The idea has solid precedent. There are already taxes on products known to create health problems, including a federal cigarette tax and sugary drink taxes. Think of a cancer tax like a carbon offset – corporations pay for the harm they inflict.

This isn’t opera as we have known it. An official, ushering us from gasometer beach back to reality, explains: “You don’t applaud the end of the world.”

Stefan Fritsche, who runs a centuries-old German brewery in Neuzelle, near the Polish border, has seen his natural gas bill jump a startling 400 percent over the past year. His electricity bill has increased 300 percent. And he’s paying more for barley than ever before. But the soaring inflation for energy and grains in the wake of the Ukraine war is no match for the biggest challenge facing Mr. Fritsche’s brewery, Klosterbrauerei Neuzelle, and others like it across Germany: a severe shortage of beer bottles.

The garden is something of a tourist attraction, but also serves as a metaphor. Bees are endangered, just like Murano’s glass industry, and she wants people who visit the garden and see her work around the world to get the connection.

The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday blocked fracking off the California coast, ruling that the federal government must complete a full environmental review before approving permits for such offshore oil drilling platforms. The decision prevents the Interior Department and other federal agencies from issuing permits for “well stimulation” through hydraulic fracturing until a complete environmental impact statement is issued “rather than the inadequate [environmental assessment] on which they had relied.”