FRANKFURT, Germany (AP) — Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk, maker of weight-loss drug Wegovy, said Wednesday it would cut 9,000 jobs, 5,000 of them in Denmark, in order to strengthen the company’s focus on growth opportunities in obesity and diabetes medications.

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The restructuring, which would eliminate 11% of the company’s workforce, aimed to reduce organizational complexity and speed up decision-making as the company faces a more competitive market for obesity drugs.

The streamlining would save 8 billion Danish krone ($1.25 billion) by the end of 2026, savings that are to be redirected to diabetes and obesity, including research and development, the company said. Novo Nordisk also makes Ozempic, a diabetes drug that also can result in weight loss.

The company said implementation of the job cuts would begin immediately and that it would let the affected employees know over the next few months depending on local labor rules. The company, which is based in Bagsvaerd just outside Copenhagen, has 78,400 workers.

“Our markets are evolving, particularly in obesity, as it has become more competitive and consumer-driven,” said President and CEO Mike Doustdar. “Our company must evolve as well. This means instilling an increased performance-based culture, deploying our resources ever more effectively, and prioritizing investment where it will have the most impact — behind our leading therapy areas.”

Doustdar became CEO in May after his predecessor, Lars Fruergaard Jorgensen, left the company after the share price fell and as the company faced competition from weight-loss drugs from competitor Eli Lilly. Shares had skyrocketed after the introduction of Wegovy and Ozempic, which are both based on the same basic ingredient, semaglutide.

At the peak, the company’s market capitalization — or the combined price of all its shares — exceeded Denmark’s annual gross domestic product and made it Europe’s most valuable company.

By Nazmul Ahasan, Bloomberg News

Hiring in the U.S. health care sector is looking increasingly shaky, raising a warning flag for the economy given its importance as a key driver of job growth over the last three years.

Health care and social assistance companies added about 47,000 employees to payrolls in August, according to a Bureau of Labor Statistics report published Friday. While it remained the largest contributor to job growth in the month, it also marked the sector’s marking the smallest increase since January 2022.

The report also showed excluding health care, the U.S. economy has shed more than 140,000 jobs over the last four months, a rare development which underscores the critical role health care employers are playing in supporting the broader labor market.

“Health care has been recovering from a slowdown during the pandemic and was growing faster than its pre-pandemic trend, so the catch-up has been an important part of that story,” said Neale Mahoney, a Stanford University economics professor who studies health care. “It’s still propping up the economy, but it won’t go on forever.”

Friday’s numbers were the latest in a string of data in recent days showing a chilling in the labor market for health care workers. A BLS report on job openings published Wednesday showed listings for open positions fell in July to the lowest level in more than four years.

Another report, published Thursday by the private-sector payroll processing firm ADP, showed headcount in the education and health services sector contracted in August for a fifth straight month.

The discrepancy between the ADP data showing a run of declining employment and the BLS data showing ongoing hiring, even if at a slowing pace, has raised questions among analysts about which one is likely closer to reality.

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The two tracked each other relatively closely in 2022 and 2023, but a gap between them began to open up last year and has widened more in 2025.

“Data from ADP raise doubts about the official BLS data on payroll growth in the health care industry,” Goldman Sachs Group Inc. economists David Mericle and Jessica Rindels said in an Aug. 17 report, before last week’s releases.

“While the BLS numbers are more consistent with trends in health care spending, employment counts from large health care companies and views from our health care sector analysts suggest that the truth might be somewhere in the middle,” they said.

Friday’s report showed outright declines in headcount in August in industries including offices of dentists, vocational rehabilitation services and outpatient care services. Offices of physicians, nursing and residential care facilities and hospitals all registered ongoing expansion.

Jon Guidi, founder of the staffing firm HealthCare Recruiters International, said some key roles appear to be increasingly suffering from a lack of qualified labor supply.

“We’re observing a noticeable slowdown in job growth for positions that require professional licensure, such as nurses, physical therapists, and mental health therapists,” Guidi said.

“This trend appears to be driven by near-full employment in these fields, coupled with a limited pipeline of newly licensed professionals entering the workforce to meet ongoing demand.”

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By ISABELLA O’MALLEY, Associated Press

Fifty-five heat waves over the past quarter-century would not have happened without human-caused climate change, according to a study published Wednesday.

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Planet-warming emissions from 180 major cement, oil and gas producers contributed significantly to all of the heat events considered in the study, which was published in the journal Nature and examined a set of 213 heat waves from 2000 to 2023. The polluters examined in the study include publicly traded and state-owned companies, as well several countries where fossil fuel production data was available at the national level.

