expansion into other Asian countries  —  Syfe, a Singapore-based startup that wants to make investing more accessible in Asia, announced today that it has closed a SGD $25.2 million …

Meet the 20 new Indian startups Google is backing

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