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Staff currently working from home because of the pandemic will be asked to do so until spring 2021.

A surge in demand from online shoppers means the company is looking for 33,000 temporary workers.

How tax avoidance left one man struggling with debt and with secrets.

image copyrightReutersCan we trust the silver bullet of technology to fix climate change? The prime minister seems to think so.In a speech due soon, he is expected to pledge his faith in offshore wind power, solar, carbon capture, hydrogen, clean cars, and zero-emission aviation. Clean technologies are clearly a huge part of any solution.But the PM is being accused of techno-optimism bias, because he does not mention other key factors in reducing emissions.In fact, experts say, tackling climate change will need action right across society and the economy – with a host of new incentives, laws, rules, bans, appliance standards, taxes and institutional innovations.Wind farms could power every home by 2030 – PM Covid crisis does little to slow climate changeThe week Boris Johnson turned green, or did he?They also warn that citizens’ behaviour must shift, with people probably driving and flying less, and eating less meat and dairy produce.In other words, when it comes to cutting carbon emissions, there’s no silver bullet – it’s more like silver buckshot.But Boris Johnson still seems to have a bandolero stuffed with technologies resembling silver bullets. Let’s see whether they’ll go with a bang.Clean carsTake cars. The prime minister is due to accelerate the transition towards battery- and hydrogen-powered vehicles.But Professor Jillian Anable from Leeds University warns that even electric cars pose “their own problems that politicians seem reluctant to acknowledge.”“Producing electricity and hydrogen requires huge numbers of wind farms or the like, and the cars themselves need resource-hungry tyres, and batteries.Increase car taxes to help climate, advisers say”They also need roads and parking spaces that could otherwise be used for gardens and trees that soak up carbon dioxide,” she said.“The harsh reality is that we have to find ways to limit the number of cars and the amount that we drive them” HydrogenThere is widespread agreement that hydrogen will play a role in reducing climate change – but how much, and in what industrial sectors, is another matter.A key question is whether it’s sourced from natural gas – which is expensive and, depending on the process used, can yield troublesome carbon dioxide as a by-product – or by using surplus wind energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. The latter process does the job cleanly but at still greater cost.Jess Ralston, from the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit think tank, said: “Hydrogen can power cars, but electricity seems to have won that technology race. It could heat homes, but electric heat pumps are emerging as a better bet. “Hydrogen could be really useful, though, in industries such as steelmaking and in heavy transport – including buses that we’re already seeing. But it’s no silver bullet.”AviationOn aviation, the prime minister has launched his ambition to devise clean planes. He calls the project “jet zero”.Industry figures appreciate his boosterish support, but critics warn “jet zero” mustn’t divert attention from the short-term need for rules and taxes to hold down aviation emissions after Covid.British Airways owner cuts flight numbers againAlmost 900 airport job cuts blamed on Covid-19Cait Hewitt from the Aviation Environment Federation told us: “No zero-carbon technology options are currently available for commercial aviation. She explains: “Planes use masses of energy. Batteries aren’t powerful enough except for tiny planes, and we can only produce biofuels sustainably in small quantities. “We need a major rollout of radical new technologies, and we need the capacity to remove remaining aircraft emissions from the atmosphere.But she says that “given how far we are from delivering these things, we’ll also probably need to fly less.” NuclearUK governments have agonised for decades about nuclear energy, but Boris Johnson recently gave it the nod. That means he’s likely to either agree a financial package for a new station at Sizewell or for small modular reactors, or both. image copyrightReutersBut nuclear is still a divisive issue. While it “could definitely help to reduce emissions,” said Professor Jim Watson, from UCL, “it’s very expensive.”“To play a major role, the cost of new nuclear plants will really need to fall, especially when the costs of other technologies like wind and solar have dropped so far. “And nuclear developers will need to show that they can build their plants more quickly because we need all electricity to be low carbon within the next 10 years.” He agreed that mini reactors might bring down costs – but said it was far too soon to be certain.Capturing carbonThe prime minister has professed himself “an evangelist” for the technology that captures carbon dioxide as it is emitted from factories and power stations and either stores it in underground rocks or uses it for new chemicals.Two decades ago it was touted as a climate saviour, but it’s very expensive and has never taken off. The main climate authority, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), says the technology must be used to capture the emissions from trees being burned for energy.CO2 plant ‘worth 22,000 cars off the road’Turning carbon dioxide into cashThis way, the plants suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and the emissions are buried – helping to turn climate change into reverse. It’s known as Bio Energy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS).But the IPCC’s Professor Jim Skea says there are “potential problems.”He explained: “If the trees are grown on land that would otherwise be used for producing food then there are problems with food security. And if we plant acres and acres of land with the same type of tree there are implications for wildlife.”Silver buckshot?So much for silver bullets. But what about the silver buckshot I mentioned earlier?Well, a long list of policies requires government attention, including: standards for new homes; green recovery; food production; planning rules; peat; heat and buildings; meat eating; infrastructure statement; road building; carbon dioxide in soil; medium-term emissions targets; tree planting; energy storage; industrial strategy; appliance standards; and the comprehensive spending review.I’ll examine some of the non-technology innovations for tackling climate change in a future article.Follow Roger on Twitter @rharrabin

