New Delhi: More than 300,000 new workers can be employed in wind and solar jobs and more than one million total employment opportunities can be created in achieving India’s ambitious clean energy goals to install 175 gigawatts (GW) of renewable power by 2022, said a study released on Wednesday. It highlighted that the solar and wind energy sectors employed more than 21,000 additional people across India in 2016-17 while an additional 25,000 people will be employed over the coming year. The study also said that labour-intensive rooftop solar segment will employ 70% of the new workforce, creating seven times more jobs…

DECEMBER 23, 2016 —The days of the Arctic being a remote and frozen wilderness appear to be coming to an end, but precisely what the rapidly changing region will develop into is only just beginning to be addressed. Two competing visions for the region clashed this week when President Obama and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced new restrictions on offshore drilling in their respective jurisdictions of the Arctic Ocean. In the eyes of these two progressive-minded leaders – one cementing his environmental legacy on the way out the door, the other beginning to establish his – the melting Arctic represents…

In one of Africa's most celebrated surprises this year, Nigerian voters unseated President Goodluck Jonathan. The election of Muhammadu Buhari defied expectations of electoral fraud and violence, and his anticorruption platform sparked hopes for reform and economic growth. Yet progress on both fronts has been slow and uneven. To understand why, pick up Tom Burgis's "The Looting Machine," a bracing look at why a continent blessed with one-third of the world's hydrocarbon and mineral wealth remains mired in poverty and dysfunction. A former Africa correspondent for the Financial Times, Burgis goes beyond the tales of spectacular venality among Africa's "Big Men" --…

Late last week the markets were shocked by a surprisingly bad May jobs report – the worst monthly report in nearly six years. The experts expected the US economy to add 160,000 jobs in May, but it turns out only 38,000 jobs were added. And to make matters worse, 13,000 of those 38,000 were government jobs! Adding more government employees is a drain on the economy, not a measure of economic growth. Incredibly, there are more than 102 million people who are either unemployed or are no longer looking for work. Gold reacted to the report quickly and decisively, gaining…

For me the Great Plains have a releasing effect. . . . Human effort is seen there in all its pitiful futility. — Thomas Hart Benton Late one afternoon in the winter of 1987, a pair of academics named Frank and Deborah Popper were inching their way down the New Jersey Turnpike when the idea hit both of them at once. Or anyway, that’s how Frank tells it. There they were, puttering along, chatting about the conundrum of the Great Plains, whose rural population has been dwindling for nearly a century, when they were overcome by a shared epiphany, and turned to each…