Germany’s Merkel wants green recovery from coronavirus crisis

BERLIN, April 28 (Reuters) - Governments should focus on climate protection when considering fiscal stimulus packages to support an economic recovery from the coronavirus pandemic, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Tuesday.

Angela Merkel.

Her comments are the clearest sign yet that Merkel wants to combine the task of helping companies recover from the pandemic with the challenge of setting more incentives for reducing carbon emissions.

Speaking at a virtual climate summit known as the Petersberg Climate Dialogue, Merkel said she expected difficult discussions about how to design post-crisis stimulus measures and about which business sectors need more help than others.

"It will be all the more important that if we set up economic stimulus programmes, we must always keep a close eye on climate protection," Merkel said, adding the focus should be laid on supporting modern technologies and renewable energies.

U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres told the conference there could be an opportunity for the world in the "dark times" of the coronavirus crisis.

Read the Reuters story - “Germany’s Merkel wants green recovery from coronavirus crisis."

Halt destruction of nature or suffer even worse pandemics, say world’s top scientists

The coronavirus pandemic is likely to be followed by even more deadly and destructive disease outbreaks unless their root cause – the rampant destruction of the natural world – is rapidly halted, the world’s leading biodiversity experts have warned.

A poultry butcher at a wet market in Kuala Lumpur.

“There is a single species responsible for the Covid-19 pandemic – us,” they said. “Recent pandemics are a direct consequence of human activity, particularly our global financial and economic systems that prize economic growth at any cost. We have a small window of opportunity, in overcoming the challenges of the current crisis, to avoid sowing the seeds of future ones.”

Professors Josef Settele, Sandra Díaz and Eduardo Brondizio led the most comprehensive planetary health check ever undertaken, which was published in 2019 by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). It concluded that human society was in jeopardy from the accelerating decline of the Earth’s natural life-support systems.

Read the story from The Guardian by Damian Carrington - “Halt destruction of nature or suffer even worse pandemics, say world’s top scientists.” 

Nearly half of global coal plants will be unprofitable this year, study show

Nearly half of all global coal plants will run at a loss this year, new research suggests.

This comes despite proposals in China to build more plants to stimulate its economy in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, according to Carbon Tracker, a London-based environmental think tank.

The organisation analysed the profitability of 95 per cent of coal plants in operation or planned around the world.

Looking at 6,696 existing plants and 1,046 in the pipeline, it found that 46 per cent will be unprofitable this year, up from 41 per cent in 2019.

This is based on estimated revenues from wholesale power markets, ancillary and balancing services and capital markets, as well as running costs, carbon pricing and pollution policies.

Read the story from the Independent by Samuel Lovett - “Nearly half of global coal plants will be unprofitable this year, study show.”