** In a record-breaking year of disasters, the Federal Emergency Management Agency is announcing nearly $3 billion for communities to build resiliency against climate change-fueled extreme weather.
** Virgin Galactic Holdings, Inc. announced the ‘Galactic 03’ flight window will open September 8, 2023, continuing a monthly cadence of spaceflights. This would be the Company’s fourth spaceflight in four months.
** Louisiana’s attorney general teams up with Chevron and an oil-and-gas lobbying firm to sue the Biden administration, saying its Gulf of Mexico oil and gas lease sale should be larger.
** Food service buildings including restaurants are nearly four times more energy intensive than commercial buildings are on average in the United States reports the EIA.
** A federal agency resumes decommissioning an antiquated nuclear reactor at a military base in Alaska following a year-long contract dispute.
** Hawaiian Electric acknowledges its equipment sparked a wildfire in Maui, but claims the blaze that leveled Lahaina ignited hours after the utility had de-energized its lines.
** Vietnamese electric vehicle maker VinFast now ranks behind Tesla and Toyota as the world’s third-largest automaker by market capitalization after debuting on Wall Street, as it gears up to build a North Carolina factory.
** NASA has released the first data maps from a new instrument monitoring air pollution from space. The visualizations show high levels of major pollutants like nitrogen dioxide — a reactive chemical usually produced when fossil fuels are burned for transportation, power generation and other industrial activities, as well as wildfires — in the atmosphere over parts of North America.
** The state of Montana filed a legal motion against the Biden administration over its decision to permit a billionaire-backed organization to lease large swaths of public property for non-agriculture uses.
World
** Workers at two of Chevron’s major natural gas plants in Australia are set to go on strike next week, the US energy giant said Tuesday, threatening up to five percent of global LNG supplies.
** The International Monetary Fund said in a new report that global subsidies for oil and gas had hit an all-time high of $7 trillion in 2022. Of this, the fund said, 18% was direct subsidies. These direct subsidies represented a twofold increase over 2012.
** Toyota Motor will restart operations at its assembly plants in Japan on Wednesday, after a production system malfunction brought domestic output to a halt at the world’s biggest-selling automaker.
** Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida asked China on Monday to urge its citizens to halt acts of harassment, including crank calls and stone throwing at Japanese diplomatic facilities and schools, in response to Japan’s release of treated radioactive wastewater from the damaged Fukushima nuclear power plant.**
** Europe has lost its crown to China as the top builder of offshore wind power as UK developers battle higher costs and stagnant power prices. The offshore wind market totalled 64.3 gigawatts of power globally last year, according to the Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC), with China contributing about 49pc of that compared with Europe’s 47pc share.
