Las Vegas Review-Journal: Tesla CEO Says Electric Cars Will 'Suffer' From Plunging Oil Prices
Plunging oil prices are set to hit the electric-car industry hard, but Tesla vehicles won't be the worst affected, says CEO Elon Musk.
"[The] industry as a whole, I think, will definitely suffer from lower oil prices," Musk told CNN's Kristie Lu Stout on Monday. "It just makes economic sense."
The drop in the cost of fuel has already filtered through into the U.S. auto market, where sales of gas-guzzling pickups and SUVs rose last year. Oil has continued its steep descent this year, sinking last week to its lowest level in more than 12 years.
Washington Post: Recent Record Temperatures 'Extremely Unlikely' Without Global Warming
Last week, U.S. agencies announced that the year 2015 had smashed records to become the hottest year ever recorded by humans, a finding that emphasizes the continued pattern of long-term global warming on Earth. The prior hottest year was just one year earlier -- 2014 -- and nine out of the 10 hottest years on global record have now occurred in the past decade.
Now, a new paper out Monday in the journal Nature Scientific Reports conducts what the authors have described as a more rigorous calculation, concluding that the odds of this series of record-breakers -- ending with 2014 -- were not quite as low as reported. Even so, the calculations still make it clear that the string of record temperatures was highly unlikely to have occurred by chance alone, supporting the idea that human-caused climate change is the culprit.
CNN Money: Big Banks Brace for Oil Loans to Implode
Firms on Wall Street helped bankroll America's energy boom, financing very expensive drilling projects that ended up flooding the world with oil.
Now that the oil glut has caused prices to crash below $30 a barrel, turmoil is rippling through the energy industry and souring many of those loans. Dozens of oil companies have gone bankrupt, and the ones that haven't are feeling enough financial stress to slash spending and cut tens of thousands of jobs.
Three of America's biggest banks warned last week that oil prices will continue to create headaches on Wall Street -- especially if doomsday scenarios of $20 or even $10 oil play out.
PV Magazine: China Has the Most Solar PV Installed Globally
Buried in the latest reports on 2015 solar installations is a fact that attests to the changed landscape of global solar markets: that China has surpassed Germany and now has the largest installed solar PV capacity of any nation on earth.
This fact was not missed by official state news agency Xinhua, which last Thursday reported that with 15 GW added in 2015 China has now reached 43 GW of solar photovoltaic capacity. This is at or below the estimates of major market analysts. Mercom Capital says that if the nation installed 15 GW in 2015 this would put it at 43 GW, and GTM Research puts cumulative installations to date at 50 GW.
USA Today: Johnson Controls, Tyco Merge in Tax-Avoiding Inversion Deal
Manufacturing giants Johnson Controls and Tyco International plan to merge in another example of a controversial tax inversion, creating an industrial conglomerate with $32 billion in annual revenue.
The deal marks the latest occurrence of a corporate inversion, in which a U.S.-based company acquires a foreign firm and switches its headquarters to the foreign firm's home to lower its tax bill.
The Milwaukee-based Johnson Controls will shift its legal and global headquarters to Tyco's Cork, Ireland, base, but will house its primary operational headquarters in Milwaukee.