Welcome to the Week in Business, a look at some of the biggest stories in business and economics.

If you watched the political conventions during the past two weeks, you heard a lot about ISIS and national security and police and race and jobs. You didn’t hear much, though, about climate change, despite the fact that it’s arguably the most consequential long-term problem the U.S. faces, and one that requires government action. Yet it’s simply not an issue that most American politicians want to talk much about. The Republicans, of course, are actively hostile to discussions of the problem, dismissing it as relatively trivial when they’re not denying its existence. At the G.O.P. Convention, the phrase “climate change” was mentioned only a few times, and the subject was raised only to reject the idea that it’s a problem at all. The Party’s platform, meanwhile, explicitly rejects the recently signed Paris Agreement.

The Democrats are, at least in theory, committed to slowing the growth of greenhouse-gas emissions, and, eventually, to shrinking them. But watching the Democratic Convention, climate change didn’t seem to be a high priority. There was no prime-time segment devoted to the subject—certainly nothing like the ones devoted to national security, police-citizen relations, and other issues. James Cameron did present a short film on climate change, on Wednesday evening, but it didn’t air in prime time. As for the marquee speakers, they made only glancing reference to the threat of climate change, when they mentioned it at all. Barack Obama made one reference to the Paris Agreement, and had one line about climate change. Hillary Clinton said, “I believe in science” (a sadly necessary counter to the G.O.P.’s denials of climate science), and, “We can save the planet.” But she had far more to say about other issues, and said nothing about specific measures we might take to deal with the problem.

The exception to this relative indifference was Bernie Sanders’s speech, on Monday night. Sanders explicitly articulated the nature of the threat, calling it “the great environmental crisis facing our planet,” and talked about the consequences of failing to act. He also conveyed a real sense of urgency, saying that action was necessary “in the very near future.” Although Sanders has a reputation for caring only about wealth inequality and campaign-finance reform, he spoke consistently about climate change throughout the primaries, and has highlighted Donald Trump’s refusal to take it seriously.

The Democratic establishment’s comparable reticence on climate change speaks to the fact that it isn’t seen as an issue that galvanizes voters (even though two-thirds of Americans wanted the U.S. to strike a climate agreement in Paris last year). This helps to explain why, when you compare the U.S. to European nations such as Denmark or Germany, or even to China, we’ve made relatively little progress in transitioning away from fossil fuels. The opponents of meaningful action on climate change are, for ideological and financial reasons, heavily invested in stopping or slowing action. That, combined with our political system’s tendency toward inertia, has made action difficult—the only reason the U.S. could sign the Paris agreement, after all, was because Obama did an end-run around Congress.

The many barriers to action mean that if Democrats are serious about addressing climate change, they’ll need to do more to marshal popular support. In that sense, the Convention was a missed opportunity. The planet can’t afford too many more of those.

C.E.O. Pay: No Performance, No Problem

When Verizon bought Yahoo’s main business units this week, for a mere $4.8 billion, it confirmed what had long since become obvious: Marissa Mayer’s attempt to reinvent the struggling Internet giant had failed. The fact that Mayer stands to make tens of millions of dollars from the deal—Fortune’s Stephen Gandel estimated the number at a hundred and twenty-three million, though Yahoo challenged his calculations—is a perfect illustration of how corporate America’s fascination with visionary C.E.O.s has inflated executive pay in the past thirty years.

It’s hard to blame Mayer for failing to rescue Yahoo, given the state of the company when she took over and the strength of its competitors. But it’s also true that she didn’t deliver the kind of performance that Yahoo was hoping for when it hired her away from Google, in the summer of 2012. Mayer’s defenders have pointed to the fact that Yahoo’s market capitalization rose sharply during her tenure, but the increase was due entirely to the increase in the value of Yahoo’s stakes in Alibaba and Yahoo Japan (which were not part of the sale to Verizon). The market value of Yahoo’s underlying businesses has actually fallen slightly since Mayer arrived. Mayer’s haul will come from cashing in her stock options and restricted stock grants, which she’ll be able to do when the sale to Verizon closes. But those options and that stock are as valuable as they are because of what Alibaba and Yahoo Japan did, not because of anything Mayer did. That is to say, she was lucky, not good.

When Yahoo hired Mayer, its board could have structured her contract so that her compensation was pegged to Yahoo’s true performance, for instance by adjusting the value of her stock-option and restricted-stock grants to factor out the worth of Alibaba and Yahoo Japan. The problem, of course, is that, had Yahoo’s board tried to do this, Mayer would never have signed the deal. She was a highly sought-after C.E.O. candidate at the time, and Yahoo was a struggling company desperately trying to become relevant again.

For Yahoo, failing to hire Mayer probably wouldn’t have been a bad thing—there are many executives who could have run Yahoo for four years, for less money, and then sold it at a cut-rate price. But the company’s board was in thrall to one of the most powerful ideas in corporate America: if you just find the right C.E.O., you can transform your business. That idea, combined with the relative scarcity of high-profile C.E.O.s, has led executive compensation to rise as it has, despite the dearth of evidence in support of the idea that C.E.O.s alone can help companies thrive.

Although some observers have argued that cronyism is also responsible for outsized executive compensation, with boards rewarding C.E.O.s whom they’ve hand-picked, the phenomenon seems to be even more pronounced when companies hire C.E.O.s from outside, as was the case with Mayer. Personal connections do play a role, of course—Mayer’s payout will be greater because of additional options she collected after she went to work at Yahoo, and she’ll only be able to cash in her options and restricted stock all at once because of a change that the board approved a few months ago. But even without that change, she would have done very well while accomplishing very little, because she was a prime beneficiary of an ideology that says you cannot pay too much to get the C.E.O. you want. Until that ideology shifts (or the government intervenes), high pay for mediocre performance will continue.

Apple: Too Good for Its Own Good?

It was a good week for Apple’s stock price, which, after a largely stagnant first half of the year, rose more than eight per cent when the company reported its second-quarter earnings, on Tuesday. But the stock rose only because its numbers weren’t as bad as the market had been expecting: in real terms, sales fell for the second quarter in a row, and earnings were down twenty-seven per cent since this time last year.

The sales decline wasn’t especially surprising. Apple is at the tail end of the iPhone 6/6s release cycle, with many consumers waiting for the iPhone 7, which will be released this fall. But the fact that Apple can no longer count on existing products to drive sales points to the biggest question about the company’s future: Will consumers race to upgrade their old phones the way they did in the past, or has the iPhone profit machine hit a plateau?