Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

On Thursday, General Motors Chairwoman and CEO Mary Barra announced a new climate pledge. The nation’s largest automaker says it will become carbon neutral across its global operations by 2040, which it will achieve through “science-based targets.” GM has also now signed a pledge by businesses to try to keep global warming to 1.5˚C. That’s a remarkable change for an automaker that, until very recently, supported the previous administration’s plan to make US market cars less fuel efficient.

Making this happen will require GM to transition its vehicle portfolio to battery electric vehicles, as well as other hydrogen fuel cell EVs. In fact, the company says it has “an aspiration to eliminate tailpipe emissions from new light-duty vehicles by 2035.”

• 

  This Asus-branded version of the DG1 is passively cooled—which should give you a hint where the DG1 sits in terms of raw GPU performance. [credit:
  Intel
  ]

Here at Ars, we’ve been talking about Intel’s eventual run at the desktop graphics market for a while now. This week, Intel announced sales of Intel DG1 graphics cards to OEMs and system integrators, for inclusion in prebuilt systems. So far, two variants of the DG1 have been at least partially announced—an Asus-branded, passively cooled card, and an actively cooled version from an unannounced vendor.

If you’re hoping to score a gray-market DG1 and include it in a home-built system of your own, you’re out of luck. Intel told LegitReviews that DG1 cards will work only on very specific systems, with custom UEFI (BIOS) that supports the card:

The Iris Xe discrete add-in card will be paired with 9th gen (Coffee Lake-S) and 10th gen (Comet Lake-S) Intel® Core desktop processors and Intel(R) B460, H410, B365, and H310C chipset-based motherboards and sold as part of pre-built systems. These motherboards require a special BIOS that supports Intel Iris Xe, so the cards won’t be compatible with other systems.

While this is disappointing news for reviewers like yours truly, it’s probably not anything to get upset about if you’re an enthusiast looking for the next hot gaming GPU. If we assume that May 2020’s leaked DG1 Fire Strike benchmarks are still accurate, it won’t get close to breaking any records yet.

Enlarge / National Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy and Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry answer questions during a press briefing at the White House. (credit: Drew Angerer / Getty Images)

Yesterday, US President Joe Biden signed an executive order entitled Putting the Climate Crisis at the Center of United States Foreign Policy and National Security. The document is sweeping, laying out a climate-focused agenda for the new administration and redirecting nearly every area of government to rethink its operations to bring them in line with that agenda. Targeted areas of government include everything from US diplomacy to the buildings that the government owns.

It’s difficult to overstate how large a difference this represents not only from the Trump administration, which treated climate change as if it didn’t exist, but even the Obama administration, which didn’t even attempt to tackle the climate until partway through its second term. Biden referred to the climate as a crisis during his campaign, and this document indicates his planned policies will actually reflect that language.

Foreign and domestic

Executive orders are limited in what they can do, in that they are limited by what’s allowed under existing laws; they can’t simply create new powers that don’t exist. There’s a considerable flexibility, however, in how existing laws are interpreted or which aspects of administration are emphasized. And this is perhaps truest in the area of diplomacy, where, outside of treaties and sanctions, the government has extensive flexibility in terms of how it manages its relationships with other nations.