Mr Lee helped to grow his father’s small trading business into a global industrial powerhouse.

Freight industry body warns the lack of an agreement on tariffs could make things more expensive.

One of the world’s oldest motorbike brands is expanding in Asia, the biggest market for two-wheelers.

The latest changes for Covid job support are not enough for some stuck in England’s tier system.

image copyrightUniversity of ChicagoWhen the Uber he’d hired went to the wrong destination, one professor took his complaint to the very top – and then learned something valuable about the science of apologising.In January 2017, John List was due to give a keynote speech at a prestigious gathering of economists. He picked up his phone and, using the Uber app, booked a cab to take him the 30-minute journey from his home. He looked up briefly, as the car sped along Lake Shore Drive, on the banks of Lake Michigan, and took in the view of the approaching city, with its fabulous skyline of skyscrapers. Then he settled back down to work on his talk.About 20 minutes later he looked up again. Surely he must be nearly there now? “Oh no!!” he screamed. He was back where he’d begun. Something had gone wrong with the Uber app, which had instructed the driver to return to the professor’s home. She had not wanted to disturb him, as he was so engrossed in his work.List was understandably furious. But what made him more so, was that Uber never sent him an apology. Not everyone who has a complaint to make with Uber has access to its chief executive, but John List did, and so he rang Travis Kalanick that evening. (This was not long before Kalanick was forced to step down, following allegations of sexual harassment.)After List had related the tale, and let off a bit of steam, Kalanick spoke. “What I want to know,” he said, “is how Uber should apologise when this sort of cock-up occurs. What’s the best way to keep Uber customers loyal, even when they’ve had a miserable experience?”How to apologise is a question which every company is interested to know the answer. And John List was in a unique position to find out.Not many people with John List’s background become leading academics. He grew up in a working class family in Sun Prairie, north-east of the Wisconsin capital Madison. His Dad was a lorry driver and expected his son to enter the family business. John had other ideas. His dream was to become a professional golfer and he won a golf scholarship to college. There he discovered two things: first, he wasn’t as good at golf as he had once thought, and second, he was fascinated by economics.He’s now on the economics faculty at one of America’s top universities, the University of Chicago. But for a few years he’s also been moonlighting, because Uber approached him to be their chief economist, and after he moved on from Uber, he joined another car-riding app, Lyft, where he holds the same position.image copyrightReutersNo doubt the job is generously remunerated, but for John List it has another appeal; for data geeks, car apps are like gold mines – in the US alone, before the pandemic, there were two million Uber drivers, making tens of millions of trips each week. John List has spent his career studying economic behaviour in the real world, so working with Uber “was a dream come true”. With this cornucopia of information, he could analyse all sorts of consumer preferences: what kinds of cars people like, how far they typically travelled, and at what times, how they responded to a change in the price of fares. He could also learn the best way to apologise.His first step was to look at what happened to Uber users after they had had a bad ride – one that had taken much longer than the app had initially predicted. The app might predict, for example, that a journey would take nine minutes, and it would end up taking 23 minutes. By crunching the numbers, he and his collaborators discovered that riders who’d experienced such a bad ride would spend up to 10% less on Uber in the future. That represented a significant loss of earnings for the car app.The next move was to come up with a variety of apologies, and to randomly try them out on those who’d experienced a bad trip.Find out moreListen to John List in Ubernomics, an episode of The Big Idea, on the BBC World ServiceClick here for transmission times, or to listen onlineDownload the podcastIt turns out there’s a sort of science of sorry. Social scientists – and