Portrait: The Resilient Environmentalist

Global leaders recently swept into New York for the United Nations General Assembly, trailed by thousands of media, activists and protestors. During the high-level get-together, two very different meetings held at the exactly same time revealed much about their priorities—and their flawed approach to the planet’s biggest problems. At a glittering gala event, the heads of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Google, and the world's largest asset manager BlackRock joined leaders from Denmark, France, New Zealand and beyond to pledge support for the acceleration of the implementation of...

The global economy must be transformed immediately to avoid catastrophic climate damage, a new United Nations report declares. Climate economist William Nordhaus has been made a Nobel laureate. The events are being reported as two parts of the same story, but they reveal the contradictions inherent in climate policy—and why economics matters more than ever. Limiting temperatures to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit above preindustrial levels, as the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change urges, is economically and practically impossible—as Mr. Nordhaus’s work shows. The IPCC report...