Bloomberg, Naureen Malik: Natural gas surged to 60 times the going rate as howling blizzard conditions stoked demand for the furnace fuel across the U.S. Northeast. The gas squeeze underscores the lack of adequate pipeline capacity to haul enough gas from Appalachia and points farther afield to Northeast metropolises where households have been scrapping heating-oil tanks for gas-fired furnaces. As a result, gas in the region is the world’s priciest, commanding 14 times more than U.K. futures price and about nine times more than Asian imports of the liquefied version of the fuel.

Brian Wullivn, Eric Roston, Bloomberg: Kinked, buckled, stuck or stalled, it doesn’t matter how you describe it, the jet stream -- the ribbon of wind that circles the Earth -- is doing strange things. The calamity list includes wildfires across Scandinavia, Greece and California, record heat in Texas, Japan and Africa and flooding rains along the U.S. East Coast that could last another week. The world is hotter in general, which means when temperatures spike, they do so off a higher baseline. Is all of this due to mankind's use of fossil fuels?

Bloomberg BNA: New nuclear reactor technology such as NuScale Power LLC’s small modular reactors and government support for existing nuclear power plants won’t be enough to rescue the declining nuclear power industry, according to new research. “Right now, the cost of generating electricity from newly constructed nuclear plants is almost double the cost for power from a new natural gas combined-cycle plant,” “In the absence of a dramatic change in market conditions, political will, and substantial subsidies, there is virtually no chance that the United States will be able to undertake the construction of additional large LWR (light water reactor) power plants in the next several decades.”

Bloomberg, John Trozi: Deaths from pollution exceeds many other cases including high-sodium diet, obesity, alcohol, road accidents, and malnutrition. Nine million annual deaths and a economic damage of trillions of dollars.