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President Trump has rolled back environmental regulations, pulled the United States out of the Paris climate accord, brushed aside dire predictions about the effects of climate change, and turned the term “global warming” into a punch line rather than a prognosis.

Mr. Trump and his political appointees are launching a new assault.

In the next few months, the White House will complete the rollback of the most significant federal effort to curb greenhouse-gas emissions, initiated during the Obama administration. It will expand its efforts to impose Mr. Trump’s hard-line views on other nations, building on his retreat from the Paris accord and his recent refusal to sign a communiqué to protect the rapidly melting Arctic region unless it was stripped of any references to climate change.

American politics is the biggest threat facing the world in 2020 and the looming presidential election will stress the country's institutions, influence economic and foreign policy and further divide an already polarized electorate, with potentially huge consequences for the climate, business and investors.

"The campaign will focus foreign policy on managing crises, distracting US attention from non-urgent issues and geographies. Trump's thirst for deliverable 'wins' before the election, meanwhile, will amplify foreign leverage in trade and security relations," Control Risks wrote in a recent report.

"The 2020 election is an American Brexit — a maximally polarized vote where the risk is less the outcome than the political uncertainty of what the people voted for," Eurasia Group says in its report. "It's uncharted political territory, and this time in a country where uncertainty creates shock waves abroad."

A year of extreme weather events and mounting evidence of global heating have catapulted the climate emergency to the top of the list of issues worrying the world’s elite.

After a month in which bushfires have raged out of control in Australia, Brende said there was a need for urgent action.

The report was released ahead of the WEF’s annual meeting in Davos next week, which will be attended by the chief executives of some of the world’s biggest and powerful companies. Despite the large number of participants flying in to Switzerland by private jet, the WEF said Davos would be a carbon-neutral event.

Germany announced on Thursday that it would spend $44.5 billion to quit coal — but not for another 18 years, by 2038.

The move shows how expensive it is to stop burning the world’s dirtiest fossil fuel, despite a broad consensus that keeping coal in the ground is vital to averting a climate crisis, and how politically complicated it is.

Germany doesn’t have shale gas, as the United States does, which has led to the rapid decline of coal use in America, despite President Trump’s support for coal. Germany also faces intense opposition to nuclear power. After the Fukushima disaster in 2011, that opposition prompted the government to start shutting down the country’s nuclear plants, a transition that should be complete by 2022.

Tech companies capable of releasing such a tool have refrained from doing so; in 2011, Google’s chairman at the time said it was the one technology the company had held back because it could be used “in a very bad way.” Some large cities, including San Francisco, have barred police from using facial recognition technology.

without public scrutiny, more than 600 law enforcement agencies have started using Clearview in the past year

The computer code underlying its app, analyzed by The New York Times, includes programming language to pair it with augmented-reality glasses; users would potentially be able to identify every person they saw. The tool could identify activists at a protest or an attractive stranger on the subway, revealing not just their names but where they lived, what they did and whom they knew.

Wall Street’s main indexes were trading at record levels on Monday as President Donald Trump’s signing of a long-awaited $2.3 trillion pandemic aid bill bolstered bets on an economic recovery.

In a sudden reversal late on Sunday, Trump backed down from his threat to block the hard-fought bill, restoring unemployment benefits to millions of Americans and averted a federal government shutdown.

erasing some fears and investors are relieved that there is help out there,

Parler is one of the hottest apps in the world, a social network that has attracted millions of far-right conservatives over the past year with its hands-off approach to policing users’ posts. And with the news that President Trump had been kicked off Twitter and Facebook, Parler was the odds-on bet to be his next soapbox.

A day earlier, John Matze, Parler’s chief executive, had said in an interview with The Times about Wednesday’s melee that he didn’t “feel responsible for any of this and neither should the platform, considering we’re a neutral town square that just adheres to the law.”

The edicts from Apple and Google were a stark illustration of the power of the largest tech companies to influence what is allowed on the internet, even on sites and apps that are not their own

Even these two, with such similar training and moderate impulses, are remarkably far apart on basic questions

Hubbard argues that the imperative of the moment — our 3-point shot — is rolling back federal benefits for wealthier and middle-class Americans. If it’s done right, he says, taxes will fall and “more entrepreneurs will start businesses. Corporate investment would rise, creating more jobs. Individuals will work harder and save more. The country would have faster growth. The benefits are quite broad.” If we stay the present course, though, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid will keep growing unchecked, and the United States, paralyzed by debt, could burn like Rome.

Summers, who once told me “I don’t do apocalypse,” acknowledged that some entitlement reform is inevitable, but that it is not the real adjustment that needs to be made. “That is playing defense,” he said. “It is essential but insufficient.” Instead, Summers wants the country to start playing offense: the crisis that demands our attention now, he says, is long-term unemployment. Millions of Americans have been out of work for more than half a year, many for much longer; not only are they suffering, but the overall economy is poorer without their contribution. Summers argues that the U.S. government can address this problem in several ways, especially by committing to more government spending, notably on infrastructure.

Oregon earmarked $62 million to explicitly benefit Black individuals and business owners. Now some of the money is in limbo after lawsuits alleging racial discrimination.

Data and anecdotes around the country suggested that the coronavirus was disproportionately killing Black people.

the pandemic has starkly exposed the socioeconomic and health disparities that African-Americans face.

