We need to be good stewards of our planet. But that doesnt mean I need to do away with my gas vehicle and drive an electric vehicle with a battery from China, said Kristina Karamo, the chair of the Republican Party in Michigan, on September 22nd. Americas Democrats, she warned, a...

FOR DECADES Americans have been moving to beautiful places that are vulnerable to extreme weather. Florida, once a swampy frontier, is now Americas third-most populous state. It is also the state most often hit by hurricanes. By 2015, the Atlantic and Gulf coasts boasted more tha...

The latest analysis from the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, a German think-tank that tracks international backing for Ukraine, finds that donors pledged some 237.9bn ($256bn) of support between January 24th 2022, one month before the war began, and July 31st 2023. For much...

To read more of The Economists data journalism visit our Graphic detail page. UKRAINES COUNTER-OFFENSIVE, which began in earnest on June 4th, has not lived up to the heightened expectations it inspired. It is happening probably slower than how some people may want or can see it, ...

AS THE WEST debates diplomatic and military means to end the war in Ukraine, it cannot ignore the lessons of its own past mistakes. Some of the most serious date back to Russias war on Georgia in 2008, when, as the invaded countrys head of state, I was in a situation similar to t...

The first songs branded country were recorded in Atlanta and sold in 1923. In the century since, Americans have danced and sung to country music with gusto, often sporting stetsons and boots. But today the genre is breaking new records. In August three country songs claimed the t...

MORE THAN half the worlds population lives in cities. In rich countries the share is four-fifths. Contrary to some predictions, remote working has so far done little to interrupt the advance of urbanisation. The rise of cities is nothing to lament: productivity is higher in urban...

IN EARLY JUNE exploratory anchovy fishing off the coast of Peru brought in nets full of juveniles. The government promptly cancelled the first fishing season of the year in order to allow the population to recover. This was a big deal. Perus anchovy fishery is the largest in the ...

Every year on September 1st, Japans ministers trek by foot to the prime ministers office to take part in a crisis simulation. Across the country, local officials and schoolchildren drill for disasters. The date marks the Great Kanto earthquake, a 7.9-magnitude tremor that struck ...

Mountains of Fire: The Secret Lives of Volcanoes. By Clive Oppenheimer. University of Chicago Press; 352 pages; $27.50. Hodder & Stoughton; 20 MOUNT EREBUSnamed after one of the primordial beings in Greek mythology, son of Chaos, personification of darknessis the southernmost act...

PEOPLE SEEK strength and solace in their tribe, their faith or their nation. And you can see why. If they feel empathy for their fellow citizens, they are more likely to pull together for the common good. In the 19th and 20th centuries love of country spurred people to seek their...

Extreme weather is constantly in the news, but a new factor is just getting warmed up: El Nino. This Pacific Ocean phenomenon can have devastating effects in some parts of the world while benefiting others; it is linked to droughts as well as floods; and this years looks like it ...

ABOUT A DECADE ago, this correspondent attended a banquet in Guangzhou. The birds nest soup was gentle and slithery, the sea cucumber rich and gelatinous and the fish sparklingly fresh and perfectly steamed. The most memorable dish, however, was the plain white cup of broth serve...

Homeownership regularly nears the top of surveys about what Americans most want in life. Alas, this part of the American dream has rarely been harder to attain. Those looking to enter the property market face a triple whammy of high prices, costly mortgages and limited choice. To...

Three months into the counteroffensive, the military is reaping the fruits of several months of drone development. But as the war continues, will it be able to scale up its capacity and outpace Russia? New international laws cracking down on Caribbean tax havens seem to be workin...

When she was only 14, Catherine Charlwood noticed a swelling in her right forearm. It was accompanied by a heavy muscular ache that made daily activities difficult. As a talented clarinettist at a British school where regular practice was on the timetable, the pain was deeply wor...

AT THEIR ANNUAL gathering in Jackson Hole last week the worlds central bankers talked, among other things, about the threat of deglobalisation. Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank (ECB), noted that the governments of Western countries are increasingly adopti...

Interrogating a fairy tale is not usually the best use of an investors time. But there may be an exception. The internal logic of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, and the idea that the economy can be just right for financial markets, merits some inspection. Earlier this year, the ...

America is the piggy-bank of the pharma world, gripes David Mitchell of Patients for Affordable Drugs, a consumer lobbying group. There is some truth to this. America is the worlds largest pharmaceutical market, with $630bn in sales in 2022, or 42% of the worldwide total. Its con...

Editors note: On September 5th Birmingham City Council, which oversees Europes largest local authority, also issued a 114 notice, in effect declaring itself to be bankrupt. WHICH OF the following do you value the most? asked a survey that Woking council sent to its residents in J...

From offices in Americas State Department and Russias Ministry of Defence, officials take turns pinging each other every couple of hours just to check the line is working. Then, almost always, silence follows. It is the dying heartbeat of global nuclear arms control. Until March ...

THE MEDIA are full of stories of how firms from Amazon to Zoom are dragging their employees back into the office. So is working from home (WFH) over? Was this simply a pandemic-era remote-work boom extended by tight labour markets? No. I believe that, having stabilised, WFH will ...

Frode Berg was a border inspector on the brink of retirement when, in 2014, he was first recruited by the Norwegian Intelligence Service (NIS). Berg was based in Kirkenes, a town of 3,500 nestled amid the pine forests and rocky fjords in the north of Norway, five miles from the R...

To read more of The Economists data journalism visit our Graphic detail page. TO TASTE THE effects of inflation in India, visit a fast-food restaurant. Sandwiches at Subway no longer come with a free cheese slice. Burgers at McDonalds and Burger King are tomato-free. Restaurants ...

WHAT I ENVY you is your liberty, says Count Valentin de Bellegarde to Christopher Newman, the protagonist of Henry Jamess novel The American. Rich, self-made and free of class prejudice, Newman moves to Paris for fun, only to be sucked into the intrigues of the French aristocracy...

Read more of our recent coverage of the Ukraine war Update: On August 30th Ukraine launched what appeared to be its most extensive drone assault on Russian territory yet, with attacks on six regions. In the western city of Pskov drones reportedly hit an airport, damaging four tra...

As bullets fly around a high-speed train carrying a former Miss World and a gang of spies through the Italian Alps, shopping is surely the last thing on viewers minds. Yet should they press pause, they will see an option to buy items from the show: the heroines gold necklace, her...

THE GATES of North Korea, closed since January 2020 ostensibly to keep covid-19 out, are finally creaking open. On August 27th North Korean state media announced that citizens who had been locked out of the country during the pandemic were starting to return home. Some North Kore...

Arrived in Bologna, Italy, today, now its off to Tuscany. The heatwave is spectacular here. If things continue like this, these holiday destinations will have no future in the long term. Climate change is destroying southern Europe. An era comes to an end. This tweet in early Jul...

AFTER YEARS of praying for more rain, Californians unexpectedly found themselves wishing for less this week, when tropical storm Hilary blew in from Mexico on August 21st. Rainfall records were smashed in Los Angeles and San Diego. Death Valley, farther inland, was deluged with a...

When Narendra Modi visited Washington in June, Indian cable news channels spent days discussing their countrys foreign-policy priorities and influence. This represents a significant change. The most popular shows, which consist of a studio host and supporters of the Hindu-nationa...

DETERRENCE CLEARLY failed in Ukraine. In the run-up to Russias invasion in February 2022, America and its NATO allies took steps to warn Russia of dire consequences, including deep sanctions and political excommunication. None of that mattered to Vladimir Putin. Some argue that N...

Update: On August 19th Russias space agency, Roscosmos, lost contact with Luna 25 after an orbital manoeuvre. In a statement on August 20th it announced that a deviation between the actual and calculated parameters of the propulsion manoeuvre led the Luna 25 spacecraft to enter a...

Households across China have been thrown into panic over the past week. The company building their flats, Country Garden, missed $22.5m in coupon payments on August 6th. Now the firm, one of the worlds largest homebuilders, has until early September to make the payments or follow...

The human body is a marvellous thing. But like anything built by evolution, it has plenty of flaws. Consider teeth. Whereas sharks grow new teeth throughout their lives, adult humans get one set, which must last 60 years or more. That is tricky. A combination of poverty, sugar-ri...

What you notice first is how silent it is, says Kimmo Koski, the boss of the Finnish IT Centre for Science. Dr Koski is describing LUMIFinnish for snowthe most powerful supercomputer in Europe, which sits 250km south of the Arctic Circle in the town of Kajaani in Finland. LUMI, w...

IN JANUARY 2021 a fleet of Chinese fishing vessels approached the coast of Oman, apparently searching for squid. According to the ships automatic identification transponders, they stayed just outside Omans Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), which grants it control of fishing rights u...

For more than 200 years Luddites have received bad pressworse even than the British Members of Parliament who voted in 1812 to put to death convicted machine-breakers. Yet even at the time, the aggrieved weavers won popular sympathy, including that of Lord Byron. In an Ode to Fra...

The sight of tanks rolling through towns as armed drones circle in the sky was supposed to be history. Nine months after a formal end to Ethiopias civil war, many had hoped the country was inching back towards stability. Anxious to turn the page on a conflict that caused hundreds...

A YOUNG WOMAN slides herself gleefully into a fake bathtub filled with giant plastic bubbles. Snack bags of popcorn are handed out inside a room designed to look and sound like the inside of a popcorn machine. Friends snap selfies amid colour-changing lights before heading to the...

Bhubaneswar has lots of greenery, a good bus system, scant signs of rubbish, and inviting public spaces around the ancient temple at its centre. The east Indian city, capital of the state of Odisha, recently acquired broad pavements, orderly parking and modern lighting. Soon it w...

Read more of our recent coverage of the Ukraine crisis On August 14th Russias rouble slipped past the value of 100 to the American dollar, meaning it was worth less than a solitary centand was the cheapest it had been since the immediate aftermath of the invasion of Ukraine. The ...

ON AUGUST 9TH a plume of smoke rose over the Zagorsk manufacturing plant, north of Moscow, which supplies optical equipment to Russias armed forces. An explosion there killed one person, wounded 60, and left eight unaccounted for, according to officials, who downplayed the obviou...

The walls of the hotel lobby in downtown Quito, the capital of Ecuador, were plastered with notices in Mandarin. Leaving for Colombia tomorrow and looking for buddies, WeChat ID below, read one handwritten flyer. A poster advertised an all-inclusive package for crossing the jungl...

CHINA AND India are not on the friendliest of terms. In 2020 their soldiers clashed along their disputed border in the deadliest confrontation between the two since 1967then clashed again in 2021 and 2022. That has made trade between the Asian giants a tense affair. Tense but, es...

ANDREY WAS in prison for murder in Russias Ivanovo region, north-east of Moscow, when army recruiters came by and offered him a good salary and a record wiped clean in exchange for six months service. Two weeks after arriving at the front he stepped on a mine, lost his foot and w...

Not so long ago analysts were openly wondering whether artificial intelligence (AI) would be the death of Adobe, a maker of software for creative types. New tools like DALL-E 2 and Midjourney, which conjure up pictures from text, seemed set to render Adobes image-editing offering...

ASK THE average American what the National Institute of Standards and Technology does, or where the closest Department of Agriculture Service Centre is, and youll probably get a blank stare. But everyone knows what the United States Postal Service (USPS) does and where the neares...

In the Hawaiian language, Lahaina means cruel sun. The north-east trade winds provide the eastern shore of Maui with ample rain and the West Maui mountains with a superfluity of it. But Lahaina, the capital of the Hawaiian kingdom in the 19th century, sits in the mountains rain s...

Decades of Decadence: How Our Spoiled Elites Blew Americas Inheritance of Liberty, Security and Prosperity. By Marco Rubio. Broadside Books; 256 pages; $32 and 20 Regime Change: Towards a Postliberal Future. By Patrick Deneen. Sentinel; 288 pages; $30. Forum; 22 The Capitalist Ma...

To read more of The Economists data journalism visit our Graphic detail page. Latin America is a place of extremes: in its geography (which ranges from idyllic beaches to rainforests to mountain peaks); its weather (the region is prone to natural disasters); and its politics (whi...

Fifteen years ago, in August 2008, the worlds credit-rating agencies were in the midst of the worst period in their history. The global financial crisis was about to reach its zenith. It was already clear that the allegiances of rating agenciesbeholden to both investors in and is...

Your columnist has just had the bittersweet pleasure of driving along Americas Pacific coast, wind blowing through what is left of his hair, in a new Fisker Ocean electric SUV. Sweet, because he was in California modea neat feature that with the touch of a button lowers all windo...

THE FALL of the Berlin Wall in 1989 held out the promise that growing prosperity would foster freedom and tolerance, which in turn would create more prosperity. Unfortunately, that hope disappointed. Our analysis this week, based on the definitive global survey of social attitude...

OVER FIVE centuries Latin America and its 2bn hectares of land have been a vital source of food, fuel and metals for the world. First looted by colonisers for gold, silver, cotton and sugar, it later supplied rubber and oil to Europe and the United States. Now Latin America faces...

ON THE ARID north China plain around Beijing, people usually complain there is too little water, rather than too much. But in recent weeks a typhoon named Doksuri made its way unusually far inland. On July 28th the storm made landfall on Chinas eastern coast. Its remnants arrived...

Hobbies shape a nation. For proof, drive to Bransdale, a grouse-shooting estate on the North York Moors. Providing a home for red grouse, a fast plump bird that is hard to shoot, requires a landscape as artificial as any garden. Controlled burning creates a mix of young and old h...

Rishi Sunak claims to want to promote British science and research. The prime minister rightly says the country has great strengths in areas that range from artificial intelligence to life sciences, though it also faces some obstacles. One of these is its post-Brexit absence from...

THE WORLD today is undergoing great changes, the likes of which we have not seen for 100 years. This observation by Xi Jinping, Chinas president, may exaggerate, but he is surely right that international relations are changing more now than at any time since the second world war....

ON AUGUST 22ND the 15th annual summit of the BRICSa group comprising Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africatakes place in Johannesburg. For the first time one of the blocs leaders will be absent. As host, South Africas president, Cyril Ramaphosa, felt he had a responsibili...

LESS THAN three months ago, Turkeys president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was busily accusing America of conspiring to topple his government, talking up his special relationship with Russia, and threatening to prevent Sweden from entering NATO. Today, after an unexpectedly easy victor...

THE GROUND approaching the salt flats in Chiles Atacama desert is pockmarked with white crystals. Underneath sit vast deposits of lithium salts, the ore for the soft, light metal used to make high-capacity batteries. Pumps run by SQM, a Chilean company that is the worlds leading ...

WHEN IT COMES to tracing the geography of global supply chains, few companies provide a better map than Foxconn, the worlds largest contract manufacturer. This year the Taiwanese giant has built or expanded factories in India, Mexico, Thailand and Vietnam. The Chinese production ...

HONG KONGS authorities would have the world believe that the city, after three years of crippling covid restrictions, is open for business. Their ongoing crackdown on the rights and freedoms that made Hong Kong a global centre for trade and finance tells a different story. In a s...

HARDLY ANYONE predicted a near-draw in Spains elections, and yet the Socialists of Pedro Sanchez, the prime minister, and the opposition centre-right Peoples Party (PP) ended up taking about a third of the vote each on July 23rd. Even with their preferred coalition partners, Vox ...

CULHAM, A VILLAGE near Oxford, in England, is home to just 500 people. It is, though, next door to the nearest thing on Earth to a Silicon Valley of nuclear fusion. What is happening there epitomises the shift of the search for controlled fusion power from governments to private ...

AN EXPLOSION OF anti-government discontent in Hong Kong in 2019 prompted China to impose a draconian national-security law on the territory to prevent further protests. Officials say this has helped: Hong Kong has achieved a major transition from chaos to order, they insist. But ...

Elon Musk is no fan of the Federal Reserve. At least a dozen times over the past year the owner of X (a firm until recently known as Twitter) has savaged Americas central bank for raising interest rates. Last December, for instance, he tweeted that its hikes might go down as the ...

TEN MONTHS ago the spectre of recession haunted corporate America. Inflation was rampant, profits were depressed and the Federal Reserve was tightening the screws. Instead, inflation has moderated, the jobs market remains tight and recession is no longer a certainty. The prospect...

Read more of our recent coverage of the Ukraine war PEOPLE ACROSS a vast stretch of north-eastern Ukraine face a grim new reality. Much of Kharkiv province was occupied last year by the Russians before being liberated in September. Yet few of those who fled have returned. Those w...

RATHER THAN simply making America great again Ron DeSantis, Floridas governor, is bent on making America Florida. That rallying-call should send shivers down any Democrats spine. In a state that used to swing, today Republicans hold supermajorities in both legislative chambers, c...

A stroll down Quantum Boulevard reveals one of the worlds tightest concentrations of bleeding-edge technology firms. Dozens of companies feed a quantum-computing supply chain that did not exist a few years ago. Their wares include some of the most advanced commercialised technolo...

WHEN OVER a quarter of your population rises up in protest, something is seriously amiss. In June some 500 of the 1,900 residents of South Uist, in the Outer Hebrides, demonstrated over their islands wretched ferry service. For much of that month their vital connection to the mai...

CALL IT, AS the Danes do, a luksusproblem, a luxury problem. Many citizens of Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden are fluent in English and often impress tourists with their command of the language. This aptitude has also prompted controversy, however, as univers...

CHINA IS ENDURING a year of frightening weather. Beijing, the capital, just experienced its heaviest downpours in 140 years, shortly after enduring an unusually brutal heatwave. Over a four-day period starting on July 29th, Beijing recorded 744.8mm of rainmore than the city sees ...

WHAT IS AN hour of Rishi Sunaks time worth? Officially, no more than 40 ($51), based on his 167,000 salary and the fact, say colleagues, that he works at least 80 hours each week. But the prime minister evidently values his attention more highly. He has a taste for air travel: a ...

FOR MUCH of June the 23m people in and around Dhaka, Bangladeshs capital, suffered in temperatures of up to 38C. Fans and air-conditioners were of little usethe country experienced power cuts on 114 of the first 150 days of this year. Just 500km to the north, the Himalayan republ...

A YEAR AFTER they were invented, both sides in Ukraine are already fielding thousands of racing drones with improvised warheads. Ukraines defence ministry calls them kamikazes, because the warhead destroys the drone itself. They are also known as First Person View (FPV) drones be...

AMID HIGH tensions with China and the steep cost of confrontation, Western leaders have adopted a buzzword to describe their strategy: de-risking. This involves continuing to roll out tech and investment restrictions on China, but coupling them with high-level summitry and calls ...

ANDREA GIAMBRUNO is a presenter for the TV network founded by the late Silvio Berlusconi. On July 18th, as temperatures in parts of Sicily and Sardinia soared to more than 45C, he began his daily programme thus: The news, if such it be, is that in July it will be hotand in Decemb...

W hen the area near Antarctica covered by sea ice fell to 1.8m km2 (800,000 square miles) on February 19ththe smallest extent since satellite-based data became available in 1978few climatologists were surprised. Such records fall frequently in a warming world, as they did at the ...

ASK A CLIMATE scientist about possible tipping points and you are likely to hear about AMOC. The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation is a stream of water which, as it flows from the southern to the northern (hence meridional) part of the Atlantic, grows cooler and saltier...

One reason dinosaurs are so popular with schoolchildren is that many of them are so extraordinarily big. Tyrannosaurus rex, a meat-eater, was up to 12 metres longabout half the length of a tennis courtand is thought to have weighed up to 7 tonnes. Some of the herbivorous dinosaur...

OVER THE past decade a losing battle against violent jihadists, autocrats and insurgents has been raging across the Sahel, an arid and dirt-poor zone in western Africa. That struggle has reached a crisis point after a military coup on July 26th in Niger. It was the last semi-func...

Hand grenades are designed to be thrown, so they are light. But when they are dropped from drones, this can be a drawback. With a typical weight of just 300 grams, grenades are short on killing power, says a man nicknamed Lyosha, who is an amateur weapons-maker based in Kyiv. Aft...

CHINAS BELLIGERENT turn under Xi Jinping and Russias invasion of Ukraine have had many unforeseen consequences, from a crisis over a spy balloon to reinvigorating NATO. One of the most significant side-effects of the new age of aggressive autocracies has been a push by the West t...

Stockmarkets, the economist Paul Samuelson once quipped, have predicted nine out of the last five recessions. Today they stand accused of crying wolf yet again. Pessimism seized trading floors around the world in 2022, as asset prices plunged, consumers howled and recessions seem...

AT HIS INAUGURATION in 2017 Donald Trump rejected the uplifting vision of America that such ceremonies usually extol. Instead he warned of American carnage, painting a picture of industrial devastation and lives stolen through crime, gangs and drugs. In office Mr Trump hardly man...

THE FUTURE of the VW brand is at stake. When Thomas Schafer, the mass-market marques newish boss, gave a presentation to his management team in early July, he did not sugarcoat its problems. High costs, falling demand, growing competitionthe list goes on. The roof is on fire, he ...

