Today: Thawing ice isn’t making the Arctic's waters easier to navigate; U.S. energy secretary says the data center boom will drive down electricity costs; Chinese rare-earth dealers are dodging export restrictions.

Welcome back: Climate change is melting sea ice at a quickening pace, and in the process rekindling dreams that have beguiled seafarers for centuries: finding an alternative shipping route to Asia around the North Pole.

Commercial shippers hope to establish an express shipping lane to save time and money. Western governments seek to deepen their presence in the Arctic to catch up with Russia. Tourists and researchers are drawn to one of the least explored regions on earth.

But in a paradox of global warming, thawing ice isn’t making Arctic waters easier to navigate. It makes them more dangerous.

Driving the growth in marine traffic is a widespread idea that the Northwest Passage—a labyrinthine network of straits and channels connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans through the Arctic—will soon become a sustainable freight thoroughfare. The West, lagging behind Russia in the Arctic, has commercial and strategic interests in making that happen.

It won’t anytime soon. The Wall Street Journal's Sune Engel Rasmussen traveled to the end of the world to understand why.

• President Trump wants a new U.S. fleet. Finnish engineers are ready to assist with icebreaker development. (WSJ)
• It is no longer possible to travel across Arctic Ocean pack ice to the North Pole as explorers once did. There is no longer enough ice. (WSJ)

U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright rejected concerns that the proliferation of data centers powering artificial intelligence across the country will raise American energy bills, WSJ Pro Sustainable Business's Clara Hudson reports.

The data-center expansion in the long run will make electricity cheaper because it will spur a boom in electricity production beyond what is needed for the centers, Wright said Tuesday at the North American Gas Forum.

“When people say, ‘AI is going to drive up my price of electricity,’ it’s actually the opposite,” said Wright, who has pushed for more quickly connecting data centers to the electric grid. “The way to get electricity prices down is to produce more electricity.”

The data-center boom is squeezing consumers in states such as New Jersey, recent reports show. Retail power prices in the Garden State, a data-center hub, were up 19% in August from a year earlier, according to the latest state-by-state data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, on the leading edge of a 6% nationwide increase in the same time frame.

• The Energy Department is renaming the National Renewable Energy Laboratory to align it with the Trump administration’s focus on fossil fuels. It will now be called the National Laboratory of the Rockies. (WSJ)
• The U.S. is looking to use large industrial diesel generators to help curb rising electricity costs and support the surge in power demand from artificial intelligence. (Bloomberg)

Rare earths are crucial for making everything from electric cars to wind turbines, but the global supply chain is dominated by China. It has implemented onerous export restrictions on the commodities as it trades blows with the Trump administration over U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods.  

Now Chinese rare-earth magnet companies are finding workarounds, as they seek to keep sales flowing to Western buyers.

The Journal's Jon Emont reports that the companies are tweaking formulas to avoid using certain restricted elements and devising other strategies to get powerful magnets out of the country, like embedding them in motors, according to employees of several large Chinese magnet companies and Western firms that buy from them.

• Vulcan Energy Resources will proceed with a lithium and renewables project in Germany after securing finance for initial development. (WSJ)
• Oil giant BP has withdrawn an application to develop a hydrogen and carbon-capture hub in the north of England due to a conflict with a data center developer over the land. (FT)

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• Volvo Car is encouraged by growth in sales of fully electric cars as overall global sales fall 10% on year in November. (WSJ)
   
• Exxon Mobil has pulled the plug on what would have been one of the world’s largest hydrogen plants. (Canary Media)
   
• How Patagonia aims to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 10% each year to achieve its net-zero commitment by 2040. (Trellis)
   
• Fast-fashion retailer Shein is facing an investigation into its labor practices and products by the Texas AG office. (Dow Jones Risk Journal)
   
• Australia's Fortescue said it would work with a Chinese steelmaker to explore new green technology. (Reuters)
   
• North Carolina has issued a $600 million catastrophe bond to fund disaster prep and reward homes with "super roofs." (Bloomberg)
   
• San Francisco filed a lawsuit against 11 major food manufacturers, alleging they knowingly made and marketed harmful foods. (WSJ)
   
• With hundreds of satellites put into space each year, scientists are worrying about emissions from launches. (Yale Environment 360)
   
• The Science Based Targets initiative has released a comprehensive suite of net-zero pathways for the global chemicals industry. (ESG News)
   
• Ignoring Scope 3 emissions could expose companies to more than $500 billion in annual liabilities by 2030. (ESG Today)

WSJ Pro Sustainable Business gives you an inside look at how companies are tackling sustainability. Send comments to bureau chief Perry Cleveland-Peck at perry.cleveland-peck@wsj.com and reporters Clara Hudson at clara.hudson@wsj.com and Yusuf Khan at yusuf.khan@wsj.com. Follow us on LinkedIn at perrycp, clara-hudson and yusuf_khan.