Finanzas

ACROSS the river from the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) headquarters in London protesters have pressure-hosed “IMO DON’T SINK PARIS” into the muck lining the walls of the Thames. The river bank is not the only thing that is dirty.

Shipping and airlines were the only greenhouse-gas-emitting industries not mentioned in the 2016 Paris climate agreement. This was, in part, because assigning emissions is hard. To whom should you designate emissions for shipping Chinese goods, made with South Korean components, across the Pacific to American consumers? But similar problems did not stop airlines quickly agreeing on an industry-wide limit. This week delegates to the IMO, a United Nations agency responsible for shipping safety and pollution, met in a belated attempt to catch up. A deal was due as The Economist went to press.

It may not be an impressive one. A preliminary agreement set out to achieve cuts of 50% on 2008 emission levels by 2050….Continue reading

“THIS is what $3bn looks like.” So beams a manager at Chevron Phillips Chemical (CPC), a petrochemical company jointly owned by Chevron and Phillips 66, both American oil firms. She throws open her arms in a figurative embrace of a giant cracker (pictured) built by the firm in Baytown, a gritty part of Houston. The new plant turns vast quantities of ethane, which is derived from natural gas, into ethylene, an important building block in plastic. Another nearby facility, which the firm has recently expanded, converts the ethylene into plastic resin that is sold worldwide. All told, CPC has spent some $6bn expanding its chemicals-production infrastructure around Houston.

A decade ago, this would have been unimaginable. Chemicals firms in America, beaten down by rivals from the Middle East that enjoyed cheap feedstocks and others from China feasting on subsidised capital, had not invested in new local plants in years. Growth in global demand for chemicals, once roaring, had slowed thanks to the…Continue reading

FOR all the allure of televised fare like “MasterChef” and “Chef’s Table”, the reality is that many people are loth to rustle up anything more taxing than a bacon sandwich. Cue the recent emergence of more than 150 companies to make cooking easier. Two of the largest, Blue Apron in America and Germany’s HelloFresh, deliver boxes of pre-portioned ingredients and easy-to-follow recipes to doorsteps worldwide for a fee of around $60 a week.

Blue Apron is also serving up a belly full of woe to investors. Less than a year after it went public in June with a $1.9bn valuation, its share price has fallen by 80%. Although the shares of HelloFresh, which debuted on Frankfurt’s stock exchange in November, have risen by 24%, analysts are concerned that both services may fall prey to competition not from rival startups, but from big grocers.

Supermarkets have gobbled up the meal-kit idea and made it their own. Instead of enrolling customers in a weekly menu of meals, these companies offer…Continue reading

From dieselgate to Diess?

MOST chief executives relish a jump in their company’s share price. But spare a thought for Volkswagen’s Matthias Müller as he watched the gauge of value leap by 4.5% on April 10th. That was galling because investors were responding to rumours, in effect promptly confirmed by VW’s board, that he was to depart this week after less than three years as head of one of the world’s top three carmakers.

The pensive Mr Müller, 64, rarely had the air of a man enjoying the limelight. His contract ran until 2020, but he had become increasingly frustrated at internal opposition to his efforts to change the way the company was run in the aftermath of “dieselgate”, a crisis sparked by VW’s rigging of car-emissions tests. To an outsider, changes such as more decentralisation and the sale of peripheral businesses hardly seemed controversial. But they were too much for some. He may be happy to go; the board referred to his “general willingness”…Continue reading

ALMOST all Canada’s oil and gas is landlocked, so getting it to market requires pipelines—lots of them. But building them requires skills more suited to circus artists than engineers. They must walk the financial high wire, jump through ever-changing regulatory hoops and juggle conflicting demands from environmental groups and numerous governments. The list of failures is long. It includes Northern Gateway, meant to bring Alberta crude to a port in northwestern British Columbia; Energy East, which would have linked Alberta to the Atlantic coast; Pacific Northwest, to bring gas to the west coast; and the legendary Mackenzie Valley gas pipeline, first proposed in 1974 and dropped in 2017 by its last, exhausted promoter.