Trump told reporters Monday afternoon that he has seen the latest climate report released on Black Friday by his administration, but said, "I don't believe it."
Why it matters: The report, known as the National Climate Assessment, warned of "hundreds of billions of dollars" in annual losses to some economic sectors without scaled up actions to adapt to current changes and slash emissions to avoid future warming.
Crude oil prices ticked up a little in Monday trading, but not nearly enough to erase the losses from Friday, when a drop of several dollars put an exclamation point on a roughly seven-week decline, per Reuters.
Why it matters: As we wrote on Friday, the price declines will fuel the already intense focus on the Dec. 6 OPEC meeting, where the cartel and allied producers — notably Russia — will decide on potential output cuts aimed at tightening the market.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk says his electric car startup was close to death over the last year — within "single-digit weeks," he told "Axios on HBO" — during the troubled ramp-up of the mass market Model 3.
Driving the news: Musk has previously said that the company nearly went bankrupt in 2008, the year he took over as CEO, and that at the time Tesla had "less than a 10% likelihood to succeed." Over the past year, he has called the Model 3 buildout "production hell," and watched as his own erratic behavior — including an ongoing scrape with federal authorities — contributed to a plunge in Tesla’s share price.
Elon Musk, the inventor and CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, told "Axios on HBO" that humans must merge with machines to overcome the “existential threat” of artificial intelligence.
The big picture: Musk said artificial intelligence is "just digital intelligence. And as the algorithms and the hardware improve, that digital intelligence will exceed biological intelligence by a substantial margin. It's obvious." And he said we're way behind: "We're like children in a playground. ... We're not paying attention. We worry more about ... what name somebody called someone else ... than whether AI will destroy humanity. That's insane."
A coalition of manufacturers and chemical makers argue in a new report that the impact on consumers would be limited if the Trump administration and Congress approve a global deal on climate change first agreed to by the Obama administration.
The big picture: Named after the Rwandan city where it was signed in October 2016, the Kigali amendment to the Montreal Protocol, an environmental treaty, phases down the use of potent greenhouse gases known as hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs). HFCs are emitted from refrigerants in appliances like air conditioners.
More than 1,600 flights were canceled Sunday and more than 3,600 delayed out of St. Louis and the Chicago area as a major winter storm approaches the midwest, according to data from Flight Aware.
The details: The cancellations are mostly concentrated in the Midwest with Chicago O’Hare airport experiencing more than 700 alone. A blizzard warning was issued by the National Weather Service which explained that a "[s]ignificant winter storm will bring heavy snow and some blizzard conditions from the Middle Mississippi Valley to the Great Lakes through Monday."
President Trump twice raised to the Iraqi prime minister the idea of repaying America for its wars with Iraqi oil, a highly controversial ask that runs afoul of international norms and logic, according to sources with direct knowledge.
Trump appears to have finally given up on this idea, but until now it hasn't been revealed that as president he's raised the concept twice with Iraq's prime minister and brought it up separately in the Situation Room with his national security team.
Carlos Ghosn is in jail, and he's likely to be there for a while. Up until last week, Ghosn was the unquestioned leader of the largest carmaker in the world, the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Alliance, which sold 5.5 million cars in the first 6 months of 2018. The group has also sold more than 500,000 electric cars, which is twice as many as Tesla.
The big picture: The success of the Alliance is in large part due to the hard-charging Ghosn. But Ghosn's sheer force of personality cuts both ways. It can get things done, especially in countries like France and Japan where change is particularly difficult. It also pisses people off, including a Japanese whistleblower at Nissan. The result: Ghosn being arrested while aboard his private jet in Tokyo.
California's Camp Fire, which killed at least 85 people and destroyed nearly 14,000 homes in the northern part of the state, has been fully contained, according to Cal Fire.
The big picture: While the blaze, which started on Nov. 8, is now fully under control, there are still nearly 250 people unaccounted for, so the death toll for the state's deadliest wildfire on record could continue to rise as authorities make their way into the fire zone. And continued rainstorms in the region this week will bring the threat of mudslides to area burn scars, creating difficult conditions for the thousands of displaced evacuees housed in makeshift shelters.
Some wildfire victims are leaving the state ... "[T]owns are struggling to absorb the roughly 50,000 people displaced by the Camp fire," the L.A. Times' Anna Phillips reports:
The big picture: "[T]he evacuees’ arrival has worsened the state’s housing crisis and raised the possibility that they could be evicted from the region again, not by fire but by a scarcity of suitable dwellings... Unable to find single-family homes in the area, evacuees have resorted to renting individual bedrooms, buying recreational vehicles and purchasing travel trailers."
The U.S. government's Black Friday climate report warns that rising "temperatures in the Midwest are projected to be the largest contributing factor to declines in U.S. agricultural productivity, with extreme heat wilting crops and posing a threat to livestock," the Chicago Tribune's Tony Briscoe writes.
Details: "Midwest farmers will be increasingly challenged by warmer, wetter and more humid conditions from climate change, which also will lead to greater incidence of crop disease and more pests and will diminish the quality of stored grain."