Collectively, these producers are responsible for 57% of all the carbon dioxide that was emitted from 1850 to 2023, the study found.

“It just shows that it’s not that many actors … who are responsible for a very strong fraction of all emissions,” said Sonia Seneviratne, a climate professor at the Swiss university ETH Zurich who was one of the study’s contributors.

The set of heat waves in the study came from the EM-DAT International Disaster Database, which the researchers described as the most widely used global disaster repository. The Nature study examined all of the heat waves in the database from 2000 to 2023 except for a few that weren’t suitable for their analysis.

Global warming made all 213 of the heat waves examined more likely, the study found. Out of those, 55 were 10,000 times more likely to have happened than they would have been before industrialization began accelerating in the 1800s. The calculation is equivalent to saying those 55 heat waves “would have been virtually impossible” without human-caused climate change, the authors wrote.

“Many of these heat waves had very strong consequences,” said Seneviratne. She said the series of heat waves that struck Europe in 2022 that was linked to tens of thousands of deaths sticks out in her mind as one of the events with particularly grave consequences.

FILE – Nicole Brown wipes sweat from her face while setting up her beverage stand near the National Mall on July 22, 2022, in Washington. (AP Photo/Nathan Howard, File)

Scientists calculate how carbon emitters influence heat waves

Climate scientists can use complex computer programs and historic weather data to calculate the connection between extreme weather events and the planet-warming pollutants humans emit. Climate change attribution studies often focus on how climate change influenced a specific weather event, but the scientists say this new Nature study is unique because it focused on the extent to which cement and fossil fuel producers have contributed to heat waves.

“They are drawing on a pretty well-established field of attribution science now, which has existed for about 20 years,” said Chris Callahan, a climate scientist at Indiana University who was not involved in the study. Callahan has used similar attribution methodologies in his research and said the new study is appropriate and high-quality.

Scientists say the new study could be taken into consideration in legal cases. Globally, dozens of lawsuits have been filed against fossil fuel companies by climate activists, American state governments and others seeking to hold the companies accountable for their role in climate change.

For example, Vermont and New York have passed laws that aim to hold fossil fuel companies accountable for their emissions and the damage caused.

“For a while, it was argued that any individual contributor to climate change was making too small or too diffuse a contribution to ever be linked to any particular impact. And this emerging science, both this paper and others, is showing that that’s not true,” said Callahan.

FILE – A tourist uses a fan to shade her face from the sun while waiting to watch the Changing of the Guard ceremony outside Buckingham Palace, during hot weather in London, July 18, 2022. (AP Photo/Matt Dunham, File)

Justin Mankin, a Dartmouth College climate scientist who wasn’t involved in the study, said the findings provide insight into the origins of the heat waves and how potential hazards from them could be minimized in the future.

“As we contend with these losses, the assessment of who or what’s responsible is going to become really important,” Mankin said. “I think there are some really appropriate questions, like who pays to recoup our losses, given that we’re all being damaged by it.”

The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

By Summer Ballentine, The Detroit News

Electric vehicles in the United States produce fewer greenhouse gases than gas automobiles, even when factoring in battery-making emissions, limited range during bad weather and coal-fired power grids, according to a new analysis.

The University of Michigan study, published in an American Chemical Society journal, compared projected lifetime emissions of battery, hybrid and gas-powered vehicles from the 2025 model year. On average, gas-powered vehicles will produce 70% more greenhouse gases than EVs with 300-mile charging ranges.

The data include emissions from battery and auto production, a roughly 200,000-mile vehicle lifespan and final recycling or other disposal of the vehicle. Data show EVs create less pollution than plug-in hybrids and other hybrids; plug-in hybrids are more environmentally friendly than other hybrids; hybrids create less pollution than gas-powered vehicles; and smaller vehicles of any powertrain are less emission-intensive than SUVs and pickups.

Pickups, SUVs, sedans and other vehicles used for personal transportation make up roughly 16% of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, according to the study, and individuals’ vehicle choices “will play a significant role” in reducing pollutants.

“Yes, there are differences in terms of how much benefit but again, we want to make it clear that our study shows advantages everywhere in the country,” said Greg Keoleian, a study author and co-director of the University of Michigan’s Center for Sustainable Systems, “which demonstrates that consumers everywhere in the country play a key role in addressing climate pollution and in lowering climate pollution.”