Read the full findings from this years liveability index here. EGYPTS GOVERNMENT worries that its citizens may get trapped in their lifts. Frequent power outages in Cairo, the capital, during the sweltering summer months mean that such miserable confinement is not an unlikely occ...

ONE OF THE few positive legacies of the covid-19 pandemic is the pace and scale of scientific innovation that it triggered. The world received vaccines at record-breaking speed, the result of work based on revolutions in biotechnology, artificial intelligence, gene-editing and co...

Take a map of Europe, locate Paris, and draw a line headed east. How far can you get given a full day and night? With the right mix of trains and lots of patience, it is possible to cross France and Germany, then Austria, Hungary and into Romania. That countrys second-biggest cit...

LAST NOVEMBER something strange happened in Mountain View. A thick fog enveloped the headquarters of Alphabet, the parent company of Google. Not the meteorological sortthis stretch of Silicon Valley is reliably sunny. It was a fog of confusion. Its cause was ChatGPT, an artificia...

RINGED BY VERDANT hills, the harbour of Port Moresby has probably not seen such military buzz since the second world war, when it was bloodily defended by America and Australia against Japanese forces. The JS Izumo, the largest ship in the Japanese navy, visited the capital of Pa...

Read more of our recent coverage of the Ukraine war WE CANT DRAW big conclusions yet, said the senior Ukrainian military officer. Although Ukrainian forces had broken through heavily defended Russian lines on July 26th in the southern Zaporizhia sector (see map) and had since mad...

Under the pen name KAL, Kevin Kallaugher has been drawing for The Economist for 45 years. Here, our cameras capture how his cartoons have become ever more strident in trying to illustrate the global environmental crisis that humanity faces....

ITS HOT. OVER the past month millions of Americans have been sweltering in fierce temperatures. Around a third of the population lives in places where the government has recently issued warnings about extreme heat. How can American cities prepare for an even hotter future? The Ec...

On July 28th the Bank of Japan (boj) took markets by surprise. At the end of a two-day policy meeting Ueda Kazuo, the central banks governor, announced an unexpected change to its increasingly expensive policy of yield-curve control. The boj raised its cap on ten-year government-...

In early 2022 New Yorkers encountered the sight of black trucks driving around Times Square displaying a peculiar billboard. It showed a balding man dressed in a dark business suit, bearing a Dr Evil stare. A columnist for the New York Post wrote, tongue-in-cheek, that it made me...

CHIEF EXECUTIVES have long had to be contortionists, balancing the needs of employees, suppliers and above all shareholders while staying within the limits set by governments. But the twisting and stretching is now more fiendish than ever. The world is becoming dangerous and diso...

MANIAC, a computer designed at Princeton after the second world war, could perform a blistering 10,000 calculations a second. This extraordinary power was applied to two main problems: modelling thermonuclear explosions and the Earths weather. They were the two most consequential...

Power is a fact of corporate life. It also affects behaviour. Research suggests power makes people less likely to take the advice of others, even if those others are experts in their fields. It makes them more likely to gratify their physical needs. In a test conducted by Ana Gui...

Protests have a funny way of kicking off when the mercury soars. The summer of 1967 is best known as the summer of love. It was a time when hippies flocked to Americas west coast to protest war, take drugs and peace out. But it was also a time when more than 150 race riots struck...

To read more of The Economists data journalism visit our Graphic Detail page. THERE HAS been no shortage of alarming stories, with alarming charts, about the climate recently. Extreme weather is hitting several regions at once: from droughts in the Americas to floods in Asia, and...

Matteo DellAcqua has to shout to make himself heard. Engine Room Number Five at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts data centre in Bologna houses a series of motors, each turning a three-tonne flywheel. Should the electricity cut out, the flywheelsand those in ...

People do not always think through the metaphors they use. Though the phrase meteoric rise is common, meteors are better known for falling. Prices are said to spike even when their rise is not accompanied by a descent. And when people talk about waves sweeping Europe, they often ...

Read more of our recent coverage of the Ukraine war RUSSIAS BELEAGUERED president took up his pen this week. In the days before a Russia-Africa summit in St Petersburg on July 27th, Vladimir Putin published an article on the Kremlins website to justify why he has abandoned the gr...

It was never in doubt. In the run-up to the Federal Reserves latest meeting, investors assigned a probability of nearly 99% to the central bank raising interest rates once again. On July 26th policymakers duly fulfilled those expectations, with their 11th increase in 12 meetings,...

IN RECENT WEEKS, extreme heat, floods and storms have smashed records and caused devastation around the world. Freak weather events such as these will become more frequent due to climate changebut they are exceptionally hard to predict. How are meteorologists gearing up to face t...

AS UXBRIDGE GREW in the 1930s, one of its attractions to those moving from central London was abundant space. The suburban town lured commuters with the promise of semi-detached houses and room to park a motor car. George Orwell, who lived in Uxbridge in 1933, thought he had glim...

Despite its renowned special forces and stalwart service in Afghanistan, Canada has long been seen by its allies as something of a laggard when it comes to its defence spending. Many Canadians still recall an excruciating exchange between Donald Trump, then president of the Unite...

Editors note: the IPCCs new chair will be elected at its 59th session in Nairobi on July 25th-28th. Three weeks ago we invited all four candidates for the post to contribute a piece to this section; Dr van Ypersele and Debra Roberts agreed to do so. THIS YEAR marks the 35th anniv...

Editors note: the IPCCs new chair will be elected at its 59th session in Nairobi on July 25th-28th. Three weeks ago we invited all four candidates for the post to contribute a piece to this section; Dr Roberts and Jean-Pascal van Ypersele agreed to do so. REFLECTING ON THE Interg...

FOR THE past week observers of Spains election have focused on the prospect of the hard right entering government, for the first time since the return of democracy in 1978. That, as it turned out, was not the main story. Experts in Spain and elsewhere failed to reckon with Spains...

IN 2019, AS Chinas trade war with America was heating up, the Peoples Daily predicted that the Chinese monopoly on rare earths, minerals crucial to the production of most modern hardware, would become a tool to counter American pressure. Dont say we didnt warn you, the Communist ...

IN THE PAST year, as the startling capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) have emerged into public view, attention has been drawn to the existential risk, or x-risk, that the technology may pose. The concern is that computers endowed with superhuman intelligence might destr...

WHERE IS RESEARCH into artificial intelligence (AI) heading? Is it all beneficial for humanity, or are there risks big enough that we need to make more effort to understand them and develop countermeasures? I believe the latter is true. The human brain is a biological machine, so...

UNLESS THE polls are very wrong, Spains opposition centre-right Peoples Party (PP) will come first in the election on July 23rd, comfortably ahead of the governing Socialists. Vying for third and fourth are Vox (to the PPs right) and Sumar (to the Socialists left). Minnowsmostly ...

BRAZIL WAS once a tiny exporter of maize. Within the past two decades, however, its share of global exports is expected to account for more than 30% this year. Similar success stories are found across Latin America, which is responsible for a growing share of the worlds agricultu...

AMY SCHWABENLENDER has a front-row seat to suffering. From the windows of her office in downtown Phoenix, she can see rows and rows of tents. Their inhabitants keep inside, hiding from the heat that is scorching the desert city. On July 18th Phoenix experienced its 19th straight ...

As covid-19 spread throughout the world three years ago, many pored over the history of a previous pandemic, the Spanish flu of 1918-19, for clues about how the disaster would unfold. Now that the plague has abated, history may also provide a few lessons for the aftermath. As the...

The best thing that has happened in Phoenix, Arizona, since the beginning of July is that the electricity grid has kept functioning. This has meant that during a record-breaking run of daily maximum temperatures above 43C (110F), still in progress as The Economist went to press, ...

BETWEEN JULY 10th and July 16th, more than 100m Americans were warned by their government of potentially deadly temperatures. Swathes of Asia and Europe are broiling. Chinas temperature record was shattered; people sought relief from the heat in bomb shelters. Authorities in Athe...

Estimates of Earths average temperature, having set a new record on July 3rd, have yet to fall back below the previous record, which was set just last year. That a run of very hot days should happen in July is, by itself, perhaps unsurprising. Two-thirds of the Earths land is in ...

Economists are not known for their optimism, but today their good cheer is palpable. Not long ago it seemed that an American recession was inevitable, as the Federal Reserve kept raising interest rates to fight inflation. Other central banks were following suit, their inflation p...

WHEN I TOOK office in 2018, we inherited a country wounded by the previous governments response to the Great Recession. The Spanish economy had gone through a rough recovery, based on an unfair austerity model that left millions behind, particularly young people and low-income wo...

WATER RESERVOIRS in Spain are usually 63% full by mid-July. This year, levels stand at just 46%. In nearly one-in-five French departements, homeowners are banned from filling their swimming pools. After a warm winter and too little rain, the continent is once again running dry. I...

The Heat Will Kill You First. By Jeff Goodell. Little, Brown and Company; 400 pages; $29 and 25 IT May BEGIN with a cracked throat, lips that stay dry no matter how many times they are licked. As the heat overwhelms the body, the head throbs and vision goes blurry, before the wor...

EUROPE, AMERICA and Asia are all enduring scorching heatwaves, air temperatures are repeatedly breaking records and the health impacts are alarming. But is the worst yet to come? Why risky assets are proving more resilient than investors expected despite war, inflation and the th...

Id like to get all the gas emissions off the highways of the world, said John Goodenough, one of the Nobel-prize winning scientists who developed the lithium-ion battery four decades ago, during an interview in 2018. Goodenough died on June 25th before his dream could become real...

The human genome can create cells with a remarkable range of capabilities and shapes. Looked at under the microscope, the enterocytes which line the gut bring to mind the ghosts from a Pac-Man video game. Neurons look like medieval morningstars, but with long hair. But none is mo...

IN THE DAYS since the Wagner Group abandoned its march on Moscow on June 24th, speculation has grown about what will become of Russias notorious paramilitary company and its leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin. Amid reports of President Vladimir Putin poking around Wagners assets and troop...

Read more of our recent coverage of the Ukraine war INITIALLY LIDA POPRUHA, 45, was not sure what to make of claims that Russia was preparing an attack at the nuclear power plant. She knew that her flat in Khortytsky, a district of the city of Zaporizhia, sat inside a potential e...

To understand the impact that artificial intelligence may have on the economy, consider the tractor. Historians disagree about who invented the humble machine. Some say it was Richard Trevithick, a British engineer, in 1812. Others argue that John Froelich, working in South Dakot...

THE NAVSTAR GLOBAL POSITIONING SYSTEM, commonly known as GPS, is familiar to many smartphone users as the technology behind the blue location dot on map apps. But GPS, which is operated by the American space force, was designed for the military. Since its launch in 1978 it has be...

THEY MAKE an intriguing pair of rivals: he in a dark suit and porkpie hat, she in a gingham dress and matching hair bow. His domain is a vast scientific-research facility in New Mexico; hers is a fluorescent-pink party house with a slide. J. Robert Oppenheimer (played by Cillian ...

To read more of The Economists data journalism visit our Graphic Detail page. Asia is home to around 2,300 languages, more than 4.6bn people and myriad cultures and customs. Such diversity is also reflected in its cities. In a ranking of liveability by EIU, our sister company, As...

CHICAGO SUFFERS from an identity crisis. Its many nicknames are proof enough. The Windy City also claims to be The City of Big Shoulders, The City in A Garden, The City by the Lake, The City that Works and the Second City, a self-mocking title that is no longer true, at least in ...

It is by their beginnings that the ages of the Earth are known. Agreeing on the precise point at which each particular syllable of recorded time began is a fundamental, often fractious and frequently long-winded part of geological science. The Cretaceous period, for example, was ...

Placed before you are two urns. Each contains 100 balls. You are given a clear description of the first urns contents, in which there are 50 red balls and 50 black balls. The economist running the experiment is tight-lipped about the second, saying only that there are 100 balls d...

FOR CENTURIES the arrival of the monsoon in India has been a time for rejoicing. The annual rains, which make landfall in the southern state of Kerala in June before spreading across the subcontinent, bring respite from a scorching summer and provide nourishment to parched farmla...

In the maize-producing areas around the city of Chengde, in northern China, the heat arrived early this year. With it came drought, the worst in decades. The needle-shaped leaves on the regions pine trees are turning brown. Worse, much of its maize is now stunted. The central pro...

You have probably heard of the resource curse, when a country is overwhelmed by a windfall from selling commodities. The tiny state of Guyana, on the north-east corner of the Amazon, is about to become one of the most extreme cases of recent times. In 2015, 11bn barrels of proven...

One way to view the history of science is as a repeated puncturing of humanitys claims to be special. In scientific terms Homo sapiens is an oddly hairless species of ape that has existed for 200,000 yearsan eyeblink in Earths 4.5bn-year history. For the past couple of decades, t...

AS THE EFFECTS of climate change are increasingly being felt around the world, the need to transition away from fossil fuels is becoming more urgent. An electrified world requires more batteries, which in turn means the demand for metals, such as nickel, is rising. Mining those m...

JAMIE DIMON is restless. The boss of JPMorgan Chase has just returned from a long July 4th holiday weekend with his large and growing family: his wife, three daughters, a gaggle of grandchildren. He has little patience for the faff that accompanies a filmed interviewthe reason th...

In deep blue waters off the coast of Guyana, gargantuan ships are sucking oil from reservoirs three kilometres below the surface. These machines are transforming the fortunes of one of South Americas smallest and poorest countries. In 2015 ExxonMobil, an American oil giant, found...

DONALD TRUMPS cant about the war in Ukraine drifts over the battlefields, dark as the pall of Russian bombs. I want everybody to stop dying. Theyre dying. Russians and Ukrainians, he declared in May. If re-elected president next year, he would end the war in 24 hours. How? He did...

Leading from the Tchaikovsky Conservatoire to Red Square, Bolshoi Nikitsky Street is lined with crowded brunch spots. Poised young women with immaculate tans sip Prosecco with their Kamchatka crab cakes, checking out the passers-by. Its as if Yevgeny Prigozhins march on Moscow ne...

THE BRITISH economy has been subject to a giant experiment: privatisation on a scale more extensive than in almost any other OECD country. Perhaps most strikingly, following the lead of Augusto Pinochets Chile, in 1989 the Conservative government privatised the water industry in ...

REMOTE WORK has a target on its back. Banking CEOs, like Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, are intent on making working from home a relic of the pandemic. For staff at Americas biggest lender and other Wall Street stalwarts like Goldman Sachs, five-day weeks are back for good. Big t...

THERE HE WAS again, friendly, imperturbable and in command, even as he announced the end of his political career. Mark Rutte has led the Netherlands since October 2010, making him the senior national leader in the EU after Viktor Orban and the longest-serving Dutch prime minister...

Read more of our recent coverage of the Ukraine war Editors note (July 10th): This article has been updated since it was first published. A SUMMIT OF NATO leaders in Vilnius, Lithuanias capital, opened in dramatic fashion on July 10th. On the eve of the gathering, which begins fo...

In 1945, just before the test of the first nuclear bomb in the New Mexico desert, Enrico Fermi, one of the physicists who had helped build it, offered his fellow scientists a wager. Would the heat of the blast ignite a nuclear conflagration in the atmosphere? If so, would the fir...

THE 8,600-TONNE ship bobbing in the bay of Nagasaki, in Japans south, is aptly named. The Kizuna, which means bonds in Japanese, is a cable-laying vessel. It is equipped with robots that can descend 3,000 metres under the sea to install and repair the subsea cables that allow mil...

American summers, known for baseball games, roasted marshmallows and county fairs, have acquired new traditions: pools missing lifeguards, camps in need of counsellors and restaurants desperate for waiters. These shortages matter for more than just the businesses concerned. Over ...

Read more of our recent coverage of the Ukraine war IN THIS GAME, 50 centimetres can make all the difference. Tsar, a 35-year-old veterinarian turned combat engineer, was part of a five-man group demining fields near Robotyne on June 27th. The sappers were three hours into their ...

Earlier this summer I followed a man called Abu al-Ajoud through the streets of Nablus, a Palestinian city in the West Bank. We walked in silence, occasionally ducking our heads to pass under an Ottoman arch. Eventually al-Ajoud stopped at an iron door, patted me down and led me ...

To read more of The Economists data journalism visit our Graphic Detail page. ON JULY 3RD the average global air temperature reached a new record. On July 4th the average global air temperature reached a new record. And on July 6th the average global air temperature reached a new...

Many of the lights that for more than a century have swept across Britains shoreline and out to sea are about to blink out. Our short film illustrates why these much-loved beams are being replaced by the winking efficiency of LEDs....

WINTERS IN LIMA, Perus capital, are dreary. By now the city is normally enveloped in a cold mist. This year, though, daytime temperatures are around 21C (70F). Ice-cream sellers are still doing brisk business at Limas beaches. Will there be a winter this year? ask headlines in lo...

Burning fuel to move humans and goods by road produced about 6bn tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2021, 16% of global energy-related emissions. If countries are to curb the increase in the worlds temperature, they must stop these emissions. That means building battery-powered vehicles...

In geology, unlike business, nothing is too big to fail. Mountains offer the most spectacular example. Pushed up by the crumpling of Earths crust following the collision of tectonic plates, they could in theory keep rising almost indefinitely. In practice, they do not. A suite of...

IN LATE JUNE Robert Friedland, the bombastic boss of Ivanhoe, a Canadian miner, warned that the world was running the risk of a train wreck, when a crunch in copper supply would derail the energy transition. The metal is used in everything from wiring to wind turbinesand green ma...

OVER THE past decade a small but growing number of governments have begun to challenge the assumption that the state is no good at deploying technology at scale. By treating some digital services as public infrastructure, countries from tiny Estonia to giants such as India and Br...

The privatisation of water utilities in England and Wales, more than 30 years ago, now looks like a rip-off. Private-equity firms have loaded some water companies with debt. That helped juice their returns but left them financially fragile. While many water bosses made out like b...

Each year scientists discover an average of five new bird species. In 2013, on a trip to a remote set of islands in Indonesia, researchers found ten in six weeksthe biggest haul in more than a century. The region in question, known as Wallacea after Alfred Russel Wallace, a 19th-...

For as long as inflation has been high economists have fought about where it came from and what must be done to bring it down. Since central bankers have raised interest rates and headline inflation is falling, this debate may seem increasingly academic. In fact, it is increasing...

Few questions in the Middle East evoke such dread as why arent you married? It signals a judgmental grilling. Anyone can play interrogator: parents, taxi driverseven an American president. Saudi Arabia and Israel have been carrying on their relationship in secret for a decade. Jo...

No country has more neighbours than China, with 14 land borders. And its neighbourhood is not just crowded, but also tumultuous. There is a rogue state, North Korea; war-torn ones, such as Myanmar; ones with which it has festering territorial disputes, such as India; others with ...

For a certain type of investor, last year came as a relief. True, the losses were grim. But at least markets were starting to make sense. Over the previous decade, central banks had pumped out floods of new money to buy bonds. Interest rates were kept unnaturally low, or even neg...

HYDROGEN IS THE most abundant element in the universe and a vast source of clean fuel. For investors, it is an equally rich source of hype. As parts of the world get a bit more serious about tackling climate change, hydrogen has emerged as a big part of global decarbonisation eff...

A SELECTION OF three essential articles read aloud from the latest issue of The Economist. This week, the humbling of Vladimir Putin, how misfiring environmentalism risks harming the worlds poor (10:15) and some tips to design better flags (18:50). Runtime: 24 min Please subscrib...

Read more of our recent coverage of the Ukraine war WHEN THE boxer Mike Tyson was asked ahead of a fight whether he was concerned about an opponents plan, he was blunt: Everybody has a plan til they get punched in the mouth. With NATO it has been the other way around. For 42 year...

Pushed by the threat of climate change, rich countries are embarking on a grand electrification project. Britain, France and Norway, among others, plan to ban the sale of new internal-combustion cars. Even where bans are not on the statute books, electric-car sales are growing ra...

MASS MOVEMENTS of people expected as climate change progresses are often depicted as catastrophes-in-waiting. We visit Niger, where that shift has begun, finding there is good news amid the bad. We examine the spate of video games depicting Ukraines live theatre of war (11:32). A...

The transition of the global economy away from carbon-emitting energy is a priority in the effort to tackle climate change. Which green incentives and innovations are speeding the shift? And which countries are leading the way? The Economists executive editor, Charlotte Howard, j...

Beginning in 2016 thousands of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders from hundreds of communities across Australia came together in regional dialogues culminating in a constitutional convention. The consultations were impressively inclusivefar more so, for instance, than for whi...

THANK GOODNESS for the enthusiasts and the obsessives. If everyone always took a balanced view of everything, nothing would ever get done. But when campaigners worldview seeps into the staid apparatus of policymaking and global forums, bad decisions tend to follow. That, unfortun...

Getting into Jinjiang Ode is a little difficult. The luxurious property development in central Chengdu will not allow potential buyers through its four-metre-high palatial gates without an appointment. Even finding out about the project in the south-western metropolis, home to 16...

