From farm to bottler to supermarket cooler, a liter of Coca-Cola creates 346 grams of carbon dioxide emissions, the company’s data show.

That’s less than half the tree-to-toilet 771-gram carbon footprint of a mega roll of Charmin Ultra Soft toilet paper, as measured by the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group.

Math like this is fast becoming obligatory. Investors are increasing pressure on businesses to disclose the emissions of greenhouse gases related to their products and services. Regulators are starting to ask about that, too. Within the next couple of years, every public company in the U.S. might well be required to report climate information.

Such an effort would be the biggest potential expansion in corporate disclosure since the creation of the Depression-era rules over financial disclosures that underpin modern corporate statements. Already it has kicked off a confusing melee as companies, regulators and environmentalists...

This column is part of the Heard on the Street stock-picking contest. You’re invited to play along with us here.

The battery business is poised to grow in the 21st century as oil did in the 20th: fast and geopolitical. Freyr Battery is on the right side of both trends.

The Norwegian startup was founded in 2018 and taken public last month by a U.S. special-purpose acquisition company. The deal raised $890 million to fund the construction of “gigafactories” in Mo i Rana, a town in Norway that grew up alongside the iron and steel industry due to a local abundance of hydroelectric power.

That cheap and green source of electricity is now at the heart of Freyr’s business plan to become one of the largest suppliers of lithium-ion batteries in Europe. In 2025, it thinks it will have a cost advantage over every other producer globally as a result of its access to cheap power, its targeted scale and a new battery technology. The pitch shares elements with that of...

Wells Fargo & Co. said Tuesday that Charles Noski had stepped down as chairman of its board of directors and will be succeeded by Steven Black, a former JPMorgan Chase & Co. executive who joined the board last year.

Mr. Noski, a former chief financial officer of Bank of America Corp. who joined the board in 2019, will remain on the board until his retirement at the end of September.

Mr. Black is a longtime ally of Wells Fargo Chief Executive Charles Scharf and their careers in finance have run in parallel for decades. Both became executives at JPMorgan, with Mr. Scharf running the consumer division and Mr. Black running the investment bank. More recently, Mr. Scharf was CEO of Bank of New York Mellon Corp. and Mr. Black joined the lender’s board.

Mr. Black moved over to the Wells Fargo board shortly after Mr. Scharf joined the San Francisco-based lender as CEO. Mr. Black has been co-chief executive of private-equity firm Bregal Investments...

TOKYO— SoftBank Group Corp. said it is holding back on new investments in China while it sees how the country’s tech crackdown plays out, in the latest sign of how Beijing’s move to tame its technology sector is rippling through the investment world.

The giant Japanese investor and operator of the $100 billion Vision Fund is one of the world’s best-known funders of Chinese startups. But recently, the value of many of those investments has been tumbling fast, after Chinese regulators started investigating some SoftBank investee companies for breaches including anticompetitive practices, consumer protection and data-security problems.

The decline in many of those valuations came on top of a fall in the value of other highflying Vision Fund companies as the frenzy over some of tech’s hot listings cooled slightly, depressing SoftBank earnings in the latest quarter.

SoftBank Chief Executive Masayoshi Son made an early, savvy bet on Chinese e-commerce giant...

The Biden administration is extending the pause on federal student loan payments and interest through early 2022.

The Education Department said that it would uphold the moratorium, which the administration first extended earlier this year and suspends loan payments, interest accrual, and collections on defaulted loans. The pause was set to expire at the end of September 2021.

Here are the details on the extension, who will benefit and what lies ahead when it comes to student-debt legislation.

Zynga ’s most recent results revived some painful memories. The mobile-game maker will need to work hard to make sure they are fleeting.

Late Thursday, Zynga reported $712 million in net bookings for the second quarter, up 37% year over year. That was a substantial deceleration from the 63% growth rate averaged over the previous three quarters and was also slightly under analysts’ projection of $715.7 million. Net bookings reflect the amount of in-game and advertising transactions executed during a given period. Zynga hasn’t missed Wall Street’s target for this key metric in at least five years, according to FactSet.

