In 1990, the state tightened its standards again, and added a new component: Its Low-Emission Vehicle program required that automakers sell some zero-emission vehicles, as in battery and fuel-cell electric cars.

An Area 51 aficionado gives a warning, Trump is fighting with California over vehicle emissions, and the FDA is struggling to regulate vaping.That's the estimated number of people who use vapes, or e-cigarettes, up from 7 million in 2011.

Under Trump’s plan, the Environmental Protection Agency will revoke the so-called waiver underpinning the state’s ability to set tailpipe greenhouse-gas emissions standards that are more stringent, as well as the state’s electric vehicle sales mandate.

But we saw stages set for two huge shifts this week: One was in Frankfurt, where automakers gathered to show off their latest and greatest concept cars, a melange of hybrid and electric shinies.

That’s why the Obama administration decided in 2012 to (slowly) strengthen regulations governing vehicles’ tailpipe emissions and fuel economy standards, requiring each automaker’s fleet to average 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025 and boosting the penalty for missing that target.

Separately, the Justice Department has opened an antitrust probe into the deal, in which four automakers reached a pact on compromise tailpipe emissions with California, defying federal regulators, according to a person familiar with the matter.

In the audience, a man named David with small glasses and pony-tailed gray hair stood up and said he’d lost his home in Paradise, California, to last year’s Camp Fire , which was supercharged by climate change.“That's climate change,” Klobuchar said.

The panel asked automakers to “develop applications to more effectively sense the driver’s level of engagement and alert the driver when engagement is lacking” when using “automated vehicle control systems.” Tesla has changed how Autopilot works, requiring drivers to put pressure on the wheel more frequently while the feature is engaged.

So instead of relying on satellites alone, a group of researchers combed through data from a dizzying number of publicly available sources, looking at everything from traffic patterns to utilities data to air pollution reporting, to quantify the emissions from not just every road but every building in the nearly 5,000 square miles of the Los Angeles megacity.

That deal represents the most clear-cut example of auto industry unease with the Trump administration’s August 2018 proposal to dramatically ease fuel economy and vehicle greenhouse gas emissions standards drafted by the Obama administration, which sought to boost average fuel efficiency to roughly 50 miles per gallon by 2025.

Aarian Marshall covers autonomous vehicles, transportation policy, and urban planning for WIRED.The Trump administration questions the science around climate change, and wants to ditch the Obama-era rules.

In a joint statement, the automakers said the pact with California “will provide our companies much-needed regulatory certainty by allowing us to meet both federal and state requirements with a single national fleet, avoiding a patchwork of regulations while continuing to ensure meaningful greenhouse gas emissions reductions.”.

The highly ambiguous law is tailored to address conversations that inspire purchases or sway votes, but it fails to carefully define what constitutes “influenc[ing] a vote in an election.” Is sharing legitimate news stories or voting locations a form of “influence?” After all, not all online automated accounts are malign; some are simply news or information dissemination services, while others are created by artists.

Clearly, planners’ toolboxes need expanding so decisions normally made solely on the basis of housing, jobs, and transportation might now be informed by a more complete picture of the impacts of different patterns of growth on communities as a whole, including their more natural areas.

When you think of skateboard photography, you probably picture a skater flying through the air while performing some recondite feat of physical wizardry. In Amir Zaki's photographs, though, skaters themselves are nowhere to be seen.

Some 30 miles north of San Diego, along the Pacific Coast, sits the Claude “Bud” Lewis Carlsbad Desalination Plant, the largest effort to turn salt water into fresh water in North America.

Audi Recall, Shifting Alliances, and More Car News This Week. Aurora, the self-driving tech startup, and VW ended their agreement to work on autonomous vehicles—just as Aurora struck another deal with FCA . And Uber has a new generation of its self-driving Volvos.

Cut off power and you risk the ire of the state's Public Utilities Commission: Skirting the danger of starting a wildfire could end up bricking medical devices and critical infrastructure.

New York State Attorney General Letitia James is among the officials suing to block the proposed T-Mobile/Sprint merger. Nine states and the District of Columbia filed suit Tuesday to block T-Mobile and Sprint's planned $26.5 billion merger, complicating the companies’ path to completing the deal.

NASA Is Ready To Get Down To Space Business, and More News. NASA is welcoming for-profit companies to space, Californians are slipping out of their measles vaccinations, and we've got some Father's Day gift ideas for you. WIRED Recommends: Father's Day Gifts.

White House spokesman Judd Deere, responding to the letter on Friday, said the California Air Resource Board “failed to put forward a productive alternative, and we are moving forward to finalize a rule with the goal of promoting safer, cleaner, and more affordable vehicles.”.

“The NY Privacy Act, in its current form, is unworkable for businesses that want to comply and fails to provide New York residents meaningful control over how their data is collected, used, and protected,” said John Olsen, a director for the Internet Association, which represents the likes of Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft.

The California Assembly passed legislation on Wednesday that could have a profound effect on hundreds of thousands of workers by requiring companies like Uber , Postmates, Amazon Flex, and others to recognize much of their workforce as employees entitled to labor protections and benefits.

Working with scientists at the Schatz Energy Research Center at nearby Humboldt State University, and the local utility PG&E, the Rancheria developed its own solar-powered microgrid, allowing it to disconnect from the main grid and run off Tesla battery power.

To operate in Los Angeles, a city whose placid weather and flat-ish streets make an appealing market for scooter and bike companies, the firms had to agree to share data with LA’s Department of Transportation through MDS.

When I asked Caltech geologist Brian Wernicke, a giant in the field of global geophysics, if it was possible that Faulds was paying too much attention to the Walker Lane, he replied, quickly and without irony: “Well, it's the most interesting place in the world.” In terms of understanding how continents deform and how seismic hazards relate to plate tectonics, he added, “it's an unparalleled natural laboratory.”.

This is also why Peloton doesn’t platoon in the rain right now, or in the snow: The company can’t yet gauge exactly how tires deteriorate over time, which means it can’t quite predict how they’ll react in a hard-braking situation.

The internal documents show that through its Vigilant Solutions contract, which began in 2018 and runs to September 2020, ICE has access not only to five billion records gathered by private businesses, but also to 1.5 billion data points contributed by over 80 local law enforcement agencies from more than a dozen states.

Digging Into Self-Driving Data and More Car News This Week This week, the California DMV released the disengagement reports every self-driving developer testing in state must file to the DMV.

Most of those multiday deluges are the product of atmospheric rivers, high-altitude streams of air that originate near the equator and are packed with water vapor.