How many jobs are vulnerable to automation? Plenty of people ask that question, and plenty of people try to give numerical answers. A recent study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) said that about 46 percent of jobs have a better-than-even chance of being automated. A 2016 study by Citigroup Inc. and the University of Oxford reported that ...

What’s so scary about climate change? The term is not scary — at last not in a visceral, skin-crawling sense. Scientists have shown that the likely 2 degrees of global warming to come this century will be extremely dangerous, but, you know, “2 degrees” is hardly a phrase from nightmares and horror films. How about “rat explosion”? As the climate ...

Exxon Mobil Corp. needed a good quarter, and it got a good quarter. It beat the consensus earnings estimate in the third quarter, having missed in the previous three. Sure, the margin of victory owed a bit to disposals and favorable tax treatment, but there were big underlying gains in both the upstream and downstream businesses. In particular, Exxon notched ...