Zynga blamed the shortfall on a combination of reduced game-playing activity as more leisure options opened up and recent changes to Apple ’s iOS platform that make it harder to track users for the purpose of selling targeted advertising. Both were well-known risk factors before the report, but having them hit at the same time was painful. And...

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Social-media earnings have come and gone as quickly as Twitter ’s Fleets, but their impact could linger for one platform in particular.

When Pinterest went public back in 2019, it was clear the platform had a very specific user base. The company said two-thirds of its total monthly active users were female and that eight out of 10 U.S. moms were already using its platform. But nailing this niche could prove its downfall.

It isn’t as though success in social media is impossible when you begin with a narrow audience. Snap ’s success over the past few years is in part a testament to the value advertisers see in its command of the Gen Z population. But not all of Pinterest’s users have proven to be lucrative thus far. For the fourth quarter of 2018, Pinterest said its average revenue per domestic user was well over $3.00. Internationally,...

Members of President Biden’s economic team generally support nominating Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell to a second term, but growing resistance from prominent Democrats including Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) could lead to his replacement, according to people familiar with the matter.

Mr. Powell, who was appointed to his first term by former Republican President Donald Trump, has received high marks from some Democrats for steering the central bank toward a paradigm shift that has placed greater attention on reducing unemployment. That coincided last year with a forceful response to the coronavirus pandemic.

But some progressives are unhappy with his bent toward easing financial regulations that were put in place after the 2008 crisis and think the central bank should have someone more in sync with Democratic politics in charge.

If Mr. Powell isn’t given a new four-year term next February, when his current term expires, the leading contender...

SoftBank ’s most successful bet came from China. But the country has given it a headache lately.

Shares of the Japanese technology conglomerate have lost around 36% since their March peak, partly reversing a 69% gain last year. China’s crackdown on its technology sector is the key reason for the selloff. SoftBank is a top investor in Chinese ride-hailing giant Didi, which has been hit by a data-security probe. Didi’s shares now trade 32% below their June initial public offering price. Full Truck Alliance , another recently listed Chinese company in SoftBank’s portfolio, was also hit.

SoftBank’s $100 billion Vision Fund and its successor recorded lower investment income last quarter compared with a quarter earlier, the company said Tuesday. The funds still managed $2.6 billion in investment gains, however, helped by buoyant U.S. tech stocks. SoftBank sold some shares in delivery company DoorDash , which gained 36% during the quarter, and in ride-hailing...

Canadian Pacific Railway Ltd. made a new, increased offer for Kansas City Southern , reigniting a takeover battle with Canadian National Railway Co. for the highly coveted U.S. railroad.

Canadian Pacific said Tuesday it submitted a bid that values Kansas City Southern at $300 a share, or about $27 billion not including assumed debt.

The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that it was planning such a move.

Kansas City Southern is the smallest of the major freight railroads in the U.S. The company plays a big role in U.S.-Mexico trade, with a network stretching across both countries, helping explain its desirability as an acquisition target. Railroad takeovers are rare as regulators tend to view them with a wary eye, but Kansas City Southern is seen as one of the last operators of size potentially available for purchase. Its allure has only grown as the economy recovers from the slowdown triggered by the coronavirus pandemic.

Canadian Pacific had...

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HotelPlanner and Reservations.com have agreed to merge and go public through a special-purpose acquisition company, the companies said.

The combined online travel-booking firm will still be called HotelPlanner and is valued at about $685 million in its combination with the SPAC Astrea Acquisition Corp.

The deal comes as online travel companies cope with last year’s decline in demand due to the coronavirus pandemic and amid concerns that the Delta variant could halt this year’s rebound. HotelPlanner—which already owns the business-focused site Meetings.com—expects to post record sales this year that top 2019’s figure. The combined company projects roughly $170 million in revenue next...

Florida officials announced the largest pandemic-era municipal-bond sale backed by port revenue, hoping to tap into investor demand for local-government debt tied to recovering sectors of the U.S. economy.