IN JANUARY THIS year, the French and German governments met in Paris to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Elysee Treaty. The meeting reaffirmed an ever closer relationship to strengthen the sovereignty of the European Union. Six months on, President Emmanuel Macrons forthcomi...

If a child were to draw a lighthouse they would draw Trevose. It is perfect. Round white walls above; rocky cliffs below; stormy seas beyond. And best of all is its beam. As the sun goes down the beam begins: dark-light-dark-light, all night, every night. For 110 years, Trevoses ...

Suppose, for a minute, that you are a finance minister in the developing world. At the end of a year in which your tax take has disappointed, you are just about out of money. You could plough what little remains into your health-care system: dollars spent by clinics help control ...

WHERE DID covid-19 come from? You might imagine that the question would be a matter for science. Instead it has become embroiled in acrimony, politics and, at times, conspiracy theory. New diseases in people almost always come from close contact between human populations and anim...

YEVGENY PRIGOZHINS attempted coup was, despite its failure, a seismic moment for Russia, laying bare President Vladmir Putins vulnerability. As the mutiny unfolded, I suggested that Russias democratic anti-war opposition should welcome the opportunity that it presented, not becau...

To read more of The Economists data journalism visit our Graphic Detail page. HIGH SUMMER in the northern hemisphere is deepest winter in Antarctica. Much of the continent is in constant darkness, wracked by winds that regularly exceed 100mph and temperatures that drop below -60C...

ON JUNE 12TH large parts of Reddit, a social-media platform with nearly 56m active daily users, went dark. The site is made up of forums, known as subreddits. Moderatorsusers who run these forums on a voluntary basisremoved 8,000 of the most popular from public view for two days....

THE RIGHT-OF-CENTRE New Democracy (ND) party raced to an expected victory in Greeces general election held on June 25th. It took 40.6% of the vote to win a second four-year term, with the radical left-wing Syriza party trailing a distant second with 17.8%. The conservatives, led ...

On June 23rd Russia entered 24 hours of mayhem. Consider, for a moment, just how surreal it all was. A violent criminal and former hot-dog seller, nicknamed the chef, leads an armed irregular militia towards Moscow, demanding the heads of the regular army chief and of the defence...

AFTER THE second world war, Americas new Atomic Energy Commission was on the hunt for a remote site where engineers could work out how to turn the raw power contained in a nuclear bomb into electricity. They settled on the desert shrubland of south-eastern Idaho. Towns in the are...

Read more of our recent coverage of the Ukraine war IN THE SPRING of 2022, at the moment when it became clear that Russias invasion had begun to falter, the generals planning Ukraines campaign grasped that their resistance on the battlefield could turn Russian commanders against ...

ONE OF THE most notable matches in womens tennis in recent years came in the fourth round of the Australian Open in January. It pitted Elena Rybakina (pictured left), a Kazakh who is the reigning Wimbledon champion, against Iga Swiatek (pictured right), a Pole who holds both the ...

THE THREAT of armed insurrection against Vladimir Putin abated on June 24th as suddenly and dramatically as it had erupted. In the morning Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the Wagner mercenary group, sent his armoured columns on a 1,000km race to Moscow, claiming to come within 200km a...

Read more of our recent coverage of the Ukraine war. ONE MONTH ago Yevgeny Prigozhins Wagner group had just conquered the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut after a nearly year-long battle, crawling forward by a few dozen metres a day. On June 24th Ukrainians watched with amazement, and s...

The quokka, an Australian marsupial about the size of a domestic cat, has full cheeks and a curved mouth that convey the impressionoften to delighted touriststhat the critter is smiling. It has been dubbed the happiest animal on Earth. Yet these days it has competition from anoth...

Britains headline annual rate of inflation remained elevated at 8.7% in May, defying expectations that it would fall again. Core inflation, which strips out food and energy prices, rose to 7.1%, the highest it has been since March 1992. The government has promised to cut inflatio...

Addressing the UNs annual climate summit in 2009, South Koreas then-president promised his country would be an early mover when it comes to tackling climate change. Lee Myung-bak pledged that South Korea would allocate the equivalent of 2% of GDP per year to the fight over the ne...

THERE IS TALK of President Joe Bidens climate envoy visiting China in the coming weeks. If the trip goes ahead, John Kerry will be the second senior American official to hold talks in Beijing in under a month. The recent visit of Antony Blinken, the secretary of state, secured th...

Wasteland. By Oliver Franklin-Wallis. Hachette Books; 400 pages; $30. Simon & Schuster; 20 In Our Mutual Friend, Charles Dickenss last complete novel, stray paper hangs on every bush, flutters in every tree, is caught flying by the electric wires, haunts every enclosure. Since th...

Editors note: On June 22nd this story was updated to include news from the Bank of England, which put up the main interest rate by 50 basis points. THE LATEST, grim, inflation figures in Britain were nottrulya shock. For each of the past few months a routine has emerged: the numb...

To read more of The Economists data journalism visit our Graphic Detail page. LIVING CONDITIONS in cities across the world have fully recovered from the deterioration caused by the covid-19 pandemic, EIUs latest liveability index shows. It rates living conditions in 173 cities ac...

It is more than two years since high inflation returned to the rich world, and hopes that it will quietly fade are themselves fading. True, prices are rising more slowly than in 2022, when the pace hit 9.1% in America, 10.6% in the euro area and 10.4% globally. But the view that ...

JUST AS OIL was weaponised by its suppliers in the 1970s, so Chinas dominance in the supply and processing of critical minerals could prove threatening. Cobalt, graphite, lithium, nickel, the rare earths and more are called critical for good reason. They are crucial to defence, s...

LIKE MANY laws governing controversial matters, the Abortion Act of 1967 was a compromise. To protect women in Britain from backstreet abortions, it allowed the termination of pregnancies in most cases until 28 weeks (this was later lowered to 24). In recognition of some peoples ...

THE SINKING of an overladen trawler off Greeces coast on June 14th is thought to be the second-most deadly migrant shipwreck in the Mediterranean, the worlds most perilous migration route. So far 81 bodies have been recovered; 104 people have been rescued. According to the UNs hu...

In the months after Russias invasion of Ukraine any hint of bad news sent energy prices into the stratosphere. When a fire forced an American gas plant to close, strikes clogged French oil terminals, Russia demanded Europe pay for fuel in roubles or the weather looked grimmer tha...

Monday June 19th was a typical day in British politics in so far as it involved a series of humiliations for the Conservative Party. mps approved a report on Boris Johnson condemning the former prime minister for lying to Parliament over lockdown-busting parties. Rishi Sunak skip...

IT TAKES LITTLE to spark fury among nationalist netizens in China, especially when the topic is Taiwan. Any action that could be viewed as a challenge to Chinas claim to the island arouses a chorus of calls for war. Their voices alarm Western officials, who fret that Chinese poli...

There was no shortage of bigwigs at a development-finance pow-wow hosted by Emmanuel Macron, Frances president, in Paris on June 22nd to discuss pressing global issues including World Bank reform, climate finance and debt distress. The expected attendees at the Summit for a New G...

SIX YEARS ago only a few hundred Indian citizens took classes at the University of East London (UEL), a former polytechnic with campuses in Stratford and the Docklands. By last year over 6,000 students, or about one-quarter of the total, hailed from India. The newcomers are helpi...

Read more of our recent coverage of the Ukraine war IN 2021, a year before Russia invaded Ukraine, General Thierry Burkhard told The Economist that the French army had to harden itself and prepare for high-intensity war, possibly in Europe. One hypothetical adversary was Russia. ...

China prides itself on firm, unswerving leadership and stable economic growth. That should make its fortunes easy to predict. But in recent months, the worlds second-biggest economy has been full of surprises, wrong-footing seasoned China-watchers and savvy investors alike. Early...

IN HOLLYWOODS LATEST superhero blockbuster, The Flash (pictured), the title character (played by Ezra Miller) can run faster than the speed of light. This, he discovers, enables him to go back in time and change the past. Some superheroes in this situation might have taken the op...

NEXT WEEK Britain and France will convene major international conferences. The first, in London, will seek to drum up support for Ukraine. The second, in Paris, will focus on international financing for countries and communities affected by extreme poverty and climate change. The...

East Africas Rift Valley, which runs for thousands of kilometres from the Red Sea to Mozambique, provides a unique window into the evolutionary history of humanity. The shifting of tectonic plates that formed its deep lakes and sheltered canyons created conditions that first nurt...

De Balie, a cosily chic cultural venue on Amsterdams Leidseplein, is the epicentre of Dutch liberal intellectual life. On May 3rd it played host to two thinkers representing ideas that are pulling the European left apart. Gloria Wekker is a black Dutch academic who argues that th...

Masterly inactivity is back in vogue at the Federal Reserves rate-setting committee. After its meeting on June 14th it kept its benchmark rate on hold, rather than raising it, for the first time since January 2022. One or two more rate rises may lie ahead: Jerome Powell, the Feds...

The Danes do it. The Dutch do it. Even Jamaica, Honduras and Papua New Guinea regularly state the formal goals of their defence and foreign policies. And so now does Germany. Long squeamish about flexing its muscles despite being the worlds fourth-biggest economy and a pillar of ...

Bosses of multinationals may have breathed a sigh of relief after the leaders of the g7 group of rich countries met in Japan last month. The talk was not of decoupling their economies from China, but of de-risking commercial ties with it. Yet any respite will have been momentary....

ON JUNE 13th Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, Indias Minister of External Affairs, sat down for an interview with The Economist at his office in South Block in central Delhi. He offered his views of Indias relationships with America, China and Russia and its effort to be a leader of the ...

The dire state of rich-world governments budgets would make even the luxury-loving Madame Bovary wince. America has avoided a debt-ceiling disaster, but in the year to May the federal governments revenue fell short of its spending by $2.1trn, or 8.1% of GDP. In the European Union...

THE WORLD is facing numerous extreme, interlinked challenges, including a climate emergency and growing economic inequalities between and within countries. Tackling these problems requires funds to flow in the right direction, towards reducing carbon emissions, supporting educati...

When Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva won Brazils election last year, climate activists the world over breathed a sigh of relief. His right-wing predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, had gutted the environmental agency, turned a blind eye to illegal gold-mining and undermined indigenous rights. ...

FEW visitors can expect the sort of welcome Narendra Modi, Indias prime minister, will receive in Washington later this month. Joe Biden, Americas president, is throwing a formal banquet for him at the White House. The leaders of the two chambers of Congress, not to be outdone, h...

Silvio Berlusconi had a political career of rare longevity. He first became prime minister in 1994, when Helmut Kohl, Francois Mitterrand and others who have long since passed into history led Europes powerhouses. Almost 30 years later, he still headed a party with significant pa...

In popular perception Americas industrial heartland is its Midwest. Just look at where President Joe Biden has travelled for many of his big made-in-America speeches: Ohio thrice, Michigan twice and Wisconsin. (These, helpfully, are also political battleground states.) But look a...

UKRAINES COUNTER-OFFENSIVE is under way, and its armed forces intend to take back as much Russian-occupied territory as possible in the coming months. The outcome is hostage to the chance and emotion that characterises all wars. Whatever the result, understanding whose counter-of...

In Australia house prices have risen for the past three months. In America a widely watched index of housing values has risen by 1.6% from its low in January, and housebuilders share prices have done twice as well as the overall stockmarket. In the euro area the property market l...

Read more of our recent coverage of the Ukraine war UKRAINE IS JUST a week into its counter-offensive against the Russians, but already the reports from the frontlines range from upbeat to gloomy. On June 11th its 68th brigade reported that it had liberated Blahodatne, a village ...

JUDGING PURELY by the steady stream of Western executives crossing the Pacific, China is picking up where it left off before the onset of covid-19. In the past couple of weeks Elon Musk of Tesla, an electric-car maker, met officials in Beijing on his first trip to the country in ...

BORIS JOHNSON did not go quietly. He never does. The former prime minister resigned from Parliament on the evening of June 9th, after reading a report into whether he knowingly lied to his fellow MPs about the extent of illegal parties on his watch during lockdown. Rather than le...

NOW AND THEN Samuel is plagued by old cravings, though he says he has quit gambling for good. The 25-year-old got hooked on online betting at 17 and, at the worst point, could squander a months salary in minutes. He is not alone. By one estimate 29m Britons place a bet at least o...

There is a bulky white structure in my little village by the Hudson river in New York just north of the Bronx. It has a 19th-century solidity to it and, on most days, offers a lovely prospect. As you descend the driveway, you see the flowing Hudson and the verdant hills on the ot...

Standing in jazzy pyjamas by her front gate, Nadya tries to work out whether the stinking flood water is about to creep over her garden wall. Her husband is disabled and doesnt want to leave their home, but the neighbours house downhill is already submerged up to the roof. She ha...

Green is getting too Brown, moaned the graffiti in Germanys capital late last year. The scribblers were hard-line environmentalists. Their gripe was that the Greens, one of three parties in Germanys ruling Ampel or traffic light coalition, were going soft. By agreeing to crank up...

Singapores immaculate Changi airport is the perfect place to witness a shift in the balance of power between global cities. Since the city-states final covid-19 border restrictions were lifted last year, it has welcomed crowds of bankers, consultants and lawyers, fresh off a four...

In november 2021, at a un summit in Glasgow, the worlds leaders declared to much fanfare that they were consigning coal to the ash heap of history. Governments promised to stop building coal-fired power plants, and financiers pledged to stop financing coal mines. Eighteen months ...

Editors note: On August 14th a Montana state court ruled in favour of the youth plaintiffs. In doing so it struck down a provision in the states environmental policy that had barred agencies from considering the effects of greenhouse gases, declaring it unconstitutional. MAE NAN ...

Fossil fUELLED power stations can be replaced by solar panels or nuclear reactors. Petrol-powered cars can be replaced with ones that use zero-carbon electricity to charge batteries. But not every part of an economy is so easy to decarbonise, even in principle. Three heavy indust...

June 6th and 7th were literally dark days in New York. Smoke filled the air, shrouding the skyline in an eerie blur. Airports delayed incoming flights, and baseball games were postponed. Health officials told residents to stay indoors. Measured by Air Quality Index (aqi), which r...

FERTILITY RATES are falling to worrying levels, and an older, smaller, global population is bad news for economic growth. Apples new headset could revolutionise the virtual reality world, but only if it sells. And, despite being in decline for decades, the tide is turning for Bri...

MANY OF THE worlds most important urban areas are on coastlines or rivers, putting them at risk of rising sea levels. Rapid urbanisation and climate change are conspiring to make this threat more urgent. How can cities adapt to avoid catastrophe? The Economists Benjamin Sutherlan...

When in March the European Union approved a law requiring all new cars to have zero carbon emissions from 2035, Germany managed to wangle an exemption for vehicles running on e-fuels. Some saw it as a charter for producers to continue flogging internal-combustion engined cars to ...

Read more of our recent coverage of the Ukraine war THE EXPLOSIONS in the early morning were so strong that windows trembled a full 80km away. By daybreak on June 6th the impact was clear: blasts had punched a large hole in the Nova Kakhovka dam in southern Ukraine, and there had...

Whether they grimace or they grin as they say it, more and more Republicans seem to agree that Donald Trump is likely to capture the partys presidential nomination. But that has not deterred others from hoping against hope and entering the contest. Chris Christie, a former Republ...

Read more of our recent coverage of the Ukraine war ON THE eve of the commemoration of the Allies D-Day landings in Normandy, General Mark Milley, Americas most senior general, drew a parallel with the Ukrainian counter-offensive starting some 2,800km to the east. The goal, he sa...

CHINAs Communist party likes to think it is good at long-term planning. A glance along the countrys coastline might suggest that it is. More than 40 years ago Deng Xiaoping, the late paramount leader, started letting coastal cities dabble in free-market policies and attract forei...

Mountains of coal are piled beneath azure skies at the port of Newcastle, Australia. Giant shovels chip away at them, scooping the fuel onto conveyor belts, which whizz it to cargo ships that can be as long as three football pitches. The harbours terminals handle 200m tonnes of t...

Editors update (June 9th): This piece was updated after Turkeys president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, appointed Hafize Gaye Erkan, a former Goldman Sachs banker, as governor of the central bank. IN THE 16th century, as inflation gripped the Ottoman empire, Sultan Murad III appeased hi...

NARENDRA MODI aspires to turn India into a vishwaguru, or teacher to the world. But what pedagogical gift, beyond its prime ministers sage-like appearance, does a rapidly growing and ambitious India have for other countries? Technological prowess, is the Modi governments answer. ...

In 1936 an enterprising businessman lit upon a way to make the British seaside even more of an endurance test. To icy seas, leaden skies and average annual temperatures of 10C, Billy Butlin added low, wooden huts to house holidaymakers; a Tannoy system to rouse them each morning;...

To most economists, putting a price on greenhouse-gas emissions is the best way to tackle climate change. It is efficient, allowing society to identify the cheapest unit of carbon-dioxide equivalent to forgo. It is fair: polluters pay; the proceeds can be redistributed. And it ai...

In the roughly 250 years since the Industrial Revolution the worlds population, like its wealth, has exploded. Before the end of this century, however, the number of people on the planet could shrink for the first time since the Black Death. The root cause is not a surge in death...

Spring was a scorcher in the Mediterranean. A heatwave in April saw temperatures up to 20C higher than usual in Algeria, Morocco, Portugal and Spain. Scientists used to hesitate to blame a particular piece of weather on climate change. These days they are more confident. World We...

We had two covers this week. Our British edition looks at Scotlands future. Everywhere else we focus on the profound economic consequences of the global collapse in fertility. In 2000 the worlds fertility rate was 2.7 births per woman, comfortably above the replacement rate of 2....

Imran Khan was a terrible prime minister. In office from 2018-2022, the Pakistani cricket star turned populist leader appointed corrupt ministers, locked up his opponents and hounded the press. As Pakistanis rapidly went off him, he peddled desperate anti-American conspiracy theo...

IF AUSTRALIA AND Canada were one economy, this Ozanada would be the worlds fifth-largest, bigger than India and just behind Germany. Considering the two in tandem is not as nutty as it seems. Weather aside, they have a remarkable amount in common. Both are vast land masses popula...

THE RUGGED, chilly coast of northern Norway, beyond the Arctic Circle, is not usually thought of as prime agricultural land. But far down a dead-end road on the shores of Skjerstad Fjord sits Salten Smolt, one of the most advanced farms in the world. Rather than crops or cows, th...

MUCH ATTENTION in recent months has focused on Russias faltering military offensive and staggering casualties in Ukraine. But there are other problems, largely unnoticed outside Russia, lurking for the countrys armed forces and society more broadly. Russias wartime military-perso...

Steelmakers around the world hope to decarbonise by changing the way they pluck oxygen from iron-oxide ores. This is done using either carbon monoxide (CO) derived indirectly from coke in a blast furnace, or by direct reduction with syngas, a mixture of CO and hydrogen. Both crea...

The price of Brent crude has a claim to be the worlds most important number. Two-thirds of the 100m barrels of oil traded each day derive their price from it. So do millions of futures contracts that buyers and sellers employ to manage risk. Some governments use the oil price to ...

JAROSLAW KACZYNSKI, the chairman of Polands ruling Law and Justice party (PiS), is not a fun-loving type. Otherwise the curmudgeonly godfather of Polish politics might enjoy the irony of passing a law supposedly intended to purge the country of Russian influence, but which has di...

Adam is a special child, says the voice-over, as the camera pans across abandoned classrooms and deserted maternity wards. Hes the last child born in Italy. The short film made for Plasmon, an Italian brand of baby food owned by Kraft-Heinz, a giant American firm, is set in 2050....

IN RECENT DAYS Ron DeSantis, Floridas governor and Donald Trumps chief rival for the Republican nomination, chose to announce his bid for the White House via Twitter. The live audio event, hosted by the social networks owner, Elon Musk, descended into farce as Twitters servers st...

EVEN IN A sharply divided Washington, DC, politics-as-usual sometimes works. America has a history of debt-ceiling drama, staring into the abyss of a government default before reaching a deal at the last minute. This time, too, the familiar pattern has repeated itself. Intense ne...

WHITE STEAM rises from the waters of Okuhida Onsengo in snowy northern Japan. Each year thousands of bathers from across the country travel to soak in these hot springs. Down the road, meanwhile, the springs underground reservoirs are being put to a new use: last December the Nak...

Last year 1.2m people moved to Britainalmost certainly the most ever. Net migration (ie, immigrants minus emigrants) to Australia is twice the rate before covid-19. Spains equivalent figure recently hit an all-time high. Nearly 1.4m people on net are expected to move to America t...

At the start of his memoir, Beautiful Things, published in 2021, Hunter Biden, the second son of the president of the United States, begins with a single claim that summarises the argument of the book. I am not Eric Trump or Donald Trump, Jr, he writes. Ive worked for someone oth...

To read more of The Economists data journalism visit our Graphic Detail page. IN RECENT WEEKS Russia has stepped up its missile bombardments of Ukrainian cities. Between May 1st and May 26th there were 13 strikes on Kyiv, mostly during the night. Yet Ukraine maintains that the co...

