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‘Getting Britain Moving’ the Rees-Mogg way as UK Conservatives go wild for fracking

Planet Business: Kim Kardashian’s costly crypto; the ‘climate positive’ Brisbane Olympics; and an update on Optimus, Elon Musk’s dancing robot prototype

Jacob Rees-Mogg delivers his speech on day two of the Conservative Party conference. Photograph: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

Laura Slattery's face
Laura Slattery
Sat Oct 8 2022 - 05:45

Image of the week: Earth to Rees-Mogg

The DisastTruss duo occupying Number 10 and Number 11 Downing Street has been a thorough distraction from the fact that this man, Dickensian villain Jacob Rees-Mogg, is the UK’s secretary of state for business, energy and industrial strategy. Rees-Mogg, a politician and investment firm co-founder no stranger to conflicts of interest, arrived at the Conservative Party conference earlier this week flanked by police, as protesters greeted him with boos energetic enough to power the UK’s national grid. Undeterred, either by placards reading “the only good Tory is a lavatory” or prime minister Liz Truss’s reported dismissal of his desire to totally slash workers’ rights, Rees-Mogg busied himself by touting his Greenpeace-infuriating pro-fracking agenda, claiming he would be “delighted” for his own back garden to be fracked. The existing seismic limit that says fracking must be stopped if it causes a tremor of magnitude 0.5 or more is “ridiculously low”, Rees-Mogg insisted, and he will soon announce “a more realistic figure”. It’s what they mean when they say they will be “Getting Britain Moving”.

[ Tory MPs angrily challenge Jacob Rees-Mogg’s fracking revival plan ]

In numbers: Crypto fine queen

$1.26 million

Sum (€1.28 million) that influencer Kim Kardashian was fined by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) after she advertised EthereumMax on her Instagram page without saying she had been paid to do so.

$250,000

Undisclosed amount that the reality television star received for advertising the cryptocurrency, the SEC said. Legal action was subsequently taken against EthereumMax, Kardashian and other celebrities amid allegations that the ads were part of a “pump and dump” scheme.

3

Years that Kardashian has agreed not to promote crypto asset securities, a hardship that the billionaire will no doubt find a way to bear.

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[ Kim Kardashian pays €1.3m to settle crypto touting charges ]

Getting to know: Andrew Liveris

Former chief executive and chairman of chemicals giant Dow, Andrew Liveris is an Australian business veteran of the kind that has university buildings named after him. These days, he sits on the board of directors of the world’s biggest oil company, Saudi Aramco, 95 per cent owned by the Saudi Arabian government. So his environmental credentials are perhaps not the strongest available. Nevertheless, in his current gig as president of the “climate positive” Brisbane 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games organising committee, Liveris reckons his experience will come in handy as it sets out to somehow achieve greenhouse gas reductions greater than the Games’ carbon emissions. “If you emit, you actually know the solutions,” he said this week. By that logic, if Riyadh was to make a bid for the 2036 Games, they would be the most climate-friendly ones ever ... right?

The list: Robot rundown

When Elon Musk isn’t devising a “peace” plan for Russia and Ukraine or coughing up the cash to buy Twitter as agreed, he has his eye on another ambition: robot project Optimus. Tesla, his electric vehicle company, has just unveiled the latest prototype of the humanoid. So what do we know about it?

1 Work in progress: At the moment, Optimus looks like the halfway point between the Terminator and Johnny 5 from 1980s comedy Short Circuit. Only one of these is a killer cyborg.

2 Peaceful co-existence: Safeguards are and will be critical to the project, Musk told attendees at a Tesla artificial intelligence (AI) event. “We always want to be careful we don’t go down the Terminator path.”

3 Task completion: Optimus can dance and water plants, two of the most essential skills in life.

4 Transformative potential: Musk claims the robots, once they are produced en masse, will transform civilisation, a service it will provide for less than $20,000 (€20,300) each.

5 Optimus optimism: The mission for the robots is effectively about “making the future awesome”, with the future timed to arrive “three to five years” from now. Take cover.

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