Miami-Dade County said Monday it is selling around $1.4 billion of bonds due 2050 and backed by revenue from the Port of Miami, or PortMiami—the county’s largest municipal bond sale ever. That is also the largest sale tied to a port since last March, beating a $1.1 billion bond issued by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey during July 2020.

Miami is home to the largest port in Florida. It processed more than $45 billion worth of cargo during the fiscal year ending September 2020 and in normal times is home to over a fifth of the world’s cruise traffic.

The offering’s size is a sign of the strength of the overall municipal market. A stimulus- and vaccine-fueled recovery has sparked a rally in bond prices, dropped yields toward record lows and...

Policy moves in Beijing are hitting Chinese corporate bonds and rippling across global markets through the U.S. and European money managers who loaded up on the securities in recent years.

Emerging-markets investors have long been subject to such shocks, but Chinese bonds are now so widely held that swings in their prices are affecting even bond funds that don’t specialize in developing countries, including funds managed by firms such as Pacific Investment Management Co. and BlackRock Inc.

Global bond funds with the most Chinese corporate debt lagged behind their benchmark indexes over the month that ended last Thursday, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of data from Morningstar Inc. The underperformance coincides with declines in stocks and bonds of Chinese private education, technology and property companies, triggered by regulatory and policy changes.

Chinese authorities recently disclosed plans to make private education companies such as...

Zynga ’s most recent results revived some painful memories. The mobile-game maker will need to work hard to make sure they are fleeting.

Late Thursday, Zynga reported $712 million in net bookings for the second quarter, up 37% year over year. That was a substantial deceleration from the 63% growth rate averaged over the previous three quarters and was also slightly under analysts’ projection of $715.7 million. Net bookings reflect the amount of in-game and advertising transactions executed during a given period. Zynga hasn’t missed Wall Street’s target for this key metric in at least five years, according to FactSet.

Zynga blamed the shortfall on a combination of reduced game-playing activity as more leisure options opened up and recent changes to Apple ’s iOS platform that make it harder to track users for the purpose of selling targeted advertising. Both were well-known risk factors before the report, but having them hit at the same time was painful. And...

A woman who accused former Apollo Global Management Inc. Chief Executive Leon Black of rape and defamation filed an amended complaint that alleges the private-equity titan was “best friends” with the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and once flew her to Florida for a potential sexual encounter involving Epstein.

One of Mr. Black’s lawyers called the claims “demonstrably and transparently false.”

The allegations, filed Monday in a New York State court, are the latest claims to emerge in litigation started in June by Guzel Ganieva, a Russian immigrant and former model, who had a yearslong relationship with Mr. Black.

Ms. Ganieva has previously alleged that Mr. Black sexually abused her and forced her to sign a nondisclosure document in 2015 and then defamed her by claiming in media reports earlier this year that Ms. Ganieva had extorted him.

Mr. Black, whose attorneys have called Ms. Ganieva’s claims a “work of fiction,” has...

Tether Holdings Ltd. released the most-detailed version yet of the assets backing its widely used digital currency, seeking to address regulator concerns that it hasn’t in the past disclosed enough about the currency’s underpinnings.

Tether is a stablecoin, a specific type of cryptocurrency designed to mimic the value of the U.S. dollar. Its use has exploded in recent years and is the third most widely held cryptocurrency after bitcoin and ether.

Traders use tether to get in and out of other cryptocurrencies because of its ease of use and quick transaction times. Trading directly between the dollar and digital currencies often involves high transaction costs and delays in processing.

Roughly half of Tether’s $62.8 billion in assets were held in commercial paper and certificates of deposit, according to a report the company published Monday. It detailed for the first time the credit ratings of these notes, saying that about 93% of them were rated A-2 or...

GreenLight Biosciences Inc. is combining with a special-purpose acquisition company to go public in a deal that values the RNA-technology firm at about $1.5 billion, the companies said.