IN 2016 A group led by a 20-year-old student in New Jersey hacked into hundreds of thousands of internet-of-things (IoT) devices. It was not hard work: the devices, mostly CCTV cameras, had default passwords like password or 12345. Whats more, even if a diligent operator of those...

HEADING INTO the first round of Turkeys presidential election on May 14th, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the oppositions joint candidate, campaigned on a message of hope, inclusion and economic recovery. For the second, which takes place on May 28th, he has run a decidedly more negative ca...

Read more of our recent coverage of the Ukraine war Weapons come in all shapes and sizes, from the Javelins that blow up Russian tanks to the F-16s Ukrainian aces may soon be flying. As his invasion of Ukraine got bogged down last year, Vladimir Putin, Russias president, reached ...

WHAT COUNTRY does French belong to? The answer seems obvious: France, as it says on the label. But there are roughly four times as many speakers of French outside France as there are within it. Who does Portuguese belong to? You might now hesitate to blurt out Portugal, rememberi...

THERE ARE two ways of looking at the security pact that Antony Blinken, Americas secretary of state, signed with the prime minister of Papua New Guinea (PNG), James Marape, on May 22nd. The obvious one is as further evidence of the great-power contest between America and China th...

Heatwaves are a natural part of the planets weather systems, but climate change means countries across the world are experiencing record-shattering heat year after year. In America heat kills more people than other extreme weather events, like hurricanes, floods and tornadoes. An...

IN MID-MAY GERMANS were bracing for the third, and longest, national rail strike this year. Deutsche Bahn (DB) was locked in a dispute over pay with EVG, the union representing most German railway workers, including 180,000 at the state-run behemoth. At the last minute union lead...

GETTING rid of old tyres has long been a problem. Every year more than a billion reach the end of the road. Until recently, most were thrown into landfills or piled up in storage yards, which occasionally caught fire. Tougher environmental laws mean many countries now insist tyre...

THE EUROPEAN UNIONS best-known law is about to turn five. On May 25th 2018 the EU introduced the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Spurred by the revelations of Edward Snowden, an American whistleblower, the blocs lawmakers gave Europes rights-based approach to data shar...

The relief in the City of Canals is palpable. For centuries, regular high tidesacqua alta to the localshave flowed through Venice, submerging walkways, flooding buildings, and stopping boats from passing under its many bridges. For most of the city, at least, that is no longer th...

To read more of The Economists data journalism visit our Graphic Detail page. HOW WELL off is humanity? Which countries citizens are thriving and which are languishing? Where are people making progress and where are they sliding back? Often the answers to such questions come from...

Britains economic outlook is a bit rosier. That at least is the verdict of the IMF, a global financial watchdog, which on May 23rd upgraded its forecast for the country. Instead of falling into a recession this year, as it was predicting in April, the IMF now believes that Britai...

A t the end of the cold war Americas president, George H.W. Bush, popularised the idea that cutting defence spending would boost the economy. We can reap a genuine peace dividend this year and then year after year, in the form of permanently reduced defence budgets, he declared i...

WHEN China launched a campaign of economic coercion against Australia in 2020, Communist Party bosses thought they had crushing leverage. The economies of the two countriesresource-rich Australia and commodities-hungry Chinawere complementary and closely connected. By massively c...

In Wall-E, a film released in 2008, humans live in what could be described as a world of fully automated luxury communism. Artificially intelligent robots, which take wonderfully diverse forms, are responsible for all productive labour. People get fat, hover in armchairs and watc...

ALEXANDER LUKASHENKO, the dictator of Belarus, spends much of his time inspecting factories, scrutinising harvests and presiding over ice-hockey matches. For nearly a week in May he did none of those thingsor anything else in public, fuelling intense speculation about his health....

When Cyril Ramaphosa became South Africas president in 2018, business leaders were ecstatic. Here was one of their own: a pragmatic tycoon to fix the incompetent kleptocracy of Jacob Zuma. Yet five years on, bosses of large businesses are exasperated. CEOs from several different ...

The American constitution vests legislative power in Congress. Over the coming days the political body may arrogate to itself a metaphysical power: transforming the utterly unthinkable into hard reality. By failing to raise Americas debt ceiling in time, Congress could drive the ...

On the last weekend of April the Berlin showroom of niO, a Chinese maker of electric vehicles (EVs), was a happy place. On the first floor a family was celebrating a childs birthday party. On the ground floor car enthusiasts inspected an SUV, a saloon and a racing car on display....

TODAY WE SEE the birth of a new species, declared Julio Friedmann, gazing across the bleak landscape. Along with several hundred grandees, the energy technologist had travelled to Notrees, a remote corner of the Texas oil patch, in late April. He was invited by 1PointFive, an arm...

GREECES RULING centre-right New Democracy (ND) party came first by an impressive and unexpected margin in an election held on May 21st; but it narrowly failed to secure an outright majority in parliament. It now looks likely that another election will be held, probably at the end...

Indiana Jones has fought his way through jungles, snakepits and booby-trapped temples. But his latest cinematic adventure, due from Disney next month, took place just off the M25 motorway near Slough. Pinewood Studios, where Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny was shot, is not ...

IT MARKS A spectacular fall from grace for a one-time Silicon Valley star. This week a court in California ruled that, Hail Mary appeals notwithstanding, Elizabeth Holmes must report to prison on May 30th to begin serving an 11-year sentence for fraud. Theranos, the startup Ms Ho...

WITH THE lifting of Title 42, America is once again forced to consider its border policy, just as Democrat-run cities struggle to find shelter for busloads of migrants sent north from the US-Mexico border. What responsibilities do states and cities far from the border have? And w...

Over the past year British environmental protesters have pulled off some spectacularand spectacularly aggravatingfeats. At the National Gallery they upended a can of tomato soup over van Goghs Sunflowers before gluing themselves to the wall. On the M25 they climbed the gantries, ...

There exists a centuries-old and fathoms-deep relationship between finance and the state. The great banking houses, such as the Medicis of Florence, were lenders of last resort to rulers at risk of being overthrown. Financiers had to avoid backing losers, who would be unable to r...

Living in California, as Schumpeter does, you would think licence plates called it the Red Tape State, not the golden one. Last August it led the world in announcing a ban on new gasoline-fuelled cars by 2035. In December its petrol prices soared higher than anywhere else in Amer...

Given the political weather, Western makers of wind turbines should be flying high. Americas Inflation Reduction Act is stuffed with goodies for all sorts of renewable energy. In late April European leaders pledged to increase the North Seas offshore-wind capacity to 300 gigawatt...

In the 1940s and early 1950s America built a new world order out of the chaos of war. For all its shortcomings, it kept the peace between superpowers and underpinned decades of growth that lifted billions out of poverty. Today that order, based on global rules, free markets and a...

WHEN ASKED about the secret behind Singapores transformation from fishing village to flourishing metropolis, Lee Kuan Yew, the city-states founding prime minister, credited air conditioning. It made development possible in the tropics, he said. These days, amid a sweltering heatw...

In 2015, in Paris, the nations of the world committed themselves to trying their best to prevent the planet warming by more than 1.5C from its pre-industrial state. Even at the time, the goal looked ambitious. In recent years, it has come to seem almost impossible. On May 17th th...

In the genetic age, ecologists jobs are made much easier by two things. One is that every organism carries its own chemical identity card, in the form of its genome. The second is that they drop these ID cards everywhere they go. Urine, bits of fur stuck to a hedge, even shed ski...

It has been a jittery few months for the economies of the West. First came the nerve-rattling crisis in the banking sector. Then came the as-yet-unresolved prospect of a default by Americas government on its supposedly risk-free debt. Many now fret over what other hidden dangers ...

THE GROUP OF SEVEN (G7) began gathering after the first oil shock of the 1970s. In the ensuing decades the club of the worlds largest rich democracies led the way on global economic policy. But its relevance faded as its share of the global economy declined. In 2009 Barack Obama,...

The phone hasnt stopped ringing for Asher Bennett, the founder of Tevva, a manufacturer of hydrogen- and battery-powered trucks near Tilbury, a run-down port town in Essex. For months he has been fielding calls from officials across America competing to lure clean-energy business...

The contest between America and China has a postmodern look to it. Whereas presidents tried to isolate and contain the Soviet Union, America is economically entwined with China, the current would-be hegemon. The official government posture on Taiwan is strategic ambiguity, a line...

THE LONG-RUNNING debate about the societal role of business is currently generating far more heat than light. Angry attacks on environmental, social and governance (ESG) activities by companies have been mounting from both those on the left (who see ESG largely as greenwashing) a...

All payment systems come with trade-offs. In a sense, all that is needed is a spreadsheet recording how much of a given currency any would-be payer has. But to prevent fraud, manage disputes, ensure privacy and offer credit, the costs can add up. One estimate suggests they can am...

EARLIER THIS month I declared an end to covid-19 as a global health emergency; a bookend to the most severe global health crisis since the influenza pandemic in 1918. Over the past three-and-a-half years, covid-19 has officially claimed almost 7m lives, although the World Health ...

Payment is one of the most fundamental economic activities. To buy anything, you need something the seller wants. One option is barter, but that is beset by friction (what are the chances of having something your counterparty wants at any exact moment?). Early forms of money, fro...

After Russias invasion of Ukraine in 2014, a financial battle began. Western card networks pulled out of Russia and politicians called for it to be cut off from the SWIFT messaging system for international payments. In response Russia built a central-bank owned card network calle...

How should Europe handle China? The continent is trying to decide. After decades of pursuing trade, Europeans are pondering how much to decouple. Their closest ally, America, wavers between China-bashing and war talk on the one hand, and de-escalation and partial detente on the o...

THE air seemed to go out of the 16-storey building in eastern Ankara, the headquarters of the Republican Peoples Party (CHP), Turkeys main opposition party, late on May 14th. Opinion polls had given Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the partys leader and the oppositions joint candidate for the...

FLYING IS A dirty business. Airliners account for more than 2% of the annual global emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, many times commercial aviations contribution to world GDP. Two forces will push this figure up in the years to come. First, people love to fly. IATA, th...

Narendra Modi was anxious to retain power in Karnataka. In the week before the affluent southern states assembly election on May 10th, Indias prime minister addressed 19 public rallies and six road shows across it. Keeping a double engine of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) governmen...

On a Tuesday night at Logan Arcade, a bar on Chicagos Northwest Side, Ian, a 57-year-old assistant manager, looks at the Rick and Morty pinball machine. This is a frustrating machine, he says. He steps up and takes his turnone of a group of four, including your correspondentbashi...

TWO YOUNG pretenders recently learned the value of keeping schtum. In Americas National Basketball Association Dillon Brooks, a player for the Memphis Grizzlies, labelled LeBron James, one of the sports greatest players, old after a playoff match against the Los Angeles Lakers. T...

ITS CAFES may be buzzing, but the mood in Kyiv is downbeat these days. True, Ukrainians have made it through a winter that brought the economy and society to the brink. The Ukrainian army is holding against grinding Russian pressure. Yet the message from some Western leaders, tha...

THERE HAVE long been worries about manhood in the United States. Today, nearly half of men believe traditional masculinity is under threat. While the left talk about toxic masculinity, some politicians on the right fear mens very deconstruction. Researchers point to data showing ...

Junk Film. By Katharine Coldiron. Castle Bridge Media; 190 pages; $16.99 BAD NOVELS, bad plays and bad paintings are often swiftly forgotten, but bad films are another matter. The worst of them amass cult followings. They become the subject of podcasts and festivals. A long-runni...

RECENT ADVANCES in artificial intelligence (AI) have put the technology into the hands of millions of users for the first time. They have used generative tools like ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion to write text, create photo-realistic pictures and automate mundane tasks. The same to...

By late January China had emerged from a tsunami of covid-19 infections that began to crash over the country a few weeks earlier, after the lifting of nearly three years of draconian pandemic controls. Officials were covering up the horrific scale of the waves lethality, but most...

At the steelworks near the German city of Salzgitter, ironmaking is a dramatic affair. Red-hot molten metal pours forth from the bottom of towering blast furnaces. The noise is deafening. Sparks fly everywhere. Soon things will be much more sedate. Seven wind turbines already tow...

After the cold war, America and Europe established an economic order based upon open markets, global trade and limited state meddling in the economy. Climate change was a distant threat. Allowing countries like China or Russia into the global economy was widely seen to be benefic...

IN GUANZI, a text from the seventh century BC, a statesman thought to be called Guan Zhong lays out the eight views needed to assess a countrys status. Tour its mountains and lakes, he says, observe its agriculture, and calculate its production of six types of livestock. Then, it...

Over the past few decades, the small, industrial city of Zibo has been best-known for its petrochemical output. In recent months, however, it has become the centre of a national barbecue craze and social-media phenomenon unlike anything China has seen before. Tourists have floode...

THE DEMOGRAPHIC milestones come thick and fast in My Home in the Forest, the official tourism anthem of Yichun, a sprawling city in Chinas far north-east. The song was released in 2018 to promote the areas pine-clad hills and temperate summers. It follows a couple from their cour...

No one enjoys Arab League meetings. Morocco was scheduled to host a summit in 2016 but decided not to bother, calling the event a waste of time. Muhammad bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince, procured a doctors note to skip last years gathering in Algeria. Heads of state are someti...

ONE OF MY most harrowing, and motivating, meetings of the past few months was with Johan Rockstrom, a fellow Swede and globally leading researcher of climate impact at the Potsdam Institute. He told me that although we are trying to limit global warming to 1.5C above pre-industri...

This article is part of our Summer reads series. Visit the full collection for book lists, guest essays and more seasonal distractions. MONEY PREDATES history. Before the ancient Mesopotamians invented the means of writing they had invented accountancy, using cuneiform symbols to...

The age of generative artificial intelligence has well and truly arrived. Openais chatbots, which use large-language-model (llm) technology, got the ball rolling in November. Now barely a day goes by without some mind-blowing advance. An ai-powered song featuring a fake Drake and...

Read more of our recent coverage of the Ukraine war FOR DECADES after the fall of the Berlin Wall Europeans spoke of their peace dividend, a welcome freeing-up of money that seemed no longer needed for defence but could now be spent on pleasanter and more productive uses. Since R...

CANANDAIGUA AND Manhattans Chinatown are about as different from each other as two places in the same state can be. One is a small town in the bucolic Finger Lakes region, where almost everyone is a white English-speaker. Chinatown packs nearly ten times as many residents, many o...

Storm Hilary became the first tropical storm to hit California in 84 years on August 20th. After being downgraded from a Category 4 hurricane, Hilary could still bring life-threatening amounts of rain, according to Americas National Weather Service, and has left nearly 26m people...

To read more of The Economists data journalism visit our Graphic Detail page. HUMANS HAVE long used the ocean as a dumping zone. Piles of rubbish have accumulated in the sea and endangered marine life. But apart from plastic, oceans and their inhabitants also bear the brunt of hu...

HE HAS BEEN king since September; now it is time for the pomp. We examine the modern monarchyand the ancient frippery of coronations. Despite prior reluctance to do much about climate change, America is set to become a clean-energy superpower. And reflecting on the life of Caroly...

To read more of The Economists data journalism visit our Graphic Detail page. AMERICAS JOBS report came in hot in April. On May 5th the Bureau of Labour Statistics reported that employers added 253,000 jobs the previous monthabove the 180,000 expected by forecasters. But the heal...

Locals in guiyang have a keen sense of the distance between them and everywhere else. Over cold rice noodles bathed in chilli paste and vinegar, an elderly resident of the city in south-west China lists a number of recent economic achievements of his home townnamely, the shorteni...

Fiscal rules always have exemptions. The one California passed in 1849 had an exception in case of insurrection. Many resource-rich countries rules can be suspended if commodity prices crash. And most guidelines have some kind of out in case of a pandemic. But in Europe exemption...

During his audacious first bid for the French presidency, in 2017, Emmanuel Macron would scold supporters at campaign rallies who jeered when he name-checked his rivals. Dont whistle at them; lets beat them! the 39-year-old pretender urged the crowds with a smile, adapting a slog...

It was on the golf course that Barry Rud first noticed something was seriously wrong. A trim 60-year-old who played hockey as a young man, he found himself unable to take more than a few steps without gasping for breath. His doctors said he had caught a strain of Pseudomonas aeru...

Earth has always been an odd choice of name for the third planet from the Sun. After all, an alien examining it through a telescope would note that two-thirds of its surface is covered not by earth at all, but by oceans of water. Because humans are land-lubbing animals, most of t...

On a wall in Manhattan, not far from Times Square, Americas debt clock ticks higher, from $3trn when it was inaugurated in 1989 to more than $31trn today. After climbing for so many years with no obvious economic fallout, it is easy to ignore, not least because it was moved from ...

THERE IS NO mention of Australia in Charles IIIs several coronation oaths; the only one of his 15 realms that is specifically mentioned is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The other 14 are swept up in an omnibus reference to your other Realms and the Terr...

On May 2nd health-care trade unions in England finally signed off on a government pay deal. More than 1m workers in the National Health Service (NHS) will receive pay increases of 5% this yearwith an additional one-off bonus added on for the previous year. But hopes for an end to...

Editors note: Beware spoilers in this article Like Elvis, he conked out, bathetically, in a bathroom, only in Logan Roys case it was on a private plane, en route to haggle with a Swedish billionaire over the sale of his media conglomerate, Waystar Royco. He uttered no last-gasp c...

Over half of the worlds lithium, a metal used in batteries for electric vehicles, can be found in Latin America. The region also has two-fifths of the worlds copper and a quarter of its nickel. Recently delegations from the United States and the European Union have flocked there ...

After a four-year spruce-up Tiffany & Co, an upmarket American jeweller, reopened the doors of its flagship store on New Yorks Fifth Avenue to the public on April 28th. At first glance the grand unveiling seems conspicuously ill timed. Hours earlier the Bureau of Economic Analysi...

DURING AMERICAS mini banking crisis in March, when Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and Signature Bank collapsed, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) used an emergency systemic-risk authority to provide 100% protection for all depositors of both banks. Since then, regulator...

CLIMATE CHANGE is stirring up internecine conflicts, criminality is making them longer, and cross-border contagion is complicating matters further. We explain why civil wars are so hard to resolve. Japanese carmakers dominance of the automobile industry could be at risk if they d...

THE WORLDS biggest amusement park was not built in a day. In 1958 planning began for an eastern Disneyland to complement the park in Los Angeles; Walt Disney World, in Orlando, Florida, opened its doors more than a decade later, in 1971. In the intervening years Disney executives...

FOR TWO decades America and its allies expended thousands of lives and some two trillion dollars in Afghanistan to stop, they said, the Taliban returning the Central Asian country to al-Qaeda plotting and chaos. After the Islamist militants regained power 20 months ago, it was fe...

Read more of our recent coverage of the Ukraine war TEREKHIVKA IS A rambling farming village outside Chernihiv, full of low iron-roofed houses and telephone poles topped with storks nests. The village boasts a general store and a community centre, and it used to have a kiosk sell...

In the three years before covid-19, rich-world consumer prices rose by a total of 6%. In the three years since they have risen by close to 20%. People are looking for a villainand firms often top the list. According to a recent survey by Morning Consult, a pollster, a third of Am...

SUDAN APPEARS to be trapped in an endless cycle of bloody coups and counter-coups. Since independence in 1956 the country has endured six coups and about ten failed attempts, by some measures the worst record in Africa. The latest was the overthrow in October 2021 of a transition...

ALEXEI NAVALNY, Russias main opposition leader, remains a thorn in the side of Vladimir Putin. When he flew back to Moscow from Germany in 2021, after surviving being poisoned by Russian agents, he never made it through passport control. He remains imprisoned and ill-treated. Tod...

This article is part of our Summer reads series. Visit the full collection for book lists, guest essays and more seasonal distractions. FEARS OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI) have haunted humanity since the very beginning of the computer age. Hitherto these fears focused on machin...

Editors note (May 2nd 2023): On May 1st the Writers Guild of America chose to go ahead with the strike after late talks with American film studios broke down. ONE HUNDRED years ago, the hills above Los Angeles got a facelift. A giant sign was erected to advertise a new property d...

EVERY SO often an appetite surges for an alternative reserve currency to the dollarand a market booms in predictions of the greenbacks imminent demise. For nearly three-quarters of a century the dollar has at a global scale dominated trade, finance and the rainy-day reserve portf...

It is an idea so seemingly obvious as to need little elaboration: peoples feelings influence their behaviour. In the economic realm this truism helps explain why surveys of consumer sentiment garner attention. They are seen as predictive of spending trends and, by extension, the ...

Britain is going green. The country tends to be found towards the top of international league tables for emissions reductions, even after accounting for imports, thanks to copious offshore wind and a swift transition from coal to natural-gas power plants. Such success has not, ho...

Renewable-energy promoters are not typical movie villains. But Alcarras, which won best film at Berlins festival last year, follows a peach farm in Catalonia forced to make way for a solar farm. In As Bestas, a thriller that won Spains own top prize, a French couple in Spain figh...

