Feb 9th 2019

Crude awakening: The truth about Big Oil and climate change

The world this week

Leaders

Big oil and the environment

The truth about big oil and climate change

Even as concerns about global warming grow, energy firms are planning to increase fossil-fuel production. None more than ExxonMobil

A sputtering engine

It is time to worry about Germany’s economy

The country’s economic golden age could be coming to an end

Nuclear discord

Blame Russian cheating, not America, for killing the INF treaty

In responding, America should be careful not to fuel a ruinous arms race

The Iranian revolution at 40

American sanctions on Iran keep the mullahs mighty

The Islamic revolution has failed, but America’s hostility helps the clerics cling to power

The World Bank’s new leader

Why Malpass should get the job

Despite being a bank critic and an anti-globalist

Letters

On the Democratic Republic of Congo, hygiene, Brexit, Japan and South Korea, chicken, King Crimson, airlines

Letters

Briefing

Bigger oil

ExxonMobil gambles on growth

A fossil-fuel titan’s strategy is at odds with efforts to hold back climate change

United States

Trick or treaty

America calls time on the INF treaty, ushering in a new age of missiles

Missiles and mistrust

Russia, America and the INF

Inappropriate circumstances

What is it with shoe polish in Virginia?

Union shenanigans

Philadelphia politics are stuck in the era of prog rock

Narcissism

Botox bars are coming to a city near you

The ideas primary

Elizabeth Warren’s unusual brand of wonkish populism

Lexington

Donald Trump is the main barrier to the revision of conservatism

The Americas

Learning survival skills

Canada in the global jungle

Davi v Goliath

A congressional win for Jair Bolsonaro

Bello

The foundations of Venezuela’s regime are cracking, not yet collapsing

Asia

The can-do Gandhis

Congress, India’s oldest political party, gains a new lease on life

Blessed are the peacemakers

South Korea’s conscientious objectors escape military conscription

The princess and the PM

A royal rumour upends Thai politics

Shaving grace

Pakistan’s rugged north-west sees an outbreak of pogonophilia

Banyan

Why Japan’s prime minister pines for four desolate islands

China

Culture wars

The Communist Party capitalises on foreign interest in Chinese culture

Mao’s best friend

Once denounced as bourgeois vanity, pets are big business in China

Chaguan

Does China understand Taiwan?

Middle East & Africa

The shadow of 1979

Four decades after its revolution, Iran is still stuck in the past

Pushing on an open door

Iran was not predestined to become a regional hegemon

Thus spoke Netanyahu

An odd Hebrew word says a lot about Israeli politics

You say you want a federation

A political union for east Africa?

Battle of the big men

A Nigerian election pits an ex-general against a tycoon

Europe

Happy Helmuts

Why Germany has no gilet jaunes protesters

Le grand débat

With a town-hall tour, Emmanuel Macron tries to win France back

Phantom fakes

Europe’s vast new anti-bogus-drugs system will not find many

When you wish upon Five Stars

Italy’s populist government is dreaming of economic growth

Sniffing out corruption

The curious incident of Hungary’s treadmill for dogs

Charlemagne

Margrethe Vestager, bane of Alstom and Siemens, could get the EU’s top job

Britain

The new Europeans

Europeans in Britain are packing up. The rest of the world is moving in

Last waltz in Kilburn

Irish Britain is booming—and shrinking

X-Trail of destruction

Nissan snubs Sunderland. Is Brexit to blame?

Spam, spam, spam!

No-deal plans become ever sillier—and the public can’t wait

Woo who?

Labour MPs provide a tricky path to a majority for the Brexit deal

All pumped up and places to go

How two brothers from Blackburn reinvented the petrol station

Less haste, less speed

Brexit? What Brexit? Amid national crisis, MPs debate beer and snooker

Bagehot

What John Ruskin can teach modern Britain

International

More light, less clarity

Electricity does not change poor lives as much as was thought

When politicians see the light

Night-time satellite imagery can measure electricity provision

Business

Making it in America

American manufacturing companies have a spring in their step

Swanning in

Intel’s new boss leads a firm that is both thriving and troubled

Bartleby

A 25-year battle to improve the image of McDonald’s

Back to basics

UNIQLO’s founder plots a way to beat Zara and H&M

Laker Airways 2.0

The disappearance of Norwegian would be bad news for consumers

Foodfight

A new law decrees French supermarkets must get greedier

Schumpeter

Chinese firms are not all serial intellectual-property thieves

Finance & economics

Germany’s economy

Germany’s long expansion comes under threat

Settling up

Malaysia’s former prime minister faces trial in the 1MDB scandal

Uncalculated risk

America’s public pension plans make over-optimistic return assumptions

Final call

Bill Gross, the king of the bond market, abdicates

Profit and loss

A commission of inquiry reaches a damning verdict on Australia’s banks

Cryptocurrencies

What happens when your bitcoin banker dies?

Buttonwood

The benefits of better credit-risk models will be spread unevenly

Cut it out

Some fights about the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act seem over

Free exchange

A bold new plan to tackle climate change ignores economic orthodoxy

Science & technology

Ecology and economics

How to preserve nature on a tight budget

Conservation

The rewilding movement is going from strength to strength

Books & arts

Together under heaven

In the future, Eurasia will rule the world

The sands of time

An art gallery buried on a Chinese beach

Physician, curb thyself

An unconventional memoir of madness

Lines of colour

When the Supreme Court ruled that separate could mean equal

The sirens’ song

Mermaids, monsters—and motherhood

Economic & financial indicators

Economic data, commodities and markets

Graphic detail

Bitcoin

Will bitcoin’s price crash cut into its energy use?

Obituary

In Mesopotamia’s halls