A developer of mRNA vaccines to fight Covid-19 and other diseases, GreenLight is simultaneously working on RNA-based sustainable alternatives to pesticides and herbicides. By reproducing cell growth without actually using live cells, the Boston-based company hopes to address the challenge of making vaccines and other RNA products at scale.

GreenLight is combining with the SPAC Environmental Impact Acquisition Corp., which is backed by investment bank Canaccord Genuity Group Inc.

Founded in 2008, GreenLight aims to capitalize on recent advancements in technology using RNA, a nucleic acid found in living cells. One type, known as messenger RNA, carries instructions encoded in DNA for cells to follow. Developing mRNA vaccines for diseases such as Covid-19 can be faster...

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U.S. stock futures struggled for direction Tuesday as investors awaited clues from Federal Reserve officials about plans to ease stimulus measures.

Futures tied to the S&P 500 wavered between gains and losses while Dow Jones Industrial Average futures edged down less than 0.1%. On Monday, both indexes edged lower amid unease about the state of the economic recovery. Nasdaq-100 futures rose 0.1% Tuesday.

In out-of-hours trading, AMC Entertainment Holdings rose almost 8% after one of the original meme stocks said Monday it was planning changes to its theaters that are aimed at appealing to its loyal following of Reddit investors, including accepting bitcoin.

Kansas City Southern rose over 6% after Canadian Pacific Railways raised its bid to buy the railroad.

SmileDirectClub slumped more than 16% in off-hours trading. The direct-to-consumer teeth-straightening business said Monday that quarterly revenue fell short of its expectations after...

WASHINGTON—The bipartisan infrastructure bill is unlikely to have a big impact on growth in the next few years, economists say. Longer term, though, investments in highways, ports and broadband could make the economy more efficient and productive.

The short-term boost to growth will be relatively limited for two reasons, economists say. For one, the bill represents just $550 billion in new spending—compared with nearly $6 trillion that Congress has approved in the past year-and-a-half to battle the Covid-19 pandemic and its economic fallout.

Second, the infrastructure spending will take place over five to 10 years starting in 2022, a longer timeline than pandemic-era initiatives like stimulus checks, extra unemployment benefits and small-business support programs. That will make its direct effects on employment and demand less noticeable.

Alec Phillips, chief political economist for Goldman Sachs Research, said the infrastructure bill could add around...

The biggest wildcard for U.S. inflation over the next year doesn’t come from used cars or airline fares. Instead, it is housing.

Officials at the Federal Reserve and the White House have highlighted what many forecasters expect will be the temporary nature of elevated price readings stemming from the reopening of the economy following pandemic-related restrictions.

But the degree to which 12-month inflation readings fall back to the central bank’s 2% goal could rest on the behavior of rents and home prices. In recent months, housing-cost trends point to more persistent, rather than transitory, upward price pressures in the coming years.

Core inflation, which excludes volatile food and energy costs, rose 3.5% in June from a year earlier, according to the Fed’s preferred gauge, the personal-consumption expenditures price index. That was the highest rate of growth in 30 years. Rising prices over the April-to-June quarter largely reflected disrupted supply...

The Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500 retreated on Monday as a tumble in oil prices signaled investor unease about the Covid-19 pandemic and the strength of the economic recovery.

The Dow dropped 106.66 points, or 0.3%, to 35101.85. The broader S&P 500 slipped 4.17, or less than 0.1%, to close at 4432.35. The technology-heavy Nasdaq Composite rose 24.42, or 0.2%, to 14860.18.

Stocks are hovering near records, with both the Dow and the S&P 500 notching a high on Friday. The Nasdaq also was at a record last week.

Front-month futures on Brent crude, the global oil benchmark, dropped $1.66 a barrel, or 2.3%, to settle at $69.04, a three-week low. China’s new measures to combat the Delta variant of Covid-19 renewed concerns that the virus would hit energy demand. Oil prices also were weighed down by data over the weekend showing that China imported less crude per day in July than in June, analysts said. China is the world’s largest...