The world gets a little greyer every year. According to a paper published in 2014 concretean aggregate material made by mixing cement, sand and gravelis the second-most consumed substance in the world after water. Around three tonnes of the stuff are poured each year for every pe...

INDIAS POPULATION is poised to surpass Chinas. No one knows exactly when: Indias government postponed the census due in 2021 (because of the covid-19 pandemic, it says), so its numbers are not as exact as they might have been. But, according to the United Nations, a reliable guid...

Floods are the most expensive type of natural disaster in America, causing at least $323bn in direct damage since 1960 after accounting for inflation. Unlike other types of risks, private insurers generally do not offer residential coverage for floods. To fill this void, Congress...

THE BERLIN Wall still stood the last time Australia took a hard, independent look at the state of its defence. It was then one of the most secure countries in the world...distant from the main centres of global military confrontation, a defence review concluded in 1986. A new rev...

During the past decade it sometimes seemed as if anyone could make a healthy return from private equity. Rising valuations for portfolio companies, and cheap financing with which to buy them, boosted returns and reeled in cash at an astonishing clip. Improving the efficiency of a...

ISRAELIS APPROACH the 75th anniversary of the establishment of their state in a subdued and sombre mood. Israeli society is deeply divided, the country is in the throes of a constitutional crisis, and there is no consensus on how to mark the milestone. On the one hand, Israel can...

Greater bay technologys transformation into a mythical beast has been speedy. The startup, which specialises in super-fast lithium-battery charging, was launched in late 2020. Only 19 months later it had reached a valuation of $1bn, making it a unicorn (ie, an unlisted firm value...

Yoon Suk-yeol entered office last May with an ambitious vision for his countrys place in the world. He promised to make South Korea an assertive champion of freedom and human rights not just for ourselves but also for others. He spoke of it as a global pivotal state, pushing libe...

AI WEIWEI IS a master of spectacle. In 1995 he produced three black-and-white photographs in which he smashed what looked like a 2,000-year-old urn; it was not clear whether the ceramic was real or a fake. In 2010 he covered the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern with 100m handmade porc...

THIS COLUMN could start in one of two ways. Option one: on its 75th birthday Israel is an incredible success story. From the horrific destruction of the Holocaust, the Jewish people rose and built a country to be proud of. Israel is a military and technological power with more No...

A fascinating case study on the exercise of power within an organisation has just reached a conclusion in Britain. Dominic Raab resigned as the countrys deputy prime minister and justice secretary on April 21st, after an independent investigation into whether he is a workplace bu...

JAPANESE OFFICIALS used to fret that America took the threat from China too coolly. Even after Chinese and Japanese ships clashed over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands a decade ago, American leaders pursued engagement. We warned the US, a former Japanese ambassador once grumbled to Ban...

JOE BIDEN is being coy. On April 10th, at the White House Easter Egg Roll, the president told an interviewer that he planned to host at least three or four more of the annual events. Pressed, he said he intended to run for a second term as president. A few days later, fresh from ...

This article is part of our Summer reads series. Visit the full collection for book lists, guest essays and more seasonal distractions. IF YOU ASK 100 anthropologists what they do you could easily get 101 different answers. The Greek roots of the word anthropology mean human bein...

A hush fell over the crowd that had assembled less than four miles from the launchpad. In the distance stood the Starship. Some 120-metres tall larger than the Statue of Liberty it loomed above the coastal Texas flats, a mass of stainless steel interrupting a vast expanse of sc...

Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? Should we develop non-human minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart...and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilisation? These questions were asked last month in an open letter from the ...

IN THE district courthouse in Rangpur, crowds throng magistrates doorways in search of redress. Many grievances in this northern quarter of Bangladesh have to do with land. Almas, a peasant-farmer in his 60s, clutches contracts in a dispute dating back to the 1980s. He sold an in...

De-risking is an ugly name for an interesting idea. When explaining how they hope to manage future relations with China, a growing number of Western leaders describe some version of risk management. This approach is presented as a middle path between the impossibleie, trying to c...

The British can talk for hours about mundanities, from the best car-journey routes to the weather. Lately pubs and coffee shops have quivered in anticipation of a text. At 3pm on April 23rd mobile phones across Britain will beep and buzz for up to ten seconds, in a test of the go...

Among the commodities that are key to decarbonisation, lithium is in the driving seat. Dubbed white gold, the metal is needed to produce nearly all types of batteries powering electric vehicles (evs). A single pack typically includes ten kilograms of the stuff. In the past two ye...

War broke out in Sudan between the national army, led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, Sudans de facto leader, who seized power in a coup in 2021, and the Rapid Support Forces, a paramilitary commanded by Muhammad Hamdan Dagalo. Some 300 people, most of them civilians, were kil...

Aprice tag of $10.8bn would look hefty for most acquisitions of smallish and newish companies. But for Merck, a drugs giant known as msd outside America, the money it is spending to buy Prometheus Biosciences, a biotech firm based in California, is relatively small change. In the...

Among the more sombre gifts brought by the Enlightenment was the realisation that humans might one day become extinct. The astronomical revolution of the 17th century had shown that the solar system both operated according to the highest principles of reason and contained comets ...

Overseas investors have been pecking at the Evergrande empire for well over a year. They have so far come away with very little. The Chinese company, which is the worlds most indebted property developer, with some $300bn in liabilities, defaulted in late 2021 and has been fending...

Read more of our recent coverage of the Ukraine war Tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers are readying for action; checking their kit, writing what might be their last letters. We do not know when or where, but soon Ukraine will launch its long-planned counter-offensive against...

When chinas leaders reappointed Yi Gang as governor of the countrys central bank in March, it was a pleasant surprise. With an economics phd from America, where he also taught, Mr Yi is the kind of reform-minded, well-travelled technocrat that is disappearing from Chinas policyma...

Drive through any city in South-East Asia and Japans commercial presence is visible everywhere: vehicles made by Toyota, Honda and Nissan clog the roads, the result of decades of market dominance in the region. If Fast Retailing, the parent company behind Uniqlo, a clothing retai...

If fresh evidence were needed of the importance of China to the global car industry, the Shanghai motor show, which opened on April 18th, provides it. The worlds other big jamborees have been permanently cancelled or downgraded, but Chinas showcase has attracted 1,000 exhibitors ...

When companies tighten their belts, they look first to discretionary spending. Meta got rid of free laundry for its workers last year. In January Google announced a round of lay-offs that included 27 in-house massage therapists. Salesforce, another tech firm, has axed its contrac...

For cash-strapped governments, development-finance institutions (dfis) offer an understandably alluring vision: that of development executed by the private sector at little cost to the state. Such institutions try to build businesses and create jobs by lending money and buying st...

BRITAINS ROADS are some of the most jammed in the world, with roughly 41m vehicles crawling along 250,000 miles of tarmac. Congestion is estimated to cost about 10bn ($12.5bn) a year in lost time. Plans to build new smart motorways, which would add capacity by getting rid of hard...

Even licence plates contribute to the feast of colour that is an Indian city. Private vehicles have plates with black characters on white; commercial ones, black writing on yellow; rental vehicles, yellow on black; prized diplomatic plates are white and blue. And in the past few ...

For several weeks extraordinary scenes have been taking place in Bolivia. As we report, last month the central bank started selling dollars directly to the public after it appeared that exchange houses had run out of greenbacks. The queues to buy them stretched along the streets ...

The stunning success of ChatGPT, a chatbot that can write essays, pass law exams and even make bad jokes, has divided the world. Optimists think artificial intelligence (AI) will help us design new drugs or generate power by nuclear fusion. Pessimists fear that superintelligent m...

According to Indonesian legend, rice was bestowed upon the island of Java by the goddess Dewi Sri. Pitying its inhabitants the blandness of their existing staple, cassava, she taught them how to nurture rice seedlings in lush green paddy fields. In India, the Hindu goddess Annapu...

Imagine, for a second, that you are a guest at the Mount Washington Hotel in the ski resort of Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. You have arrived to enjoy neither the slopes nor the hotels 18-hole golf course. Instead, you are here for the sort of conference that reimagined the inter...

Although scientists have not determined how covid-19 emerged, the leading theory is zoonotic spillover (transmission from animals). The death toll from covid has given efforts to prevent future pandemics new urgency. A recent study in Nature on bats, which carry sars-cov-2s close...

The natural world is a source of beauty and wonder, but it also provides humans with essential services. Jungles, savannahs and mangroves act as buffers against infectious diseases and storm surges. Forests channel moisture into rivers that irrigate crops, while their roots preve...

Chinas energy security concerns are undermining its ambitious climate pledges. We try to understand the contradiction from the perspective of Chinas leaders. And, in a country where activism can be dangerous, we find out how environmentalists are working within the system. Is Chi...

Consensus is rare in UN climate negotiations, but most parties agree on one point. China and Americathe two biggest carbon emittersmust talk. So there was understandable relief when, midway through this years conference in an Egyptian resort, the two countries agreed to resume a ...

EVERY MORNING scores of buses roll into Dhaka, Bangladeshs sprawling, sinking capital. Their passengers, laden with bundles, step out into a new life. By one estimate, some 2,000 migrants arrive in the city each day. Almost all come from elsewhere in the country and most have, at...

From TONNES of carbon to degrees of global temperature rise, it is not unusual for un climate summits to revolve around numbers. At this years cop, held in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, one set of figures is dominating the conversation above all else: the size of the bi...

To read more of The Economists data journalism visit our Graphic Detail page THERE HAS been some small progress in the fight against climate change. The Global Carbon Budget, a forecast of the sources of greenhouse-gas emissions and the sinks which absorb it, showed that growth i...

NO ONE SAID that combating climate change would be cheap. Still, a report released during the COP27 climate talks made for a sobering reminder. The report, commissioned by Britain and Egypt as the past and current hosts of the UN summit, said that developing countries alone need ...

For a look behind the scenes of our data journalism, sign up to Off the Charts, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter. Agricultural yields have been rising for decades, defying predictions that the worlds population would outgrow its food supply. Such gains stem largely from scie...

COP27 has kicked off in Egypt, and adaptation is high on the agenda. In the second episode of our series covering the conference, we explore how to step up global efforts to adapt to a changing climate. Edward McBride, The Economists briefings editor, travels to Iraq to investiga...

To accept that the worlds average temperature might rise by more than 1.5C, declared the foreign minister of the Marshall Islands in 2015, would be to sign the death warrant of small, low-lying countries such as his. To widespread surprise, the grandees who met in Paris that year...

Barren does not begin to describe Abu Aymans small patch of land in southern Iraq. The sun pounds down, sometimes pushing the temperature above 50C (122F). Dry earth and withered weeds crackle underfoot. It used to be a palm plantation, but no trees remainjust rows of untopped tr...

Rich countries, says Macky Sall, the president of Senegal, must show more solidarity with developing ones. He means they must compensate those countries for their losses due to climate change and that they must provide them with money for adaptation. The obvious way to pay both b...

The 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, at which the un Framework Convention on Climate Change (unfccc) was signed, marks the point at which the world started to pay attention to climate change. One of the reasons it did so was fear about the future of agriculture. Farming and i...

It can climb stairs, check gauges and send reports. When its not busy with work, it takes itself off to its quarters, to rest. It never needs food or water, and can plug itself in to recharge. And although it doesnt like sandstorms any more than people do, it knows how to batten ...

Farmers are not the only people who need to adapt to the changing climate of southern Iraq. The summer temperatures make air conditioning ever more vital, but it is neither universally affordable nor reliable. War, corruption and mismanagement have left Iraqs grid unable to keep ...

CLIMATE CHANGE touches everything. It is reshaping weather systems and coastlines, altering where crops can be grown, which diseases thrive, and how armies fight. Rising temperatures affect geopolitics, migration, ecosystems and the economy. It will remake societies and the world...

On November 6th the worlds leaders will assemble once more to talk about the climate. This time last year all eyes were on Glasgow, in Britain, for the COP26 UN climate summit. Attention now turns to Egypt, host of COP27. Progress since Glasgow has been disappointing, as the late...

Editors note: On November 20th delegates at COP27, the UN climate summit, agreed to set up a new loss and damage fund to help cover the costs of climate damage in vulnerable countries. DENMARKS GOVERNMENT recently pledged just over $13m to developing countries that have suffered ...

HURRICANE IAN crashed into Floridas coast on September 28th. It is thought to be tied as the fifth-strongest recorded hurricane to have made landfall on the contiguous United States, with winds approaching 150mph (240kph). It left Cuba in darkness after knocking out its power gri...

The recent floods in Pakistan have submerged a third of the country and left more than 1,100 people dead. Monsoon rains, the heaviest in a decade, caused flood surges of more than a metre in parts of the country. It is not the only part of the world to have endured extreme weathe...

Nomad Century. By Gaia Vince. Flatiron Books; 288 pages; $28.99. Allen Lane; 20. Climate Change and the Nation State. By Anatol Lieven. Oxford University Press; 240 pages; $29.95. Penguin; 9.99 Suppose the global temperature were to rise by four degrees Celsius above its pre-indu...

One of your columnists favourite ways of passing a hot afternoon in Monterrey, three hours south of Mexicos border with Texas, is with a cold bottle of locally brewed Bohemia beer alongside a plate of cabrito (roast kid). For a business writer, it is a justifiable use of the expe...

Economists visit time-tested haunts when they want to get a feel for how Europe is faring. The bourses of Milan or Paris provide a barometer of investor sentiment. Counting container ships coming into Rotterdam and Marseille gives a clue as to the haleness of trade. Frankfurt, wh...

For a look behind the scenes of our data journalism, sign up to Off the Charts, our weekly newsletter The disastrous effects of climate change are plain to see: in recent weeks devastating wildfires have torn through large swathes of Europe and heatwaves have killed more than 1,0...

For a look behind the scenes of our data journalism, sign up to Off the Charts, our weekly newsletter Milan, italys second city, turned off half its public fountains this week in an attempt to save water. Amid a fierce heatwave, some Italian cities have also placed restrictions o...

Walking into the grid control room at 50Hertz, a Berlin-based utility, on the morning of May 13th felt like walking onto the bridge of a spaceship: screens full of data, an air of competent calm and the underlying sense of an immense flow of power being guided on its journey. Thi...

When shadrack lolokuru was nine or ten, his relatives put him into a bucket and lowered him into a well. From the murky bottom, he filled the bucket and passed it back up so the familys cows could drink. No one thought this odd. Among his people, the Samburu of northern Kenya, a ...

It is a word normally used only in homeware catalogues, alongside coral, fuchsia and taupe, to make a bluish-green towel or sweater sound sophisticated and desirable. But teal has suddenly become the most important term in Australian politics. It denotes independent candidates wh...

ON A SPRING day in 2021 some visitors to the ECB made an unusual entrance. Just before its governing council was due to meet, two paragliders landed on one of its buildings in Frankfurt, unfurling a banner reading: Stop funding climate killers! Another banner urged the bank to Ac...

THE WAR in Ukraine is causing countries to rethink their dependence on Russian energy. Some governments are turning to nuclear power. While unpopular, it is one of the safest and most sustainable forms of energyand an essential weapon in the fight against climate change. Can inno...

THE WINDOW to prevent global temperatures from rising by more than 1.5C above pre-industrial averages is rapidly closing. Decisions made this year could determine whether that target is met or whether the world overshoots it by the middle of this century and has to deal with seve...

AS RUSSIAS INVASION of Ukraine becomes more violent, the world is on the cusp of what may become the worst energy crisis since the 1970s. Whereas those crises only involved oil, Russia is one of the worlds largest producers of nearly every form of energyoil, natural gas, coal, an...

JEREMIAH LETTING learned about coffee from his father. As a child in the late 1980s, he worked on his familys one-acre (0.4 hectare) coffee farm in the hills of Nandi county, western Kenya. The cycle ran like clockwork: cultivate, plant, ripen, harvest and sell. Every year was th...

DEADLY FLOODING and landslides have become a regular threat in my hometown of Kampala, the capital of Uganda. In 2019, we were hit particularly hard: the rains killed more than a dozen people and washed away peoples belongings and businesses. Waters from Lake Albert submerged pri...

IN NORMAL CIRCUMSTANCES the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) can take media attention for granted. Its infrequent and authoritative analyses of how much climate change human activity is causing, and will cause, and its weighty warnings about the consequent rising ...

THERE IS A peculiarly modern form of the uncanny which Glenn Albrecht, a philosopher, dubs solastalgia. It is an uneasy feeling that what you took to be the natural way of things has been changed, without your consent, and that your life does not fit into it as once it did. It is...

THE ASSESSMENT REPORTS from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change used to assess scientific extrapolations, the output of models and similar investigations into likely and frightening futures. The latest, sixth, assessment report, which comes eight years after the previou...

ON FEBRUARY 15TH 2018 a gas well blew up in Ohios Belmont county. Flying overhead shortly before 1pm, a state highway-patrol helicopter captured images of a column of flames and a billowing plume of soot and gases rising high into the sky from the rolling hills. Although the flam...

INVESTORS ENTHUSIASM for financing the green transition is growingjust look at the surge of interest in the electric-car industry. Teslas shares rose by 50% in 2021; those of CATL, Chinas battery giant, rose by 68%. Yet if you look more closely, you will find huge problems. If th...

AFTER A major UN climate summit, momentum behind climate policy often falters. But will that happen in 2022 in the wake of COP26? Climate cooperation is leading to some unlikely alliances and new reports on the impact of global warming underline greater urgency. Will significant ...

COP26, THE UN climate summit that took place in November, sought to speed up the fight against climate change. In the end governments merely kept alive the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. This year extreme weather events, from a heatwave in Am...

TORNADOES CAN, individually, be unpredictable to the point of caprice. In general, though, their behaviour follows particular rules. They spawn in places where big slabs of cold air can move in on top of warmer air below on a large scale, with strong winds headed in different dir...

THE SALAR DE UYUNI, a salt flat in southern Bolivia, is so vast and so white you can see it from the moon. It spans 10,000 square kilometres (4,000 square miles), roughly the area of Kosovo. The top layer consists of salt hexagons, thick enough to withstand the weight of Jeeps an...

KARASHIMA YUKARI sits before a colour-coded map. She points out homes that were inundated by floods in Saga prefecture in August, for the second time in two years. Ms Karashima, who works at the Peace Boat Disaster Relief Volunteer Centre, a non-profit, spends much time rushing t...

AS COP26 FINALLY came to a close on November 13th, more than 24 hours behind schedule, the mood inside the drab temporary buildings erected to house it on the banks of the River Clyde was a mix of celebration and frustration. The painful reality suffusing the conference was that ...

After two weeks of talks in Glasgow, the UNs climate conference, COP26, has come to a close and the final decision document has been published. But will it be enough to stop global temperatures rising 1.5C above pre-industrial levels and to limit the harm of global warming? Cathe...

ONE SIDE-EFFECT of hosting an international climate conference is an outbreak of navel-gazing. As the UN extravaganza in Glasgow nears its end, many opinion polls and studies have appeared, which provide a superbly detailed view of how Britons think about climate change. They rev...

IT IS tempting to dismiss personal responsibility for lowering ones carbon footprint. After all, it was BP that popularised the concept in the mid-aughts, telling everyone that it was time to go on a low-carbon diet. The company knew full well how impossible that was, much like i...

IT IS TRADITIONAL, after a major UN climate summit, for the momentum behind climate policy to enter a lull. It happens most noticeably in years after annual summits that had created a lot of pre-conference fanfare and expectations that were almost impossible to fulfil. This was t...

FARMERS IN SOUTHERN Italy are cultivating avocados and mangos. Tropical creatures such as the rabbitfish are turning up in Mediterranean nets. And Bordeaux winemakers fret that their Merlot grapes may become extinct. Fifty years ago all this would have been unthinkable. But since...

A rise of 3C in global temperatures above pre-industrial levels by 2100 would be disastrous. Its effects would be felt differently around the world, but nowhere would be immune. Prolonged heatwaves, droughts and extreme weather events could all become increasingly common and seve...

THE RAIN it raineth every day, Feste tells the audience at the end of Twelfth Night. And the COP it COPpeth every year. Since 1995 the countries bound by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) have missed only one conference of the partieswhen the pandemic struck ...

MIHIR, A 25-YEAR-OLD who lives near the Indian city of Durgapur, has big plans. They all depend on coal. Every day, he rides his bicycle around collieries and depots gathering sacks of coal slipped to him by conniving workers or security guards. Once he has stacked the bike with ...

STEVE TRAIN used to finish work by 1pm. In those days, Mr Trainwho has worked as a lobsterman in Maine for more than 30 yearsdidnt have to travel far to find the critters. Now he sometimes wraps up closer to 4pm. Some lobsters are still close to shore, but rising temperatures hav...

WHEN IT COMES to tackling climate change, the British government lacks neither ambition nor self-regard. In 2019 it enacted a law committing itself to reaching net zero greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050. A medium-sized country that accounts for 1% of global emissions believes it c...

The effects of climate change will be felt by everyone, but who should be taking the lead on climate action? The Economists deputy executive editor, Sacha Nauta, was joined by our environment editor, Catherine Brahic, and our briefings editor, Oliver Morton, to discuss whose resp...

