Here’s what you need to know today

• President-elect Trump, his son Don Jr. and Texas Senator Ted Cruz were the special guests of Elon Musk at SpaceX’s sixth test launch of the Starship rocket. Unlike the fifth test, the launch-tower arms were not able to catch the rocket booster and it instead landed in the Gulf of Mexico. (ABC News)
  
  

• The war in Ukraine continues to escalate. The US has given Ukraine authorisation to use US-made long-range missiles inside Russian territory, which Ukraine acted on this week - a first after more than 1,000 days of war. At the same time Putin has escalated his rhetoric and lowered Russia’s threshold for using nuclear weapons. (NY Times)
  
  

• The Murdoch family face a growing shareholder revolt over their dual-share class structure at News Corp. Under the structure, the Murdoch family own 14% of the shares but enjoy 40% of the votes. Activist investors Starboard Value have been trying to rally shareholders to support a change. This week, Starboard picked up another ally as Australian super giant Hesta voted to end the dual-class structure. (Capital Brief)
  
  

• ASX-listed packaging company Amcor will acquire American maker of plastic packaging Berry Global. The combined packaging giant will make US$24 billion in revenue. (Capital Brief)
  
  

• More signs the American consumer is holding up okay. Retail giant Walmart reported third-quarter revenue of $169.6 billion, up 5.5% year-on-year. Walmart shares are up more than 60% this year - wild. (Wall Street Journal)
  
  

• Super Micro Computer is back. After facing its auditor resigning and Nasdaq threatening to delist it, the company has appointed a new auditor, BDO, and submitted a compliance plan to Nasdaq. Shares were up more than 30% as fears of a delisting subsided. (Reuters)
  
  

• Chinese phone maker Huawei has acknowledged it is feeling the pinch of US trade restrictions. Their latest chips are being made with a 7-nanometer process that is 3 generations behind the cutting edge process of TSMC, who expects to start production of 2-nanometer chips in 2025. (Quartz)

What the…?

NASA may have killed life on Mars? That is the argument German astrobiologist Dirk Schulze-Makuch has made in the journal Nature Astronomy.

He argues that NASA’s Viking landers may have applied too much water to the Martian surface, in the process killing life that had adapted to a planet that once had water (4 billion years ago Mars had abundant water like Earth) but had since dried out. (Nature Astronomy | Quartz)

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No-shows and early exits make climate talks a sideshow

The UN’s annual climate conference has been overshadowed this year. Scheduled for the same week as the G20, the leaders of the world’s largest economies were in Brazil rather than Baku this week. But the problem at the heart of the world’s efforts to stop climate change appear to go deeper than a scheduling mistake.

At the heart of the negotiations in Baku, Azerbaijan is how much richer countries should give poorer companies to help fight and adapt to climate change. Going into the conference US$1 trillion was the ask. A week and a half into the two week conference and that doesn’t appear likely.

It is fast emerging that the COP process may no longer be fit for purpose. Last year, China overtook the European Union in terms of total emissions yet is resisting calls by delegates to share the financial load of decarbonisation. It highlights that these international agreements still require the world’s largest powers to put their shoulder to the wheel and work to get a deal done. Take the Paris Climate Conference in 2016. There is no doubt that a key reason the world got to a deal was Obama’s desire to reach a climate deal in his final year in office.

The next couple of days will be instructive as COP29 draws to a close. Biden’s time in office is drawing to a close and the world’s leaders are preparing for a climate-skeptic Trump to take the reins. COP29 will be the world’s best chance to reach a meaningful climate deal in the next few years. But it will require a level of commitment from the world’s powers that has been absent for the past week-and-a-half.

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