When President-elect Joe Biden assumes office in January, he will face economic challenges that are arguably greater than any president has dealt with since Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Since January, nearly one in seven Americans have lost full-time work. Permanent job losses have erased almost seven years of gains, and the nature of today's unemployment exposes some of our most vulnerable citizens to the worst economic hardships. All of this comes against the backdrop of a rapidly surging Covid-19 pandemic.

Moreover, the end of the pandemic could unleash strong economic growth from pent up demand. And the news about vaccine development provides more certainty about the end date of the pandemic.

Mr. Paulson, who intends to devote at least 50 percent of his time to his new role, plans to leverage his relationships around the globe to work with governments and industry to raise money and find investments.

The early returns from TPG’s existing Rise funds — $2 billion of which are in climate-related investments — appear to suggest that socially responsible investing can be just as profitable as other approaches. Mr. Coulter said that with the reduction in the cost of solar energy — for example, bringing it to parity with the cost of building a new gas plant in some places in the United States — the opportunity to make attractive new investments has fundamentally changed.

He said he was seeing similar opportunities in electric vehicles and the energy grid that powers them, in agriculture and in consumer packaged goods.

The underlying theme of capitalism is the use of wealth to create more wealth.

With the rapid development of European trade and prosperity in the 13th century, cities in Italy and the Netherlands witness a creation of wealth which is capitalist in kind - because any merchant is in essence a capitalist, risking his pot of money each time he buys in one place to sell in another

Florence in the 14th century demonstrates more familiar indications of capitalism. It has its great banking families, engaging in transactions across the breadth of Europe.

Addressing climate change in a post-pandemic world

the coronavirus outbreak seems to indicate that the world at large is equally ill prepared to prevent or confront either.

By contrast, financial shocks—whether bank runs, bubble bursts, market crashes, sovereign defaults, or currency devaluations—are largely driven by human sentiment, most often a fear of lost value or liquidity.

Fifty years ago, the economist Milton Friedman warned in his seminal essay, “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits,” that corporate executives would undermine the “basis of a free society” if they acted as if “business has a ‘social conscience’ and takes seriously its responsibilities for providing employment, eliminating discrimination, avoiding pollution and whatever else may be the watchwords of the contemporary crop of reformers.”

Instead of operating in a manner that treated all stakeholders fairly, Mr. Friedman argued, every corporation should seek solely to “increase its profits within the rules of the game.”

Not only that, Mr. Friedman sought to weaken the rules of the game by opposing basic civil rights legislation, unions, the minimum wage and other measures that protected workers, Black people, and the environment.

There are movies whose back stories and reception histories are as compelling as the movies themselves. “The Spook Who Sat by the Door” is one.

Directed by Ivan Dixon, “The Spook Who Sat by the Door” was adapted from a best-selling novel by Sam Greenlee that, according to its author, was rejected by nearly 40 American publishers before it was brought out by a British house in 1969.

The novel was a thriller, but Greenlee — a veteran of the U.S. Foreign Service — used it as an exposé of institutional racism. “Spook” is both a racial slur and a slang term for spy; seated “by the door” suggests a person hired for show.

Just when you thought 2020 couldn't get any more chaotic, the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg set off a political earthquake that could rattle the fragile economic recovery.

At a minimum, the loss of RBG is yet another wild card for investors, CEOs, small business owners and consumers

The Supreme Court vacancy is shaking up the previously stable battle for the White House, not to mention control of the US Senate.

He can’t afford to pay the six-figure arrears he has accrued while his restaurants remain shut, and the landlord, he said, has refused to grant a deferral or discount.

“We’re probably going to lose money for another year to a year and a half,”

Nearly 98,000 businesses have closed permanently since the pandemic took hold

a party of upper–middle-class traditions and inclinations finds itself left alone with the working-class parts of Trump’s base, in a society where the deck is more stacked against the working class than it has been since the nineteenth century.

The party’s survival depends on protecting the interests of these voters, and yet few Republicans have given much systematic thought to how they might do it. The task has fallen largely to three senators: Hawley, Marco Rubio of Florida, and Tom Cotton of Arkansas.

In the twenty-first century thus far, something strange has been happening. Reaganite Republicans have continued cutting taxes to “unleash” “entrepreneurship,” but the rich people thus favored keep turning into Democrats.

Next-generation nuclear must overcome public wariness of the technology engendered by the terrifying mishaps at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and, most recently, Fukushima. Then there is the challenge of making a compelling case for nuclear power as the cost of electricity from natural gas, wind and solar is plunging.

Rather than offering up SMRs as a replacement for renewables, proponents of the devices say they can play a complementary role in the smart grid of the future—replacing coal- and gas-fired plants and operating alongside wind and solar

Most utilities rely on a variety of electricity sources, with differing costs, emissions and capacity to provide the constant flow that power grids need for stability, says Tom Mundy, chief technology officer at SMR developer NuScale Power LLC. “Our technology is a great complement to renewable power systems,”

travel restrictions are producing an emerging trend among some wealthy Americans: buying a second passport.

“This limitation of mobility has made more people aware of ... the benefits of having more than one passport,”

Arton says his firm has seen a 30 to 40 percent increase, year to date, in demand for services that help clients obtain citizenship in a sovereign state through financial means. The price tag for these services varies, ranging from $100,000 for some Caribbean options to more than $2 million for European ones.