Investments and Business

In Mo i Rana, a small Norwegian industrial town on the cusp of the Arctic Circle, a cavernous gray factory sits empty and unfinished in the snowy twilight — a monument to unfulfilled economic hope.The electric battery company Freyr was partway through constructing this hulking facility when the Biden administration’s sweeping climate bill passed in 2022. Perhaps the most significant climate legislation in history, the Inflation Reduction Act promised an estimated $369 billion in tax breaks and grants for clean energy technology over the next decade. Its incentives for battery production within the United States were so generous that they…

Two large Texas oil producers are joining forces in a deal valued at $26 billion, the latest in a wave of consolidation in the U.S. energy industry.Diamondback Energy and Endeavor Energy Resources, both major players in the booming Permian Basin oil field that straddles New Mexico and Texas, announced on Monday that they would merge in a cash-and-stock deal, with Diamondback’s shareholders owning about 60 percent of the combined company.The Permian Basin was once seen as a worn-out patch. But over the last decade or so, technological advances, including the advent of fracking, or hydraulically fractured horizontal wells, have opened…

The history of Las Vegas has been marked by a relentless churn of hotels, casinos, theaters and restaurants. But only recently has the city’s landscape included major professional sports teams.The Golden Knights of the National Hockey League were the first to start play here in 2017. The Aces of the Women’s National Basketball Association started in 2018, and the National Football League’s Raiders arrived from Oakland in 2020. Last year, Major League Baseball’s Athletics were given the go-ahead to make the same Oakland-to-Las Vegas move, and the National Basketball Association is expected to add a team in the coming years.Las…

The estimated price tag for President Biden’s clean-energy and climate agenda has effectively doubled since the Inflation Reduction Act was signed into law a year and a half ago.Nearly all of the increase is attributable to forecasters’ belief that the law will be more popular than they had originally expected, in part because of the way the Biden administration wrote certain regulations. That rising price tag may actually be good for reducing greenhouse gas emissions — and for the U.S. economy.The Inflation Reduction Act, which Democrats passed on a party-line vote in summer 2022, includes tax credits and other subsidies…

Mary Kay Henry, the president of the Service Employees International Union, one of the nation’s largest and most politically powerful labor unions, announced Tuesday that she would step down after 14 years in her position.Ms. Henry was the first woman elected to lead the union, which represents nearly two million workers like janitors and home health aides in both the public and private sectors.Under her leadership, it launched a major initiative known as the Fight for $15, which sought to organize fast-food workers and push for a $15 minimum wage. Winning over skeptics in the ranks, Ms. Henry argued that…

CNN spent years trying to compete in the cutthroat realm of chatty morning TV, cycling through formats in the hopes of catching up to breakfast-time staples like “Morning Joe” and “Good Morning America.”That experiment never quite caught on with viewers — and now it is coming to an end.In his first significant programming move since joining the network in the fall, Mark Thompson, CNN’s chairman, announced on Monday that the channel would exit the morning chat-show format by the end of the month. Instead, its morning lineup will focus on straight news coverage, the kind of bread-and-butter reporting that Mr.…