President Trump has so far restrained himself from trying to meddle with the Federal Reserve on matters related to monetary policy during his second term. But some of the more than 50 executive orders he has signed since returning to the White House are leaving an imprint on the central bank. The latest evidence is…
Twenty-two states, led by West Virginia, are suing to block a recently approved New York law that requires fossil fuel companies to pay billions of dollars a year for contributing to climate change. Under the law, called the Climate Change Superfund Act, the country’s biggest producers of greenhouse gas emissions between the years 2000 and…
When Andreas Fichtner unspooled a fiber-optic cable into a deep hole in Greenland’s ice, he wasn’t expecting to discover a whole new way that glaciers move. Even when the cable started sending back data, his first reaction was skeptical. “Rubbish,” Dr. Fichtner, a professor of seismology and wave physics at the Swiss university ETH Zurich,…
In the United States at least, coal is a terminal case. While it once dominated the nation’s power grid, hundreds of units have shuttered over the last two decades and have been largely replaced by natural gas and renewables like solar and wind. More than half of the remaining coal units in the United States…
Good Chablis is the most distinctive chardonnay wine in the world. I’ve long been convinced of this, and a wine I drank on a recent visit to Chablis reaffirmed my conviction. It was a 2015 Montée de Tonnerre from William Fèvre, one of Chablis’s best producers. The wine was saline and stony, like drinking liquid…
At a time when the documentary film business is atrophying, one of the world’s leading documentarians, Alex Gibney, has taken on a powerful partner: Wendy Schmidt, a billionaire philanthropist by way of Google. “We’ve been managing to make films on important social issues for a long time, but finding and getting those stories to audiences…
Even as much of the United States shivered under frigid conditions last month, the planet as a whole had its warmest January on record, scientists said on Thursday. The warmth came as something of a surprise to climate researchers. It occurred during La Niña conditions in the Pacific Ocean, which tend to lower the globe’s…
President Trump has nominated Neil Jacobs to once again lead the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, one of the country’s premier centers for climate science and the target of proposals for deep cuts by Republican groups. Dr. Jacobs was the acting head of NOAA in the first Trump administration when Mr. Trump claimed in the…
President Trump’s trade war has begun, with tariffs against all Chinese imports going into effect today. Levies against Mexican and Canadian imports were paused at the last minute, for 30 days, after Trump said both countries had offered concessions to his demands, though how significant these were is unclear. But the threat of steep tariffs…
The Environmental Protection Agency plans to demote career employees who oversee scientific research, the enforcement of pollution laws, hazardous waste cleanup and the agency’s human resources department and replace them with political appointees, according to two people familiar with the approach. The move would give Trump administration loyalists more influence over aspects of the agency…