HYDROGEN HAS been controversial ever since the tragedy of the Hindenburg, an airship filled with it that went down in flames in 1937. Boosters say that the gas is a low-carbon miracle which can power cars and homes. The hydrogen economy, they hope, will redraw the energy map. Sce...

EATING LESS meat or giving up flying are palpable ways people can help mitigate climate change. But how much does personal action matter? And how should societies meet the challenge of lowering greenhouse gas emissions? Yael Parag of the Reichman University in Tel Aviv weighs the...

In a subscriber-only live event, Oliver Morton, The Economists Briefings senior editor, and Catherine Brahic, Environment editor, discuss the recent findings of the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report which has delivered the starkest warning yet about climate ...

RISING GLOBAL temperatures have already increased the frequency of floods, wildfires, droughts and heatwaves around the world. If humanity does not change course rapidly, the effects of climate change will become more extreme. What can be done to avoid this outcome? To a Lesser D...

FOR HUMANS, adapting to climate change will mostly be a matter of technology. More air conditioning, better-designed houses and bigger flood defences may help ameliorate the effects of a warmer world. Animals will have to rely on changing their bodies or their behaviour. In a pap...

READING HIS local newspaper last month, Bruce, a 70-year-old retired executive, could take it no longer. Almost every article on Nola.comwebsite of the Times-Picayune, New Orleanss paper of record since 1837had an element of Wokeism, he wrote in an email cancelling his subscripti...

IN RECENT YEARS regulators have begun warning about the threat that climate change poses to the stability of the financial system. Following its strategy review in July, the European Central Bank (ECB) will assemble a climate change action plan. Mark Carney, the former governor o...

TOM EISENHAUER remembers driving through Manitoba, a province in central Canada, more than a decade ago. Surrounding his car were fields of cold-weather crops, such as wheat, peas and canola (rape). Dense staples such as maize (corn) and soya, which are more profitable, were few ...

IN A YEAR scarred by one extreme weather event after the next, the question of how far climate change is to blame has continually come to the fore. On August 23rd a group of climate scientists issued its preliminary assessment of the role of climate change in the devastating floo...

THE HEADLINE of the latest pronouncement from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on the physical science of climate change is the finding that, even if the world cuts emissions by more than governments are promising, it is still more likely than not that Earth w...

AT A KEY moment in the film Jaws, police chief Martin Brody, having known that a shark attack was possible, witnesses one actually happen. The director, Steven Spielberg, underlines the transformative nature of Brodys shock with a shot which makes inspired use of a camera techniq...

THE UN CLIMATE bodys latest doorstopper report is unequivocal: climate change is human-caused, and already hereand 1.5C of warming is looking ever harder to avoid. In Bolivia, debate still rages as to whether a 2019 election was rigged, or a coup; the people want pandemic relief,...

CLIMATE CATASTROPHES have come thick and fast in recent months. In June an unprecedented heatwave blasted the Pacific northwest, creating the conditions for devastating wildfires. In July extreme floods in central China killed more than 30 people. In August deadly fires have been...

EVEN A SHORT spell submerged in floodwaters is enough to transform a car into an eerie, unfamiliar object. A week after ferocious rains first battered the central province of Henan, the hulk of a white Toyotafronds of waterweed wrapped round its buckled framelay on a muddy street...

IN 1745, AS the river Liffey, having broken its banks, clawed at the foundations of the house in which he sat, the young Edmund Burke experienced a strange, perverse thrill. The man who would go on to found modern conservatism drew inspiration from this experience in a later essa...

BY THE STANDARDS of the 21st century as a whole, 2021 will almost certainly go down as a comparatively cool year. By the standards of the rest of human history its weather looks disconcertingly like hell. On July 20th, as Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland were sti...

By the standards of the century as a whole, 2021 will probably turn out to have been a relatively cool year. But that is not the way it has felt. Devastating floods in northern Europe and central China, a worsening water shortage in the Middle East and north Africa, and fierce fo...

CARBON PRICES are the most cost-effective way to fight climate changebut for them to work properly, emissions must be priced everywhere. On July 14th the European Commission unveiled its plan to levy what would, in effect, be a tariff on some carbon-intensive imports which, by vi...

IN THE FOOTHILLS of Chianti Classico in central Italy, Elena Lapini and her husband make their way down neat rows of grapevines and inspect their fruit. The grapes are ripening too fast under the blistering sun. Too much bronzing on the vine and they will wither into raisins, tur...

IN RECENT WEEKS Canadas west coast and much of Americas Pacific north-west have experienced an extreme heatwave. Lytton, a village in British Columbia, reported record temperatures three days in a row: a new record was set on June 29th when thermometers read 49.6C (121.3F). The w...

A ROOF OVERBURDENED with construction equipment, poor waterproofing, faulty construction: if reasons such as these are behind the catastrophic collapse on June 24th of a condominium building in Florida, they will be fairly straightforward to learn from and to fix in other buildin...

SINCE ARRIVING two days late at its usual landing point at Thiruvananthapuram in Kerala near Indias southern tip, South Asias annual summer monsoon has made up for lost time. Tearing north, the south-westerly, rain-bearing winds covered four-fifths of the country in the first two...

THE FIRST sign of trouble on the Rhine, Europes busiest inland waterway, was when the river cruises and hotel ships disappeared. Then the cargo vessels got smaller, or simply stopped sailing; goods like coal were shifted to trains. Water levels fell low enough to expose unexplode...

HUMAN SOCIETIES depend on healthy ecosystems. People consume their products in the shape of fish, meat, crops, timber and fibres such as cotton and silk. Medicines may be directly harvested from the natural world or inspired by molecules and mechanisms found within it. The ecosys...

OF ALL THE appointments to Mario Draghis cabinet, arguably the least expected was that of Roberto Cingolani, his minister for ecological transition. A physicist and former science director of the Italian Institute of Technology, Mr Cingolani came into government from a senior job...

THE STONE AGE did not end for lack of stone, and the oil age will end long before the world runs out of petroleum. That battle cry animates critics of Big Oil, who dream of phasing out hydrocarbons in favour of cleaner fuels and technologies. Their bete noire is ExxonMobil, long ...

THE EIGHT arseholes in Karlsruhe, otherwise known as Germanys Federal Constitutional Court, have been perennial irritants for politicians, as this outburst from an irate minister in the 1970s suggests. Yet on April 29th, when the courts first senate declared Germanys climate-chan...

WESTERN DEFENCE ministries are talking up their willingness to take on a new enemy: climate change. In March Lloyd Austin, Americas defence secretary, wrote that the changing climate is altering the global security and operating environments, impacting our missions, plans and ins...

Editors note: This article has been updated to take in news of Joe Bidens climate summit, which occurred after The Economist went to press MEETINGS OF GLOBAL leaders always combine, in varying proportions, pomp, substance, glitches and questionable set design. The first day of Pr...

Climate change is a dire threat to countless people. The longer humanity takes to curb emissions, the greater the dangers. Nearly 200 governments signed the landmark Paris agreement of 2015 that promised to limit global warming to between 1.5 and 2C above pre-industrial levels. B...

TODAY JOE BIDEN, Americas president, is playing host to 40 world leaders in a virtual climate summit. He kicked it off with a plan to cut Americas greenhouse-gas emissions in half by 2030, compared with their levels in 2005. That is nearly twice the reduction promised by Barack O...

COFFEE IS A multi-billion dollar industry that supports the economies of several tropical countries. Roughly 100m farmers depend on it for their livelihoods. Unfortunately for them, and for the many other people around the world for whom coffee is a near-essential adjunct to life...

THE PLAN that President Joe Biden unveiled in Pittsburgh on March 31st proposes over $2trn of spending on jobs and infrastructure. However, at the heart of the American Jobs Plan is action to combat climate change. It bristles with support for electric vehicles and renewable ener...

HOW MANY, many things/they call to mind/these cherry blossoms! the poet Basho once wrote of Japans favourite flower. The blossoms have long provoked reflections on beauty, transience and the unceasing rhythms of the natural world. This year, their annual appearance has many think...

THE PARIS agreement, negotiated at a United Nations summit in 2015, committed its 194 signatory countries (plus the European Union) to try and keep the worlds average temperature to well below 2C above pre-industrial levels, and if possible 1.5C. The world is already perilously c...

SUSTAINABLE INVESTING is in the firing line, as two recent events have shown. Last week, the board of Danone, a French food-maker, fired its boss, Emmanuel Faber, who had long championed the benefits of stakeholder capitalism and sustainability. Shareholders were unhappy with the...

SEVERAL SHOWY Hollywood blockbusters have imagined a world devastated by climate change. In The Day After Tomorrow (2004), the most famous example of a cli-fi disaster film, the planet is beset by superstorms, hurricanes and tsunamis. A paleoclimatologist must save his son as the...

IF ALL GOES well, a balloon will soon rise from Esrange Space Center in Kiruna, Sweden. It will drift high into the upper atmosphere, where nothing will happen. The balloon will then return to Earth. Nevertheless, a collection of environmental groupsincluding the Swedish branches...

TEXAS PRIDES itself on being different. Yet it is in the grip of a winter storm that typifies the Snowmageddon-size problems facing energy in America. Although nobody can be sure if this particular freeze is a sign of climate change, the growing frequency of extreme weather acros...

TEXANS ARE not used to putting on snow boots and salopettes. Temperatures in much of the state rarely drop below 5C during the winter. This weeks extreme chill, which has brought snow storms and sent thermometers down to -18C in places, has thrown Texas into chaos. Power outages,...

How to Avoid a Climate Disaster. By Bill Gates. Knopf; 272 pages; $26.95. Allen Lane; 20 HOW MANY planets? That question was posed by Mahatma Gandhi as he contemplated the environmental implications of Indias following the resource-intensive path of development pioneered by Brita...

Migrations. By Charlotte McConaghy. Flatiron Books; 272 pages; $26.99. Published in Britain as The Last Migration; Chatto & Windus; 12.99 THE VOGUE for emotive literary engagements with the natural worldknown as the new nature writing and encompassing the work of Amy Liptrot, Hel...

ON JANUARY 25TH John Kerry, a former senator and secretary of state, made his first speech as Americas new climate envoy. Addressing world leaders by video at a conference on climate change, he lamented the absence of leadership from his country over the past four years under Don...

AFTER DECADES of incremental steps forward, 2021 will be the most significant year yet for combating climate change. Two recent developments have made this possible. First, as science tells us that we have a decade to reduce emissions dramatically or face the worst impacts of cli...

EVERY YEAR since 1995, tens of thousands of climate-policy wonks, politicians, journalists and campaigners from all corners of the world have gathered in one place at the end of the year. For two weeks they cram themselves into an enclosed conference centre. There is much talking...

GOVERNMENTS ARE lining up to set new climate targets for the middle of the century. This week Japan said that it would eliminate all greenhouse gases (see article). In the past month or so China and South Korea have declared that their economies will be carbon-neutral, meaning th...

WHEN SET against the grave threat posed by climate change, the green policies favoured by economists can seem convoluted. Carbon prices, beloved of wonks, require governments to estimate the social cost of carbon emissions, a nebulous concept. Green subsidies put politicians in t...

IN A RECORDED video message to the UN General Assembly on September 22nd, Chinas leader, Xi Jinping, made a surprise announcement. He said that as well as aiming to halt the rise of its carbon emissions by 2030much the same goal as five years agoChina would strive for carbon neut...

Covid-19 has given a sense of how hard it will be to deal with climate change. As economic activity has stalled, carbon-dioxide emissions have fallen sharply. But to have a decent chance of keeping Earths mean temperature less than 2C above pre-industrial levels, net greenhouse-g...

FOR MOST of the world, this year will be remembered mainly for covid-19. Starting in Asia, then spreading across Europe and America before taking hold in the emerging world, the pandemic has infected millions and killed hundreds of thousands. And it has devastated economies even...

IN MID-JANUARY a storm gathered over Lake Michigan. Gale-force winds dragged water up and dumped it on Milwaukee. The city was pummelled, says Adam Tindall-Schlicht, the director of its port, which was badly damaged. Dock walls were ripped off and washed inland. The trade routes ...

SENSO-JI IN TOKYO, dedicated to the boddhisattva of compassion, is Earths most visited sacred site. Some 30m people a year pass through the temples imposing entrance, known as Kaminarimon, or Thunder Gate, flanked by Fujin, the god of wind, and his even fiercer brother, Raijin, t...

RELENTLESS CLIMATE change will make devastating blazes more likely; urbanisation in woodland areas will make them more costly. Prevention measures could helpif updated and widened. Anti-vaxxers may undermine coming covid-vaccination efforts; we examine the history of a baseless a...

ON SEPTEMBER 7TH in Denver, Colorado, the temperature reached 34C (93F), 6C above what is normal for the time of year. The city was sitting under the dome of hot air encouraging record fires across the American West (see article). The next day snow started to fall. By midnight th...

NOT FOR the first time in her life, Scotlands first minister is getting ready to enter a television studio in her home city. But the purpose of Nicola Sturgeons forthcoming visit is not to answer questions about Brexit or public health; instead, she will conduct a probing intervi...

RECENT REPORTS paint a dark picture, from heatwaves to hurricanes to high-water marks. But some promising trendsand pandemic-era economicsprovide reasons for hope. We examine the night-time economy of the very swankiest parties, discovering a kind of beauty brokerage at work behi...

AMERICAS CONFRONTATION with China is escalating dangerously. In the past week the White House has announced what may amount to an imminent ban on TikTok and WeChat (two Chinese apps), imposed sanctions on Hong Kongs leaders and sent a cabinet member to Taiwan. This ratcheting up ...

IN DECEMBER, WHEN Saudi Aramco listed 1.5% of its shares on the Riyadh stock exchange, it became the worlds most valuable listed company, with a market capitalisation of $1.9trn or so. The state-backed oil behemoths bosses assured investors that low costs and vast reserves would ...

THE AMERICAN embassy escaped the blast in Beiruts port unscathed. Many Western countries either have missions in the city centre or diplomats who live in the area. The wife of the Dutch ambassador was killed, as was a German diplomat. But Americas embassy sits in the mountain vil...

ADAPTING A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seths epic novel about marriage, politics and social upheaval in newly independent India, for the small screen was a labour of love for its director. Mira Nair talks to Anne McElvoy about why she worked with a white writer on this Indian classic, t...

JOE BIDENS strategy so far has been to stay out of the way as far as possible. The more the news cycle is filled with President Donald Trump, covid-19 deaths and economic misery, the better for Mr Bidens campaign. So far it has worked: he is nine points up in our average of polls...

ANDREW JOHNSTONE runs a fund that goes where people have not gone before. Launched in 2015, Climate Investor One finances renewable-energy projects that the market deems too risky, such as wind farms in Vietnam and hydropower facilities in Uganda. It uses grants from development ...

FOR CHINESE users, WeChat does far more than just messaging. What are the implications of Americas proposed ban on the Chinese super app? Also, Canadas last full Arctic shelf has collapsed, and climate change is to blame. And a sizzling solution to indoor barbeque pollution. Tom ...

THE DRAMATIC arrest of Jimmy Lai, a pro-democracy newspaper owner, reveals just how enthusiastically Beijings new security law will be deployed to quash any dissent. A reservoir is filling behind an enormous new dam in Ethiopiaand that has soured relations with Egypt downriver. A...

RELATIONS BETWEEN America and China are at a fresh low. What do Donald Trumps latest threats mean for Chinese businesses? Also, the coronavirus has had a disastrous effect on Saudi Aramcos earnings. How can the state-controlled oil company weather the extreme conditions? And, the...

EVERYONE KNOWS how to do a Donald Trump impersonation. In speech, adopt his raspy timbre, bellowing volume and start-stop rhythm. In writing, throw in bigly, capitalise Emotional Noun Phrases and end everything with an exclamation mark. Such quirks of enunciation and spelling mak...

On Time and Water. By Andri Snaer Magnason. Translated by Lytton Smith. Serpents Tail; 352 pages; 16.99. To be published in America by Open Letter in March 2021; $26. IN AUGUST 2019 an extraordinary plaque was unveiled at Borgarfjordur, in western Iceland. It commemorates Okjokul...

DONALD TURNER, Americas top trustbuster in the mid-1960s, saw antitrust law as benefiting from an inhospitable tradition: on many matters its default response was to say no. Government lawyers routinely blocked mergers merely on the grounds that the resulting company would be too...

IN JUNE MWAZULU DIYABANZA marched into the Musee du Quai Branly in Paris with four friends. Ive come to recover goods that were stolen from Africa, he said, seizing a funerary statue from South Sudan. With 70,000 objects, the Quai Branly has Frances biggest stash of African artef...

AS THEY REOPEN after lockdown, many restaurants are firing up their barbecues. Diners appreciate food grilled over glowing charcoal embers, but the neighbours often do not. Pollution levels near restaurants can be notably higher than average, largely because of emissions from kit...

FOR FIVE months Guyana has waited to see if the stand-off between its president, David Granger, and the opposition would end in violence, a coup or a peaceful transfer of power. On August 2nd peace prevailed. The Elections Commission declared that Irfaan Ali, the oppositions cand...

WHEN THIS correspondent formed a band in his early 20s with four other jazz maniacs, little did its members think it would still be going decades later. But then A Night In Tunisias business model worked impeccably until the pandemic. Rather than charge money, the band bribed lis...

SINCE LAUNCHING a policy on misleading information in May, Twitter has clashed with President Donald Trump. When he described mail-in ballots as substantially fraudulent, the platform told users to get the facts and linked to articles that proved otherwise. After Mr Trump threate...

IN DECEMBER 2018 China hawks in the Trump administration pushed a series of punitive measures in what some referred to internally, according to a new book by Bob Davis and Lingling Wei, as Fuck China Week. That was as nothing compared with what happened in the month of July 2020....

IN A BOOK of essays called The Next Great War?, which examines Sino-American relations through the lens of the first world war, Richard Rosecrance warns of the tyranny of small things, the points of friction and misunderstanding between rival powers that, without leadership to ma...

SCIENTISTS ARE looking to South-East Asia to find how the virus got its start in humans. Knowing that could head off future pandemics. It is often hard to blame climate change unequivocally for weather events, but there is no other explanation for this years searing Arctic temper...

Editors note: Some of our covid-19 coverage is free for readers of The Economist Today, our daily newsletter. For more stories and our pandemic tracker, see our hub IN THE FORM it is known today, macroeconomics began in 1936 with the publication of John Maynard Keyness The Genera...

IT IS SOMETIMES said that governments wasted the global financial crisis of 2007-09 by failing to rethink economic policy after the dust settled. Nobody will say the same about the covid-19 pandemic. It has led to a desperate scramble to enact policies that only a few months ago ...

THIS HAS been a sweltering year in the Siberian Arctic. Between January and June, temperatures across the region were more than 5C warmer than the recent average (calculated between 1981 and 2010). In some spots they were more than 10C above average. On June 20th in the town of V...

MUCH OF the international effort thus far to combat climate change has focused on cutting emissions of greenhouse gases, chief among them carbon dioxide. That is, of course, a rational approach. Global average temperatures are roughly 1.1C warmer today than in pre-industrial time...

Letters are welcome via e-mail to letters@economist.com Of limited intelligence Artificial intelligence is an oxymoron (Technology quarterly, June 13th). Intelligence is an attribute of living things, and can best be defined as the use of information to further survival and repro...

Editors note: Each of these climate-change articles is fiction, but grounded in historical fact and real science. The year, concentration of carbon dioxide and average temperature rise (above pre-industrial average) are shown for each one. The scenarios do not present a unified n...

ON NOVEMBER 7TH 1972 the people of Delaware voted to send Joe Biden, a brash, garrulous county councilman, to the United States Senateeven though he would not turn 30, the Senates age minimum, for another two weeks. During the campaign he had sought both to use and downplay his y...

IN THE MAYFAIR office of Chris Hohn, the boss of TCI, a hedge fund, an enormous photograph of a melting iceberg hangs on one wall. Robert Gibbins, the founder of Autonomy Capital, another London hedge fund, says his desk is adorned with the deformed remains of a car bumper, melte...

THE FINANCIAL industry reflects society, but it can change society, too. One question is the role it might play in decarbonising the economy. Judged by todays fundraising bonanza and the solemn pronouncements by institutional investors, bankers and regulators, you might think tha...

WHOM WOULD China prefer as Americas next president? That is a hard question, without an uplifting answer. In elite circles in Beijing, both President Donald Trump and his rival, Joe Biden, a former vice-president, are spoken of with distrust and condescension. Rather unusually, b...

COMPANIES ARE often quick to tout their green credentials. So are many of the sophisticated institutional investors who buy and sell their shares. Yet when it comes to pricing the risk of climate change, those investors may be falling short. New research suggests that the risk of...

IF ECONOMISTS ruled the world, carbon prices would drive most of the action on climate change. Polluters would pay for the negative externality their emissions inflict on the planet. There might be differences on the method of paymentsome might lean more towards taxes, others tow...

