Opinion

New York City saw it coming. In May, in the kind of clarifying document that invariably gets noticed when it’s too late, the city mapped out the sort of devastation that Hurricane Ida would bring just a few months later. The message of the New York City Stormwater Resiliency Plan is that, weatherwise, the scale of everything has changed. The ...

From the way some analysts have been talking lately, you’d think that energy markets obeyed some version of the butterfly effect, where flapping wings will determine the formation of tornadoes weeks later. Call it the BlackRock Inc effect: Larry Fink needs only to whisper the words “ESG,” and natural gas and coal markets will explode 21 months into the future. ...

As fuel ran short at UK pumps and “eco-warriors” brought London’s highways to a standstill, Boris Johnson was in the midst of a bravura speech at the Conservative party conference, full of relentless good cheer. Right-wing think tanks, usually supportive of the Tories, disliked the speech for different reasons than the usual Boris-bashers. The Adam Smith Institute called it “economically ...

One way to gauge just how transitory the current supply-chain challenges are is to look at the degree to which companies are spending to add more capacity. The third-quarter industrial earnings season kicks off next week with factory-floor distributor Fastenal Co. The theme will undoubtedly be logistical logjams and parts shortages, which have become materially worse since the last time ...

I have met Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg only once and it did not go well. It was at a dinner in July 2017, in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s presidential election victory, and controversy was raging about Facebook’s political role. I had the temerity to warn him that he increasingly resembled a cross between John D Rockefeller and William ...

Stuart Woolf, a large almond and tomato producer, recently bulldozed 400 acres of almond orchards in central California — about 50,000 trees that under normal conditions would have produced $2.5 million of nuts every year for another decade. It’s a fraction of the 25,000 acres his family farms, but razing the land was a necessary triage — “Like cutting off ...

There’s plenty of symbolism to Russian editor Dmitry Muratov’s (shared) Nobel Peace Prize. The media outlet he edits, Novaya Gazeta, started, in a way, with another Nobel — Mikhail Gorbachev’s: He spent part of his 1990 Peace Prize to buy computers for the Novaya start-up in 1993. The award also comes almost exactly 15 years after Novaya journalist Anna Politkovskaya ...

International travel is finally starting to recover from the Covid-19 slump. As of August, demand for cross-border flights was still down about 69% relative to 2019 levels, according to the International Air Transport Association. But that marked a notable improvement from the prior month — the sixth straight, in fact. That’s despite a wave of Covid-19 linked to the Delta ...

For a week that ended with a crowd-pleasing speech from the Conservative Party leader but little new policy substance, there was one notable exception. UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government seems to have done a U-turn on its controversial “once in a generation” reforms to Britain’s house-building plan announced in August 2020. Whatever comes from the policy rethink will have ...

Barely a week goes by without a UK electricity and gas supplier being toppled by soaring commodity prices. Millions of British customers face an unsettling wait to learn if their power provider will survive, who’ll take over their contract, and whether their energy bills will increase. Britain’s energy regulator Ofgem — the Office of Gas and Electricity Management — has ...