The adoption challenge

Widespread EV adoption lags in the United States, where battery-powered models make up roughly 8% of the market share and account for at most about 5% of vehicles in use. Analysts expect a surge in sales through the end of September, when legislation signed by President Donald Trump will end $7,500 tax credits for buyers and lessees. After that, automakers are bracing for a steep drop-off in sales, at least temporarily.

While many auto industry analysts and insiders still have faith battery-powered automobiles will dominate sometime in the future, the short-term fate of electrification has been shaken by “openly antagonistic” policies enacted under Trump, said Sam Abuelsamid, vice president of market research at auto communications firm Telemetry.

Most recently, Trump’s administration announced plans to scrap federal rules on vehicle tailpipe emissions, which have been a driving force in pressuring automakers to electrify their fleets.

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“Clean energy incentives, tax credits, and regulations enacted during the previous administration were designed to build a new landscape for American manufacturing by fostering technological advances and encouraging domestic manufacturing,” U.S. Rep. Debbie Dingell, D-Ann Arbor, said in a statement.

“They worked, and led to a surge in EV investments, driving sales, lowering costs for consumers, and creating thousands of good-paying union jobs. The rollback of these incentives and regulations reverses all that progress and puts us on a dangerous path.”

Buyer concerns about high sticker prices, limited access to quick charging, and anxiety about how far an EV will go before its battery needs a boost have also limited sales growth.

U.S. Rep. Tim Walberg, R-Tipton, said in a statement that forcing automakers to electrify faster than market demand is not a viable policy: “While I am not against EVs or reducing transportation emissions, we must not implement misguided regulations that limit consumer choice or exacerbate the pollution they are trying to address.

“Even after the Biden-Harris administration’s Green New Deal giveaways and costly regulations, electric vehicles continued to sit unpurchased on auto dealership lots due to a lack of consumer demand,” Walberg added. “Government mandates that force the mass production of EVs, only for them to sit idly on lots, don’t help with emissions reductions — they make it worse.”Even without government pressure or incentives, Abuelsamid said, the industry will move toward electrification.

“People are not going to stop buying EVs just because Trump says they’re bad,” he said. “Manufacturers, despite slowing some product rollout, are still producing EVs and are going to continue producing EVs.”

Still, recent developments demonstrate the industry’s slow and uneven march toward electrification. Last month, Ford Motor Co. said it would invest $2 billion at its Louisville Assembly Plant to build a $30,000 electric midsize pickup while delaying the start of production at a Tennessee battery plant until 2027. And this week, General Motors Co. said it would temporarily reduce planned production of EVs at plants in Kansas and Tennessee because of soft demand.

‘Overwhelming’ benefit

A University of Michigan-made calculator based on the study’s data allows users to compare greenhouse gas emissions between two vehicles on a county-by-county basis. The local power supply matters. Fossil fuels such as natural gas and oil, among the top power sources in Michigan, create more pollution. Wind, hydroelectric, solar and nuclear power are considered cleaner.

But overall, driving an EV is still greener, even in coal-heavy areas.

“Study after study has shown that driving an electric vehicle, no matter the electricity grid mix, is significantly cleaner than a gasoline vehicle,” Kathy Harris, Natural Resources Defense Council director for clean vehicles, said in a statement. “And, unlike other cars, electric vehicles actually get cleaner over time — as the dirtiest sources of electricity retire and new, clean energy gets hooked up to the grid. A cleaner grid means a cleaner EV.”

Driving an EV sedan in some counties in hydroelectric-powered Oregon could mean a roughly 90% cut in emissions compared to a gas-powered SUV, according to an example from the study. In coal-powered Appalachian counties, EV sedans are still expected to produce 60% less in greenhouse gases than traditional gas-powered SUVs.

While EVs do not produce tailpipe emissions when driven, making the batteries is emissions-intensive. But those emissions pale in comparison to pollution caused by gas-powered vehicles on the road, according to the data.

“We acknowledge there are tradeoffs,” Keoleian said. “But the overall benefit is overwhelming.”

Previous research based on 2020 model-year vehicles estimated that driving certain gas vehicles was better for the environment in about 1-2% of U.S. counties, considering the local power grid.

The University of Michigan research is based on the assumption that, over time, the U.S. power grid will increasingly rely on renewable energy sources rather than fossil fuels. Keoleian said utilities already are planning on increased demand from EV charging and are adjusting to provide more power.

“When you actually look at total life cycle emissions for vehicle manufacturing and production and then energy used through vehicle lifetime and end-of-use processing of vehicles through recycling and disposal, EVs always come out ahead,” Abuelsamid said. “Every single time.”

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