psychologists in particular – have studied what kinds of apologies work. But John List had a big advantage; he could actually measure the impact.He calls one type of sorry, the “basic apology” – “We note that your trip took longer than we predicted and we sincerely apologise.” A more sophisticated apology involves an admission that the company messed up. Another type of apology involves a commitment – “We will try to ensure that this will not happen again.” On Uber’s behalf, John List tried them all. What’s more, with some of these apologies Uber offered a $5 discount off the next trip. In the experiment there was also a group of Uber customers who received no apology at all.How many people does it take to oust a political leader?Choice blindness: Do you know yourself as well as you think?The result was surprising. On their own, apologies in whatever form proved ineffective. But an apology coupled with the $5 coupon kept many people loyal. “So, we end up bringing back millions of dollars by assuaging consumers with an apology and a coupon.”What consumers want, it turns out, is for a company to demonstrate its remorse by taking a material financial hit. But looking deeper into the stats, List realised that even this device ceased to work if there was a second or third bad trip. Indeed, a second or third apology only seemed to alienate customers further.These are invaluable insights for Uber, and for other businesses too.Many economists sit at their desks and make predictions about economic activity based on their models. What makes John List a little unusual for an economist is that he likes to test theories out in the real world. He’s conducted experiments from Tanzania, to New Zealand, China to Bangladesh. The vast digital data sets held by Uber and other car apps have enabled him to identify certain quirks in human behaviour that armchair economists might not have uncovered. For example, when you book an Uber you never know whether you’ll get a male or female driver, so you might expect male and female drivers to earn the same. But in fact, male drivers earn about 7% more per hour than their female counterparts. Shocked by this disparity, List set about trying to find out the reason for it. He uncovered several explanations. One is that women tend to have more childcare responsibilities, so there are fewer female drivers available at lucrative times, such as morning and afternoon rush hour. But by far the most important factor turns out to be speed: Uber-driving men drive on average about 2.5% faster than Uber-driving women, so they give more rides per hour. image copyrightGetty ImagesThat’s not the only gender gap. Because he thought it would make Uber drivers happier, List persuaded the Uber board to add a tipping function – bringing Uber in line with other car apps. He then studied tipping behaviour. For every $4 women give as a tip, it transpired, men give around $5. What’s more, women drivers receive more tips than male drivers – except when those women drivers are 65 years old or older. I think we can take this as further evidence of male shallowness.The study of economic behaviour through car app data has been called Ubernomics – though John List’s box of data toys is now delivered to him by Lyft, not Uber – and he continues to produce a stream of fascinating results. Analysing the behaviour of Lyft users, he’s recently computed the power of what he calls “left-digit bias”. Cutting the price of a journey from $15 to $14.99 has roughly the same impact on consumer demand as reducing it from $15.99 to $15. Some of the discoveries in Ubernomics are unsurprising. Consumers care about price: the lower the cost, the more likely we are to book a cab. But the analysis of how we use car apps is also revealing some of the biases and idiosyncrasies of human economic behaviour.By the way, if you ever decide to become an Uber driver, and think that being nice to the customer will have a significant impact on your income, there is some bad news. I’m afraid it won’t. Even when customers rate one driver 10% higher than another for niceness, John List says, they both receive the same tip.You may also be interested in:image copyrightGetty ImagesWe are not used to the idea of machines making ethical decisions, but the day when they will routinely do this – by themselves – is fast approaching. So how, asks the BBC’s David Edmonds, will we teach them to do the right thing?Can we teach robots ethics?