Editors note: Some of our covid-19 coverage is free for readers of The Economist Today, our daily newsletter. For more stories and our pandemic tracker, see our hub FOLLOWING THE pandemic is like watching the climate crisis with your finger jammed on the fast-forward button. Neit...

WHEN COMPANIES that depend on emissions, such as easyJet, an airline, use offsets sold on private over the counter markets to claim carbon neutrality it is hard not to be reminded of the indulgences sold by the medieval Catholic church that helped sinners to go on sinning guilt-f...

Editors note: This article is the fourth in a series of climate briefs. To read the others, and more of our climate coverage, visit our hub at economist.com/climatechange ON NOVEMBER 21ST 2016, a line of thunderstorms passed through the Australian state of Victoria. By the end of...

Editors note: This article is the third in a series of climate briefs. To read the others, and more of our climate coverage, visit our hub at economist.com/climatechange IT IS ALL, in the end, a matter of chemistry. Carbon dioxide is a form of what chemists call inorganic carbona...

Editors note: This article is the second in a series of climate briefs. To read the others, and more of our climate coverage, visit our hub at economist.com/climatechange TO IMAGINE EARTH without greenhouse gases in its atmosphere is to turn the familiar blue marble into a barren...

APRIL 22ND WAS doubly disrupted. If it had not been messed up by the covid-19 pandemic, as all days now are, parts of it would have been brought to a halt by activism about the climate. This was the 50th anniversary of the first Earth Day, a festival of demonstrations, marches an...

Editors note: This article is the first in a series of climate briefs. To read the others, and more of our climate coverage, visit our hub IN JUNE 1988 scientists, environmental activists and politicians gathered in Toronto for a World Conference on the Changing Atmosphere. The a...

THE SOUTH-WEST of the United States, together with adjacent parts of Mexico across the Rio Grande, is one of the driest parts of the North American continent. But, over the past two decades, even that expected dryness has been taken to the limit. According to Park Williams, who w...

Editors note: The Economist is making some of its most important coverage of the covid-19 pandemic freely available to readers of The Economist Today, our daily newsletter. To receive it, register here. For our coronavirus tracker and more coverage, see our hub THIS YEAR started ...

Editors note: The Economist is making some of its most important coverage of the covid-19 pandemic freely available to readers of The Economist Today, our daily newsletter. To receive it, register here. For more coverage, see our coronavirus hub IN VENICE, WATER in the canals is ...

ON THE HILLS of central Kenya, almost lime-green with the shimmer of tea bushes in the sunlight, farmers know all about climate change. The rainy season is not predictable, says one. When it is supposed to rain it doesnt, then it all comes at once. Climate change is an issue that...

A NURSE, a roofer, an electrician, a former fireman, a lycee pupil, a photographer, a teacher, a marketing manager, an entrepreneur and a civil servant. Sitting on red velvet benches in a domed art-deco amphitheatre in Paris, they and 140 colleagues are part of an unusual democra...

JEFF BEZOS, the boss of Amazon and the worlds richest man, has long had a reputation as a peculiarly frugal plutocrat. A quarter of a century after Amazon was founded, the firm, now worth over a trillion dollars, still does not pay dividends to its shareholders. Lately, though, h...

IS IT A peak, a stutter or just a brief pause? Time will tell. But whatever it is, on February 11th the International Energy Agency (IEA), an intergovernmental organisation which collects such data, announced that emissions of carbon dioxide in 2019 which were related to energy h...

AS REVOLUTIONARY SLOGANS go, it hardly had the resonance of No pasaran! But when Repsol, a Spanish oil company, said in December it would reduce the net carbon footprint of everything it produces to zero within 30 years, it marked the most powerful pledge so far by a big oil firm...

I BELIEVE WE are on the edge of a fundamental reshaping of finance, wrote Larry Fink, the boss of BlackRock, the planets biggest fund manager, in an open letter on January 14th. His annual missives, addressed to clients and the bosses of companies in which BlackRock invests, are ...

THE FIRES eased over Christmas. But as 2020 neared, Australias inferno blazed anew. In the state of Victoria, thousands of people fled to the seashore on New Years Eve as bushfires ringed the coastal town of Mallacoota. Samuel McPaul, a volunteer firefighter, died earlier in neig...

THE ECONOMISTS international section thrives on variation. It covers everything from sport to kidney transplants, and maritime piracy to air-traffic controlanything that qualifies as a truly international issue. Looking at what we have published in 2019and in particular, at the a...

ANNUAL UN CLIMATE summits are never moments of unbridled optimism, but this years, held in Madrid and dubbed COP25, was particularly dispiriting. Its logo was a clock with its hands at a quarter to 12. Midnight duly passed on Friday December 13thsupposedly the summits last day, a...

AS FAR AS interest rates are concerned, the new boss of the European Central Bank (ECB), Christine Lagarde, seems largely in agreement with Mario Draghi, her predecessor. Where she seems to differ is in wanting the bank to be greener. On December 2nd she told European parliamenta...

LABELLING BASED on incomplete information, public shaming, and shunning wrapped in moral rhetoric, said Hester Peirce, a straight-talking commissioner at Americas main financial regulator, the Securities and Exchange Commission, in June. She was taking aim at the scoring systems ...

OF THE WISDOM taught in kindergartens, few commandments combine moral balance and practical propriety better than the instruction to clear up your own mess. As with messy toddlers, so with planet-spanning civilisations. The industrial nations which are adding alarming amounts of ...

SOON AFTER Hurricane Sandy battered Manhattan in 2012, Emilie Mazzacurati founded a firm in California to analyse the risks posed by climate change to business. She called it Four Twenty Seven, after the states target of lowering annual greenhouse-gas emissions to the equivalent ...

GALILEO GALILEI, it is said, described wine as sunlight, held together by water. Todays winemakers can only agreeat their own expense. Wine grapes are highly sensitive to climate. Too much heat and they accumulate excess sugar, producing overly alcoholic and flabby wines. Not eno...

Rightly, the world has been celebrating the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. On November 9th 1989 the communist government of East Germany announced that its security forces would no longer prevent people from visiting West Berlin. Quickly, delirious Berliners sur...

THIS YEARS electioneering already has a greener tinge than 2017s. A summer heatwave and Extinction Rebellions activism have given environmental issues a fillip. Polls by YouGov find that around a quarter of the public list the environment among the top three problems facing Brita...

LAST TIME Canadians had a general election, in 2015, many felt it was a struggle for the soul of the country. It pitted Stephen Harper, a cantankerous Conservative from the oil-producing province of Alberta who had governed for nearly ten years, against Justin Trudeau, the handso...

THE ECONOMISTS Open Future essay competition winner was announced in September, beating nearly 2,400 entries from over 110 countries. But how might artificial intelligence tackle the question? We asked it. Specifically, we fed the essay question and the 58-word description throug...

LIKE DISORGANISED students, Germanys ministers had to pull an all-nighter to meet a deadline they had known about for months. On September 20th, after the members of the climate cabinet had spent 19 hours negotiating in the office of Angela Merkel, the chancellor, they unveiled a...

THOSE CONCERNED about global warming change had a clear message for the leaders attending the United Nations Climate Action Summit on September 23rd. Greta Thunberg, a 16-year-old activist, led protests in New York imploring politicians to act now to limit rising temperatures, an...

WHAT ARE the risks businesses face from climate change? And Kate Raworth, economist and educator, explains doughnut economics and says rich economies are addicted to unending growth. Who are the billionaires hoping to make big bucks from climate change? Also, we hear from the fin...

WHAT TO WEAR to dine on the ocean floor? The invitation warned of the changing weathers of Scotlands west coast. Oilskins and a souwester might have been appropriate. Or wellies. Or perhaps just bare feet. Over ten days in September 2017, Alon Schwabe and Daniel Fernandez Pascual...

LIKE ALL human enterprise, business is threatened by climate change. And, as with humanity as a whole, these risks may not become catastrophic for the corporate world for decades. But some corporate citizens will be vulnerable soonerif they are not already. Global regulators, suc...

IN THE EARLY 19th century Joseph Fourier, a French pioneer in the study of heat, showed that the atmosphere kept the Earth warmer than it would be if exposed directly to outer space. By 1860 John Tyndall, an Irish physicist, had found that a key to this warming lay in an interest...

IN NORTH JAKARTA, not far from a quayside where workers unload frozen mackerel, a derelict building stands a metre deep in murky water. The warehouse was flooded in 2007, after torrential rains and a tidal surge submerged half the city under nearly four metres of water, displacin...

IT IS NOT just that Asia accounts for the greatest proportion of the worlds carbon emissions, with China the biggest emitter, India the third-biggest, and Japan, South Korea and Indonesia all among the top dozen. Asians are also the most vulnerable to climate catastrophe, with me...

TAKE IN THE view from atop Gatun dam and fathom what is missing. Container ships float idly on Lake Gatun, near the midpoint of the Panama Canal, awaiting passage to the Caribbean sea, their gateway to the Atlantic Ocean. What look like islands are hilltops poking up from a valle...

THE PILOTS of the Port of London Authority are the cabbies of the Thames estuary. Based in Gravesend, 33km from the capital, they navigate some 10,000 ships into London terminals every year. Dispatched offshore on fast patrol boats, they use rope ladders to board ships as tall as...

WHEN HURRICANE DORIAN rolled across the Abaco islands on September 1st, packing winds of 300kph (185mph) and bringing sea surges of nearly eight metres (26 feet), it was as powerful as any Atlantic storm ever to have hit land. The destruction it wrought was devastating, the death...

FROM ONE year to the next, you cannot feel the difference. As the decades stack up, though, the story becomes clear. The stripes on our cover represent the worlds average temperature in every year since the mid-19th century. Dark blue years are cooler and red ones warmer than the...

FIRST CAME fires that turned the Siberian skies into a wall of solid smoke stretching for thousands of kilometres. Then came a drought that sucked the Lena river nearly dry, leaving boats marooned in the mud. It has been an arduous summer in Yakutia, an icy republic in Russias fa...

AFTER DESTRUCTIVE storms like Hurricane Dorian, those affected have decisions to make. Should they invest in cellar pumps and better drainage? Should they rebuild with more robust design and materials? Should they move? These judgments are informed by a harsh reality: the weather...

AS GLOBAL LEADERS prepare for the UN climate change summit next week, we debate what changes individuals can make today to help limit the effects of climate change. The Economists environment editor, Catherine Brahic, hosts a roundtable with Christiana Figueres, who convenes Miss...

Here you will find some of the resources used in the production of The Economists film Climate change: the trouble with trees along with exclusive additional material. It is part of the The Story Behind, a film series that reveals the processes that shape our video journalism. DO...

FOR DECADES, some of the worlds sharpest minds have advanced a plethora of ideas to tackle climate change, but to no avail. Perhaps its time to give the kids a chance. The Economist asked 16- to 25-year-olds to answer, in fewer than 1,000 words: What fundamental economic and poli...

In this years essay competition The Economist received nearly 2,400 entries from 130 countries and territories. They came from entrants as young as nine and as old as 71who said they felt compelled to add their voice, even though the rules specified that only those aged 16 to 25 ...

This is the winning essay of The Economists Open Future Essay Competition 2019 on the question What fundamental economic and political change, if any, is needed for an effective response to climate change? The winner is Larissa Parker, a law student at McGill University in Montre...

The second in a series of articles on the impact of global warming on the world LIKE MOST Malawians, Wema Kaloti lives off the land. She grows maize on her family plot in Kamwendo, a village in the south of the country. But farming is getting harder as rainfall grows erratic. Som...

IF HURRICANE stories feel like an annual ritual for news organisations every autumn in the northern hemisphere, that is because they are. Last year was the third in succession of storms in the Atlantic of above-average intensity. Hurricane Dorian suggests this year may follow sui...

IMAGINE A HUGE horizontal A-frame: a recumbent, two-dimensional Eiffel Tower. Pin a pivot through its tip, so it can swivel around 90 degrees. Then add to its splayed feet something like the rocker of a rocking chair, but 210 metres long, 22 metres high and 15 metres wide. Now do...

IN EAST AFRICA millions of people are suffering from a prolonged drought. Deadly typhoons are wreaking havoc in Vietnam. Honduran coffee-farmers are seeing their crops wither in the heat. Poor countries have less capacity than rich ones to adapt to changing weather patterns, and ...

AFTER 29 HOURS of uninterrupted negotiations the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), on how alterations in land use are contributing to such change, was gavelled through in Geneva on the afternoon of August 7th. When, minutes later, your corre...

THE MERCURY is rising, carbon-dioxide levels are increasing and a 16-year-old girl is leading a global movement to call attention toand demand action onan existential threat. Global warming threatens economies and the stability of societies. Political leaders have negotiated seve...

THE MOMENT when, 50 years ago, Neil Armstrong planted his foot on the surface of the Moon inspired awe, pride and wonder around the world. This newspaper argued that man, from this day on, can go wheresoever in the universe his mind wills and his ingenuity contrives...to the plan...

WHEN BEN VAN BEURDEN was a boy in the Netherlands, one of his chores was to fill the coal scuttle. It was a hateful taskespecially in the cold weather when he had to traipse out to a shed in the back garden. I can still feel the wet, freezing cold creeping up my legs, he told a D...

IS AMERICAN INACTION on climate change going to render bits of the planet uninhabitable by 2100? Or will American grit and ingenuity lower the risks? There is evidence for both views. While the White House was issuing an edict seeking to offer relief to coal-fired power stations ...

BRIAN BOQUIST, an Oregon state senator and fugitive of sorts, does not take his pursuers lightly. Send bachelors and come heavily armed, he warned from his hideout, which is allegedly in Idaho. Im not going to be a political prisoner in the state of Oregon, he added. Since June 2...

1 A gamble on the rains WITH RHEUMY eyes and a face wizened by the sun, Narayanappa looks down to the ground and then, slowly, up to the skies. After weeks of harsh heat his land, one and a half hectares (four acres) of peanuts, chillies and mulberry bushes, has turned to dust. A...

GREENLANDS MISLEADING name is the result of a marketing campaign by Erik the Red, a tenth-century Norse explorer who wished to attract settlers to its icy landscape. Little did he know that the island had been covered by lush forests many millennia before he was born. Nor could h...

IT USED TO take some effort to shut down an airport. A quarter of a century ago the Irish Republican Army (IRA) fired mortar rounds into Heathrow on three separate days over the course of a week. It failed to make much of a dent. Nothing exploded, nobody died and the airport was ...

FOUR GENERATIONS of one family run Riverdock Restaurant in Hardin, a small town on a spit of wooded land between the swollen Illinois and Mississippi rivers. The matriarch is Sara Heffington, in red T-shirt and jeans. She says the Illinois river usually passes 400 feet (120 metre...

INVESTORS CONCERNED about climate change have never been better organised, thanks to Climate Action 100+, a coalition with more than $33trn in assets under management. Nor have they ever had more success. Last year shareholders of Royal Dutch Shell persuaded it to pledge emission...

ALL THE worlds a stage, wrote William Shakespeare in his monologue, The Seven Ages of Man. Centuries later, that stage is on fire, to paraphrase Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish climate-change activist who delivered a raw message to titans of industry in Davos this year th...

DID CLIMATE change cause the war in Syria? Or the genocide in Darfur? Obviously, that is not the whole story. Suppose Syrias despot, Bashar al-Assad, or Sudans former tyrant, Omar al-Bashir, were to find themselves on trial in The Hague and tried to blame their countrys carnage o...

ON THE OUTSKIRTS of Baga Sola, a small town in Chad not far from the border with Nigeria, is a refugee camp called Dar es Salaam. The name means haven of peace, but the surrounding area is an inferno of war, spilling across the borders of four countries: Chad, Nigeria, Niger and ...

ARTISTS HAVE long been inspired by the great issues of their day. Eugene Delacroixs topless amazon, Liberty, celebrated the revolution that toppled the French king in 1830. Picassos Guernica mourned the horror of the Spanish civil war. Earlier this month a panel backed by the UN ...

IN THE PAST 150 years, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen from 280 parts per million (ppm) to 410 ppm. For farmers this is mixed news. Any change in familiar weather patterns caused by the atmospheric warming this rise is bringing is bound to be disru...

ONE OF THE great concerns that ornithologists have is that climate change will throw the nesting activities of birds out of sync with the availability of food for the raising of chicks. For one species, the pied flycatcher, a new study shows that some of its clan are proving to b...

RARELY HAS climate change been discussed in America as often as it is today. The Green New Deal, a utopian but implausible spending programme proposed by some Democrats, has been championed by left-leaning commentators and pilloried by conservatives. Despite a spate of wildfires ...

DESPITE RAGING forest fires and images of receding glaciers, the consequences of climate change seem vague and abstract, buried under a mountain of stats and UN reports. Many know the effects will be terrible but policymakers and journalists struggle to describe how it will chang...

Editor's note: This article has been changed. A previous version mistakenly described Mr Shapiro as an "alt-right sage" and "a pop idol of the alt right". In fact, he has been strongly critical of the alt-right movement. We apologise. EVERYTHING ABOUT Ben Shapiro is polished. His...

AMERICAN PUBLIC opinion has been catching up to the scientific consensus on climate change, but still has a long way to go. In a poll conducted by the Pew Research Centre in 2016, just 48% of respondents said they believed that the Earth was warming because of human activity. One...

TORNADOES KILLED at least 23 people in Alabama on March 3rd, causing catastrophic damage as winds of up to 270 km (170 miles) per hour ripped apart rural towns in Lee County. Such severe weather events, especially hurricanes and heat waves, are projected to become more intense in...

AS IT SCOURS the universe for signs of extraterrestrial life, NASA has a motto-cum-mission-statement: Follow the water. About 70% of the human body is made up of water, it says, and 70% of Earths surface is covered in the stuff. Water creates an environment that sustains and nurt...

CHIEF EXECUTIVES who care about climate changeand these days most profess tooften highlight headquarters bedecked with solar panels and other efforts to lower their carbon footprint. Last week Volkswagen, a carmaker, told its 40,000 suppliers to cut emissions or risk losing its c...

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming. By David Wallace-Wells. Tim Duggan Books; 320 pages; $27. Allen Lane; 20. CLIMATE CHANGE is a devilish problem for humanity: at once urgent and slow-moving, immediate and distant, real and abstract. It is a conundrum for writers, too. ...

LETS PRETEND our house is our planet, Damon Gameau, an Australian actor and writer, says. In front of his fireplace he explains that burning fossil fuels cause carbon emissions, and animated black dots crowd the room. Reaching into his bathtub, where computer-generated waves ebb ...

IN AMERICA, THE worlds largest economy and its second biggest polluter, climate change is becoming hard to ignore. Extreme weather has grown more frequent. In November wildfires scorched California; last week Chicago was colder than parts of Mars. Scientists are sounding the alar...

AS DEALS GO, the New one was a big one. Franklin Roosevelts plan to yank America out of depression permanently altered the contours of the countrys economy and politics. Proponents of a Green New Deal harbour similar ambitions. Though still nebulous the proposal, championed most ...

HOW MUCH do Midwesterners care about climate change? The back of the envelope political calculation is that this region is the least interested of any in the subject, says an official at Chicagos city hall. He notes how the last coal-fired power station inside Chicagos city limit...

CLIMATE CHANGE is many problems in one. Developing and deploying zero-carbon technologies is a formidable challenge. So is the politics of co-ordinating disparate groups to achieve the necessary collective action. In America, where the Republican Party persists in climate deniali...

INTERNATIONAL OIL companies wrestle with the clash between their duty to deliver value to shareholders and the fact that how they produce those returns threatens the planet. A key question is whether they can reduce greenhouse-gas emissions without gutting their businesses. On De...

IT IS MORE than a quarter of a century since the leaders of the world, gathered in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, committed their countries to avoiding dangerous anthropogenic interference in the climate system by signing the UN convention on climate change. The case for living up to th...

CLIMATE POLICY in America has always been an up-and-down affair. But few reversals have been as dramatic as the replacement of Barack Obama with Donald Trump. Unlike his predecessor, the current president is sceptical about climate change and loves beautiful, clean coal. The envi...

CLIMATE CHANGE is not threatening Dale Parks livelihood, but it is not making his life easier, either. His small cattle farm near Badgingarra in Western Australia gets about 580mm of rain a yearwell below the 650mm that was typical when he first moved there 30 years ago. The rain...

FOR decades scientists have warned that rising atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels risk adversely affecting the climate, increasing ocean acidity, the frequency of freak weather and other symptoms of planetary ill-health. But it seemed ...

LIFE in Longyearbyen, the worlds northernmost town, can be harsh. Average high temperatures in July top out at 8C; for three and a half months in the winter, the sun does not rise at all. Polar bears roam freely, meaning that anyone leaving the settlement of just over 2,000 peopl...

IN 1996 the European Union became the first significant political body to suggest that the goal of preventing dangerous anthropogenic interference in the climate, to which the world had signed on at the Rio Earth summit of 1992, meant, in practical terms, keeping global warming b...

THREE years ago the world agreed in Paris to keep global warming below 2C relative to pre-industrial levels, and preferably no higher than 1.5C. Scientists expecting a fuzzier climate-friendly commitment were astonished by the inclusion of the lower target, inserted at the insist...

