Global/World Issues

WASHINGTON—As war and the pandemic expose the fragility of supply chains, the U.S. and its allies are pursuing a new kind of global trade, one that confines commerce to a circle of trusted nations. Fans call the shift “friend-shoring.”The new strategy is a departure from economic globalization of recent decades, when businesses bought and made products where costs were low and free-trade policies made moving goods around the world cheaper and faster. Now, U.S. officials and their allies in Europe, Asia and the Pacific are…

Efforts to shift the U.S. electrical grid off fossil fuels have major obstacles to overcome to meet the Biden administration’s decarbonization targets, let alone some companies’ more ambitious goals, executives said at an industry event this week. “If we have to decarbonize the entire economy by 2050, electricity has to go a hell of a lot faster,” said Miranda Ballentine, chief executive of the Clean Energy Buyers Association, during a panel discussion at a climate-change conference hosted by the nonprofit Aspen…