image copyrightPavel YuryevWith the first Strictly Come Dancing live show on UK screens later, Nell Mackenzie looks at how professional ballroom dancers and coaches around the world are continuing to cope with the impact of pandemic restrictions.When Covid-19 closed the ballroom dance studio where Madis Abel and Aleksandra Galkina practised, it was their first break in eight years.Mr Abel could finally recover from the hip injury he had sustained months earlier. “Usually, I just have to keep going and going,” says the Estonian.He and his Russian partner are highly ranked in the world of international standard ballroom dancing. This includes the waltz, tango, foxtrot, Viennese waltz and quickstep categories.In a normal year, their 12-hour weekdays at their base in the Estonian capital of Tallinn would see them first practise for three hours, and then spend the rest of their time teaching other dancers. On weekends they would travel to competitions across Europe and around the world.image copyrightGetty ImagesWhen lockdowns darkened dance floors back in the spring, the couple separated temporarily, and Ms Galkina flew home to Russia.But Mr Abel says they definitely were not “just chilling”. Instead they moved their lessons online, teaching students via video calls.And after his hip recovered, both logged many hours in the gym. “I like to kill my body with exercise,” he says.How do you film Strictly 2020 during a pandemic?Last month they attended a local competition in Estonia, their first since February. “It felt so good to be back,” says Ms Galkina. “Without the competitive life, it’s not the same.”New Economy is a new series exploring how businesses, trade, economies and working life are changing fast.New York-based Edward Simon is a former American smooth champion – which shares the same dances as traditional ballroom, but also allows additional spins and jazz moves.Before the arrival of Covid-19 he judged and coached at competitions around the world, and the bulk of his revenues came from coaching and choreography sessions people would schedule with him at these events.High-level coaches like Mr Simon can earn as much as £400,000 a year. This is more than top professional dancers, who earn in excess of £100,000.When Mr Simon’s travelling schedule was cancelled, he pivoted his attention to develop a business that he co-owns, Dance Teachers Network, online. This offers classes to both dancers and instructors.image copyrightTatiana Keegan”My job right now is to help these teachers on their path,” says Mr Simon. “It’s the most important thing I need to do for the industry right now.”He says that he has turned a growing number of instructors on to Zoom, and that it has been transformative for many. One particularly reluctant instructor is said to have won back 70% of his students.Mr Simon adds that another teacher told him how, during a lesson, when he reached up to adjust his video camera with two hands, his student said, “Oh you are giving me a hug, that means so much to me right now.”However, unlike his face-to-face lessons, Mr Simon is currently still offering his online sessions for free.Two other ballroom dancing coaches who have moved online since the start of the pandemic are Slawek Sochacki and Marzena Stachura. Yet even before this, the impact of Covid-19 meant they had to relocate to the other side of the world.image copyrightMary TweedleThe four-time, undefeated American smooth champions had to go back to their native Poland, temporarily, after 18 years in the US. This was after the landlord of their dance studio near Los Angeles demanded they continue paying the $9,000 (£7,000) monthly rent, even when they were required to close.Ms Stachura says they found a welcome, paying client base in Poland. “People said, ‘Wait a minute, we were already asking you guys to come back like three years ago, to come teach us.'”The dance partners charge $130 for a one-on-one 45-minute online session, dropping to $20 per person for group calls.Back in the US, New York-based coach Tatiana Keegan has started to offer daily Latin dancing exercise classes via live streams on Facebook. The lessons are free, but participants can choose to make a donation.Ms Keegan, who is also the current US Latin dance champion for couples over 35, adds: “I wanted to give a sense of belonging… and to make my students understand they can stay in dancing shape from their living room.”image copyrightRyan KennerShe has now taught more than 90 hour-long online classes, gaining students from countries such as Turkey, India, Spain and Italy.The lessons are for her too, she says, as they keep her in shape for her own competitive dancing. “I’m gonna keep going,” she says. “If I don’t dance, I’ll die.”Also in the US, Michelle Hudson took her annual dance competition, Heart of America Dancesport Championships, online.image copyrightMatthew HodgemanThis year’s event, in August, saw more than 2,000 entries. Entry for professionals was free and for amateurs there was a $75 registration fee, plus $25-$65 for dancing fees.Instead of travelling to the usual host city of Kansas City, Missouri, entrants slapped on sequins and make-up, and either went to their local dance studio or set up makeshift ballrooms at home. One couple even performed in a park, and some younger dancers who normally would not have been able to afford to travel to the event, were able to compete remotely against more established pairs.image copyrightShane MeuwissenAnd because the event was live streamed for free, the competition reached a new audience.”I had dancers tell me that their parents had never seen them dance before,” says Ms Hudson. “And some of their family members are elderly and have been quarantined. They haven’t seen them in months, but they got to watch them dance.”For professional dancers who have seen competitions suspended, Mr Simon thinks this pause could actually ultimately be to their benefit.”As a coach, sometimes it’s hard to say, ‘Take a breath,'” he says. “Let’s really focus on something rather than do, do, do.”How do you change something? How do you get to the next level? And that’s hard to do in regular time. So this time period allows that to happen.”Back in Estonia, Mr Abel and Ms Galkina say they will keep practising ahead of the world returning to normal. “We will keep improving, and trying to get something new into our dancing, so that when we finally get out of this lockdown we can absolutely blow everyone off their feet,” says Mr Abel.