PEOPLE living on opposite sides of the planet have in recent days felt the disastrous consequences of distant rumblings in the deep ocean. In America, they are still suffering the devastation left by Hurricane Florence, which made landfall in North Carolina on September 14th. Les...

SUPPOSE Britains prime minister ordered civil servants to make the worlds fifth-biggest economy fully carbon-neutral by 2045, and thereafter to extract more greenhouse gases from the atmosphere than it emits. In a sense that is what happened on September 10th, when Governor Jerry...

EARTH is smouldering. From Seattle to Siberia this summer, flames have consumed swathes of the northern hemisphere. One of 18 wildfires sweeping through California, among the worst in the states history, is generating such heat that it created its own weather. Fires that raged th...

IN MAY some 250 scientists and policy types from around the world convened in Gothenburg, Sweden, to discuss a dirty secret of the three-year-old Paris climate agreement. Virtually all simulations which chart paths toward meeting that compacts goalto keep temperature rise well be...

SIX years ago Nabil Musa, a Kurdish environmentalist, returned from over a decade abroad to find Iraq transformed. Rivers in which he had swum year-round turned to dust in summer. Skies once crowded with storks and herons were empty. Drought had pushed farmers to abandon their cr...

GLOBAL warming is often used as a synonym for climate change, and most discussions of the topic focus on the expected increase in average global temperatures. However, the frequency and severity of individual, catastrophic weather events depend heavily on the variability of tempe...

EACH morning, as the tide recedes, the people of the Marshall Islands check the walls that protect their homes from the sea. Sea levels in this part of the western Pacific are rising by 12mm a yearfour times the global averageand countering them with sandbags, concrete and metal ...

UNTIL America gets a grand military parade, a drive along the wharf at Naval Station Norfolk, in Virginia, is the next-best thing. Destroyers, missile-cruisers, nuclear-powered submarines and, most fearsome of all, two 333-metre (1,092-foot) Nimitz-class aircraft-carriers, are en...

MANY people fear that the rapid disappearance of Arctic sea ice spells doom for polar bears. The effect of global warming on another famous northern species, the reindeer, is, however, less cut and dried. Until recently, researchers thought reindeer benefit, rather than suffer, f...

TWO years ago the world pledged to keep global warming well below 2C hotter than pre-industrial times. Climate scientists and campaigners purred. Politicians patted themselves on the back. Despite the Paris agreements ambiguities and some setbacks, including President Donald Trum...

IN FEBRUARY a tribunal in Kirkenes, in Norways far north, ruled that oil extraction in the Barents Sea was illegal. The courtrooman auditorium sculpted from 190 tonnes of ice, pictured aboveand the verdict were fictitious, staged as part of a festival. But the legal question is r...

IN JUNE Christiana Figueres, the UNs former climate chief who helped broker the Paris agreement in 2015, warned that the world has three years to safeguard our climate. It was a hyperbolic claim, even then. New research makes it seem even more of one today. An analysis published ...

WHEN religious leaders speak out on matters of global policy, they often stick to lofty generalities and avoid making direct challenges to those who wield earthly power. Not so this week. In the space of barely 24 hours, Donald Trump and his perceived indifference to environmenta...

TO THE untrained eye, the satellite photos of north-west Ethiopia on July 10th may have seemed benign. They showed a relatively small pool of water next to an enormous building site on the Blue Nile, the main tributary of the Nile river. But the project under construction is the ...

THIS summer America has experienced some of the most intense heatwaves in decades. In parts of southern Arizona the mercury has climbed to a sweltering 48C. That has had an impact on the states infrastructure. Last month, a single days heatwave grounded dozens of planes. As globa...

ON JULY 12, the Larsen C ice shelf in Antarctica disgorged a chunk of ice the size of Delaware, a small state on Americas east coast. Americas government seems unfazed by the possibility that such shifts might one day threaten Delaware itself. Its climate defiance grows not only ...

THE Great Barrier Reef stretches some 2,300 km down Australias north-east coast, covering an area the size of Italy. It is home to about 600 types of coral and 1,625 species of fish. UNESCO calls it a site of remarkable variety and beauty. That may not last. For the second consec...

THOSE who doubt the power of human beings to change Earths climate should look to the Arctic, and shiver. There is no need to pore over records of temperatures and atmospheric carbon-dioxide concentrations. The process is starkly visible in the shrinkage of the ice that covers th...

DONALD TRUMP continues his assault on environmentalism. On March 28th he signed an executive order instructing Americas Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to withdraw and replace Barack Obamas flagship energy policy, the Clean Power Plan. Among other measures, the "Energy Inde...

BLOWING hot and cold doesnt begin to cover it. In 2009 Donald Trump signed a public letter calling for cuts to Americas greenhouse-gas emissions. In 2012 he dismissed climate change as a hoax cooked up by the Chinese. On the campaign trail he promised to withdraw from an internat...

IN 1972, on their way to the Moon, the crew of Apollo 17 snapped what would become one of the most famous photographs ever taken. The Blue Marble shows Earth as it looks from space: a blue sphere overlaid by large brown swatches of land, with wisps of white cloud floating above. ...

This week The Economist explains blog looks at the American presidential candidates' positions on major policy issues. For four days until Thursday this blog will publish a short explainer about one specific area A COMPARISON of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump on environmental p...

POUR some water into a partly full bathtub and the level in the tub will rise. Calculating how much it will rise is straightforward, as long as the surface area of what was already there and the amount being added are known. The same should apply to working out how much the sea l...

CAN you spot the connection between rising carbon-dioxide levels and a European free trade area? Or between free movement of labour and the increased risk of "extreme weather" events? It is not easy to spot the intellectual link. Remarkably, however, many of the leading campaigne...

MENTION the phrases greenhouse gases and global warming in the same breath and most people will think of the carbon dioxide produced by burning fossil fuels such as coal and oil. But CO2 is not the only greenhouse gas and fossil fuels are not the only source of such gases. A surp...

WEVE shown whats possible when the world stands as one, declared Barack Obama after UN climate talks in Paris ended with an agreement on December 12th. Our collective effort is worth more than the sum of our individual effort, said Laurent Fabius, Frances foreign minister, who ov...

THE test of a first-rate intelligence, F. Scott Fitzgerald, a sometime Parisian, once wrote, is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time. By this standard, the 195 countries that gathered outside Paris in the two weeks running up to December 12th to negotia...

HISTORY is here, declared Francois Hollande, Frances president, on Saturday morning. The UN climate conference in Paris had run over its original deadline, and the final text had yet to be seen, but the mood among the negotiators and ministers he was addressing was buoyant. And f...

In December talks in Paris involving more than 200 countries may result in a new agreement aimed at reducing carbon emissions. In the months leading up to the conference, The Economist will be publishing guest columns by experts on the economic issues involved. Here, Damian Tago,...

IN SOME ways, the climate talks that begin in Paris on November 30th will show world leaders at their best. Taking a break from pressing issues such as terrorist threats and stuttering economies, they will try to avert a crisis that will pose its gravest risks long after they hav...

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LOOKING BACK FROM the early 24th century, Charlotte Shortback suggests, half-jokingly, that modern human history can be split into distinct periods. The most exciting was the Accelerando, from about 2160 to 2200, when human lifespans were greatly extended and the terraforming of ...

IN AN APPROPRIATELY sweltering lecture theatre at the University of Pierre and Marie Curie in Paris, scientists gathered earlier this year to discuss a phenomenon called the global-warming hiatus. Between 1998 and 2012 humans pumped unprecedented quantities of greenhouse gases in...

WITHIN days the world's leaders will flock to Paris for the latest round of UN climate talks. None will deny the consequences of the greenhouse effect on the Earths temperature, the role carbon dioxide plays therein or humanitys part in adding to the level of that gas in the atmo...

FEW symbols of the oil industry are as familiar as the pumpjack, or nodding donkey (pictured). The technology is little changed since it was invented in 1925, and in some mature onshore fields it serves as a constant reminder of the worlds insatiable thirst for oiluntil recently,...

SAVING the planet is now a matter of a few clicksat least on a small scale. On September 22nd the UNs Climate Change Secretariat launched Climate Neutral Now, a website that estimates an individuals carbon footprint based on whereabouts, recycling habits, energy use and so on. Of...

In December talks in Paris involving more than 200 countries may result in a new agreement aimed at reducing carbon emissions. In the months leading up to the conference, The Economist will be publishing guest columns by experts on the economic issues involved. Here, John Quiggin...

RELIGIOUS organisations tend to operate slowly and ponderously, while environmental politics, and sometimes the environment itself, move more rapidly. The Vatican had intended to release Pope Francis's long-planned encyclical on climate change in a carefully choreographed event o...

EARLY this year, touring a drought-stricken fruit farm in California, Barack Obama cited the states three-year dry spell, the worst on record, as an example of the harm that climate change can cause. Politicians like this sort of pronouncement. David Cameron, Britains prime minis...

COULD Pope Francis become the world's foremost campaigner on global warming? That is certainly the fondest hope (or in a few cases the darkest fear) of a lot of people who are closely involved in deliberations over the planet's future. Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general, met t...

SHINY things absorb less heat when left in the sun. This means that if the Earth could be made a little shinier it would be less susceptible to global warming. Ways to brighten it, such as adding nanoscale specks of salt to low clouds, making them whiter, or putting a thin haze o...

FIVE years ago next month, disagreement between America and China, the worlds biggest greenhouse-gas emitters, scuppered the UNs Copenhagen climate-change conference. On November 11th Presidents Barack Obama and Xi Jinping announced a deal on carbon emissions. This is welcome, wi...

SCIENCE has spoken, said Ban Ki-Moon, the UNs secretary general. Time is not on our side. Leaders must act. He was reacting to the latest assessment of the state of the global climate by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a group of scientists who advise govern...

ON NOVEMBER 2ND the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which represents mainstream scientific opinion, said that it was extremely likely that climate change is the product of human activity. Extremely likely in IPCC speak means having a probability of over 95%. The...

ON SEPTEMBER 21st Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general, joined thousands of people on a march through the streets of New York to demand more action on climate change. Organisers of the march claimed that there were related events in 161 countries. The targets of these global adm...

ON SEPTEMBER 23rd 120-odd presidents and prime ministers will gather in New York for a UN meeting on climate change. It is the first time the subject has brought so many leaders together since the ill-fated Copenhagen summit of 2009. Now, as then, they will assert that reining in...

NOTHING is too good for the United States Congress. The Capitol even has its own power station. The Capitol Power Plant in south-east Washington is still puffing away, though it was built in 1910making it older than most museums of powerand even though it has not generated any el...

THE less people know about how laws and sausages are made, the better they sleep at night. That comment, attributed to Bismarck, could equally apply to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The IPCCs reports, published every six or seven years, are immense undertakings. ...

THE Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a gathering of scientists who advise governments, describes itself as policy-relevant and yet policy-neutral. Its latest report, the third in six months, ignores that fine distinction. Pressure from governments forced it to st...

IN SCIENCE, more information is supposed to lead to better conclusions and greater consensus. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which published its latest report on March 31st, certainly has more information. The new study synthesises 73,000 published works (a...

THE four horsemen of the apocalypse": that was the disparaging appraisal by Richard Tol of the University of Sussex of a report published in Yokohama on March 31st by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a group of scientists (including Dr Tol) who provide govern...

How global surface temperature, ocean heat and atmospheric CO2 levels have risen since 1960 THE record of atmospheric carbon-dioxide levels started by the late Dave Keeling of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography is one of the most crucial of the data sets dealing with global ...

IT HAS been a long time coming. But then the fifth assessment of the state of the global climate by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a United Nations body, was a behemoth of an undertaking. It runs to thousands of pages, involved hundreds of scientists and wa...

HELL is a city much like Londona populous and a smoky city, wrote Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1819. It is a description that would suit many Chinese cities today for, like Britain in the early 19th century, China is going through an industrial-powered growth spurt. Like Britain back ...

A SHORT film called The Drowning Room features a seemingly ordinary family dining together. The scene is mundane, silent but for the sharp tick-tock of a clock. But there is something eerie about the way it looks. As air bubbles escape from their lips, it becomes clear: they are ...

GLOBAL warming has slowed. The rate of warming of over the past 15 years has been lower than that of the preceding 20 years. There is no serious doubt that our planet continues to heat, but it has heated less than most climate scientists had predicted. Nate Cohn of the New Republ...

AT NOON on May 4th the carbon-dioxide concentration in the atmosphere around the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii hit 400 parts per million (ppm). The average for the day was 399.73 and researchers at the observatory expect this figure, too, to exceed 400 in the next few days. The...

OVER the past 15 years air temperatures at the Earths surface have been flat while greenhouse-gas emissions have continued to soar. The world added roughly 100 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. That is about a quarter of all the CO2 put there by hu...

Greenprint: A New Approach to Cooperation on Climate Change. By Aaditya Mattoo and Arvind Subramanian. Centre for Global Development; 150 pages; $17.99. Buy from Amazon.com MOST books about the environment take the West as their starting point. This is understandable. For decades...

GOVERNMENTS like to cite external constraintssuch as meeting the conditions for an international bail-outwhen pushing through unpopular policies. But with measures to deal with climate change, the opposite prevails. Each round of intergovernmental talks on cutting emissions and c...

NEVER let it be said that climate-change negotiators lack a sense of the absurd. Thousands of politicians, tree-huggers and journalists descended on Doha this week, adding their mite of hot air to the country that already has the worlds highest level of carbon emissions per head....

The Carbon Crunch: How Were Getting Climate Change Wrongand How to Fix It. By Dieter Helm. Yale University Press; 273 pages; 20. To be published in America next month; $35. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk IN DECEMBER 2009, as the Copenhagen climate conference fell apart, the ch...

James Hansen argues that rising global temperatures are fueling an increase in extreme weatherHe cites a 2010 heat wave in Russia and last year's Texas drought as examplesHansen, an activist, directs research at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies What do the 2010 heat w...

A FLOATING MOUNTAIN of grey and white ice, castellated and crevassed like an Alpine ridge, the iceberg is vast: the size of two aircraft carriers, maybe more. Scale is hard to judge in the Arctic because of its ubiquitous icy-white backdrops. Yet much the biggest part of the iceb...

THE overwhelming majority of climate scientists believe the Earth is warming as a result of man's activities. The American public is more sceptical. About a quarter of Americans still have doubts about global warming, and even more believe that the threat is being over-hyped. It ...

THE UN's climate change summit in Durban last December confirmed how far the world is from limiting its emissions of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas. Everyone agrees that this must be done, but not on who, exactly, should do it. Given the deadlock, an America-led plan to ...

IN THE early hours of December 11th, after three days and nights of exhausting, often ill-tempered final negotiations, the United Nations' two-week-long climate-change summit in Durban ended with an agreement. Its termseven assuming they are acted uponare unlikely to prevent a gl...

A HUNDRED years from now, looking back, the only question that will appear important about the historical moment in which we now live is the question of whether or not we did anything to arrest climate change. Everything elsethe financial crisis, the life or death of the euro, au...

IN HARD times governments are consumed by short-term problems. But this does not mean the archetypal long-term problem, climate change, has gone away. Science continues to support the case for curbing greenhouse-gas emissions so as to minimise the risks of catastrophe. Meanwhile ...

FOR those who question whether global warming is really happening, it is necessary to believe that the instrumental temperature record is wrong. That is a bit easier than you might think. There are three compilations of mean global temperatures, each one based on readings from th...

A new measure of global warming FOR those who question whether global warming is really happening, it is necessary to believe that the instrumental temperature record is wrong. That is a bit easier than you might think. There are three compilations of mean global temperatures goi...

ON SEPTEMBER 9th, at the height of its summertime shrinkage, ice covered 4.33m square km, or 1.67m square miles, of the Arctic Ocean, according to America's National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC). That is not a record lownot quite. But the actual record, 4.17m square km in 200...

THE problems climate change looks likely to bring in the future may increasingly be visible in the records of the past. Not just in the far-off ages of surging sea levels following ice-age thaws, spikes in prehistoric temperatures correlated with natural releases of greenhouse ga...

ON THURSDAY March 31st Richard Muller of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory gave evidence to the energy and commerce committee of America's House of Representatives on the surface temperature record. Without having yet bothered to check, Babbage can say with some certainty that this ev...

THE planet-wide industrial exhalation of previously fossilised carbon is not the only way that humans are changing the Earth's climate. There are other greenhouse gases, other atmospheric pollutants, the effects of cutting down forests, and more: together these things may contrib...

AN IDEAL fossil-fuel power-plant would produce power, carbon dioxide and nothing more. Less-than-ideal onesnot to mention other devices for the combustion of carbon, from diesel generators to brick kilns and stoves burning dungalso emit various gases and gunk. These often cause l...

AS A follow-up to last week's post wondering why Americans don't care about global warming, I wanted to mention a few things drawn from the comments and elsewhere around the web. One theme from commenters was that they're not concerned about climate change because they don't beli...

IN AN interesting piece at the environmental publication Grist, David Roberts looks at the way in which climate scientists and economists often butt heads over policy recommendations. The scientists, he says, continue to pull in new data on the pace of change and suggest that cat...

MY COLLEAGUES have been discussing climate change, and it's worth noting that global warming used to be the subject of genuine political debate in Washington as well. Al Gore made a movie about it. Barack Obama vowed to put a stop to it (indeed, he claimed that he had begun to lo...

FIRST of all, I apologise for the slightly inflammatory headline of this post. The fact is that a majority of Americans (58%) do think climate change is a serious problem, according to the January 2011 Rasmussen Energy Update, and fully one-third, 33%, "see it as a Very Serious p...

OUR topics this morning are global warming, evolution and feathers. Let's start with the warming. Despite a frenzied last-minute drive involving snowstorms in Europe and the eastern United States, planet Earth failed to save itself from another last-place finish in 2010: once aga...

COMPARED with the extraordinary fanfare before the global-warming summit in Copenhagen a year ago, the meeting of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change that starts in Cancun next week has gone unheralded. That is partly because of a widespread belief that the ...

ON NOVEMBER 29th representatives of countries from around the world will gather in Cancun, Mexico, for the first high-level climate talks since those in Copenhagen last December. The organisers hope the meeting in Mexico, unlike the one in Denmark, will be unshowy but solid, lead...

THE one approach I will not accept, said Barack Obama in June of Congress's faltering efforts to fight global warming, is inaction. Instead, the president instructed America's lawmakers to seriously tackle our addiction to fossil fuels. Yet the energy bill unveiled by the Democra...

Some critics argue that the global record of land surface temperature over the 20th century could be to some extent corrupted by heat from towns and other factors. There is a clear warming, though, if a lesser one, in two other records made independently; that of the temperature ...

FOR anyone who thinks that climate science must be unimpeachable to be useful, the past few months have been a depressing time. A large stash of e-mails from and to investigators at the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia provided more than enough evidence for...

CLIMATE-change legislation, dormant for six months, is showing signs of life again in Washington, DC. This week senators and industrial groups have been discussing a compromise bill to introduce mandatory controls on carbon (see article). Yet although green activists around the w...

FACED with the undoubted grandeur of climate change, a grand response seems in order. But, to the immediate disappointment to most of those participating and watching, the much anticipated UN climate conference held in Copenhagen in December led to no such thing. Initial ambition...

AROUND 100 world leaders are set to attend the UN climate-change summit in Copenhagen to discuss a global deal to replace the Kyoto protocol. This will be tough. Scientists estimate that greenhouse-gas emissions from rich countries need to be cut by 25%-40% to keep global warming...

THE mountain bark beetle is a familiar pest in the forests of British Columbia. Its population rises and falls unpredictably, destroying clumps of pinewood as it peaks which then regenerate as the bug recedes. But Scott Green, who studies forest ecology at the University of North...

AFPAS POLITICIANS, policy wonks, businessmen, NGO types, hacks and hangers-on converge in Copenhagen for the forthcoming climate conference, a row over a set of e-mails from a previously obscure part of Britain's University of East Anglia is becoming ever louder, if no more illum...

AlamyAS THE world gathers in Copenhagen over the coming weeks to discuss how much carbon dioxide people should be putting into the atmosphere, the Benguela Stream will be docking in the Windward Isles to bring bananas to Europe for Christmas, and doing her bit to help ascertain w...

Illustration by Claudio MunozWHAT is truth? That was Pontius Pilate's answer to Jesus's assertion that Everyone that is of the truth heareth my voice. It sounds suspiciously like the modern argument over climate change. A majority of the world's climate scientists have convinced ...

SINCE time immemorial, farmers have planted their crops according to the seasons. That is what my forefathers have been doing, says Mohammad Ilisasuddin in Shibganj, in northern Bangladesh, but now the weather does not seem right for what we have done traditionally. Seasonal plan...

AVIATION has long been blamed for its share of anthropogenic global warming. Indeed, some travellers now ask themselves whether their flight is strictly necessary and, if they decide it is, salve their consciences by paying for the planting of trees. These, so they hope, will abs...