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27 May 2020 | Five months after floating the idea of a “European Green Deal” to achieve zero net greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, the European Commission has proposed funding that Green Deal in part through a €750 billion COVID-19 recovery instrument called “Next Generation EU,” which is embedded in a €1.85 trillion budget proposed today.

The bulk of the funding is earmarked towards a €560 billion “Recovery and Resilience Facility,” which will be equipped with a grant facility of up to €310 billion and will be able to make up to €250 billion available in loans. Support will be available to all Member States but concentrated on the most affected and where resilience needs are the greatest.

It’s not yet clear how much if the funding will go towards the European Green Deal, which is an ambitious plan that European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen first floated in December, 2019.

The proposal will go before the European Parliament in the summer.

13 May, 2020 | Last month, health care experts from across the United States gathered to address hundreds of journalists and policymakers by webinar. But their focus was not testing, nor vaccines, nor “herd immunity.” It was not even COVID-19, really. Instead, their focus was climate change.

“While many see issues like climate change and biodiversity loss as far from what’s going on right now … I see this as the time to talk about it,” said Aaron Bernstein, a pediatrician at Boston Children’s Hospital and a professor at Harvard Medical School. “Climate solutions are, in fact, pandemic solutions.”

A few days later, economists and policy experts with the World Resources Institute held their own panel discussion. The message was similar, and the audience one of the largest in the organization’s history. The experience of and response to COVID-19, proclaimed expert after expert, was intricately tied to climate.

Indeed, increasing numbers of researchers and policymakers, scientists and health care practitioners, are looking at the coronavirus through an ecological lens. Whether they are focused on consumer behavioral shifts, changes in emission outputs, or policy decisions that might help or hurt long-term goals for green infrastructure, they are seeing in this moment a pivotal chance to address climate change.

“As we respond to the very imminent economic and health crisis, can we also tackle the climate and sustainability crisis?” asked Manish Bapna, WRI’s managing director and executive vice president.

There have been a number of short-term environmental shifts connected with how the world is coping with the pandemic. China’s carbon emissions dropped 18% between the beginning of February and mid-March, according to data compiled by the website CarbonBrief. Pollution over India has decreased dramatically, according to satellite images from NASA’s Earth Observatory. And in the U.S., a dramatic decrease in air travel, as well as a drop in vehicular travel, has also lowered emissions.

But many of these changes are temporary, researchers say, and may barely register on any long-term analysis of global carbon emissions. The drop in China’s carbon output, for instance, came alongside a lockdown over much of the country and a related plunge in factory operations. As the country reopens, says Fang Li, chief representative of the World Resources Institute in Beijing, emissions are expected to rebound along with the economy. After the global financial crisis of 2008 and 2009, Dr. Fang and others point out, global emissions grew rapidly.

Renewing a focus

For many climate advocates, this is a reason to push green initiatives now. Environmentalists worry that unless policymakers focus on climate as part of their economic packages, the pandemic could lead to policy shifts that would undermine years of hard-won climate victories. Indeed, the Trump administration in late March announced that it would weaken Obama-era fuel standards that mandate increased fuel efficiencies for automobiles. It also announced last month that the Environmental Protection Agency will not enforce environmental regulations during the pandemic.

“What we have to worry about is whether … policy changes are going to be long term or short term,” says Christopher Jones, director of the CoolClimate Network at the University of California, Berkeley. “If we roll back standards and they remain in place when the economy comes back, we are going to have a real problem.”

Researchers say that a green economic stimulus package could both help the U.S. ensure long-term sustainability and rebound from the crushing economic impact of the pandemic. (More than 26 million Americans have filed for unemployment benefits since March 15, according to the U.S. Labor Department.) Many environmentalists look at the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the stimulus package signed by President Barack Obama in 2009, as an example of how government initiatives can spur climate-friendly industry. That bill, which earmarked some $90 billion to promote green energy, is widely credited with launching the widespread renewable energy sector in the U.S.

“Economic measures should focus on climate as well as jobs and livelihood,” Mr. Bapna said during the WRI panel.

But as Kenneth Gillingham, a professor at Yale University and a research fellow at the National Bureau of Economics Research, points out, the pandemic itself has slowed renewable energy efforts.

“There’s a slowing down of building new solar farms, of new wind facilities,” he says. “Some projects are hitting the pause button. Other projects may not happen for a long time.”

And while there is hope for a green renewal, he suspects the future will be a good deal more nuanced.

“Entirely rebuilding our economy as a green economy? It’s a wonderful vision, but I don’t believe that’s what we’ll likely see,” he says.

Inequality, exacerbated

But a move toward environmental sustainability, says Dr. Bernstein, is going to be crucial not only for combating a climate crisis, but for helping some of the people most impacted by the coronavirus. As he points out, both the pandemic and the impacts from climate change disproportionately affect people of color and other marginalized groups.

There is, he and others say, a hopeful lesson to be taken from the massive lifestyle and economic shifts seen across the globe in response to COVID-19. For years, popular wisdom has said that people simply would not engage in the sort of behavior changes necessary to fight climate change; that they wouldn’t stop traveling, wouldn’t stop consuming, wouldn’t sacrifice material comforts and help save others who are most immediately at risk from climate change. Now, the response to the pandemic suggests otherwise.

“We are able to mobilize the entire global economy and population for an imminent threat,” says Dr. Jones. “Both climate change and this pandemic both affect the most vulnerable. But everybody is willing to make personal sacrifices to protect the most vulnerable. I think that’s quite new.”

The question, he and others say, is whether people will be able to see climate change as a similarly “imminent threat,” deserving of action. While climate researchers look at the world’s increasingly frequent and severe natural disasters and see a direct connection to human behavior, research shows that most everyday people still feel disconnected from both the impacts and causes of climate change.

“We don’t experience risk properly,” says Katharine Hayhoe, professor and director of the Texas Tech University Climate Science Center.

But with the coronavirus, researchers say, there is a chance to shift.

“It can make people feel that what was previously unthinkable is plausible,” Dr. Jones says. “They know what the experience feels like.”

23 April 2020 | Microsoft drew widespread praise in January this year after Brad Smith, the company’s president, announced their climate “moonshot”.

While other corporate giants, such as Amazon and Walmart, were pledging to go carbon neutral, Microsoft vowed to go carbon negative by 2030, meaning they would be removing more carbon from the atmosphere than they produced.

By 2050, Smith added, the company was aiming to remove all of the carbon they had ever emitted since being founded in 1975.

The firm’s promises won plaudits from conservationists and climate conscious Microsoft employees, but also attracted big questions: how are they going to actually deliver this?

Much of its plans lean on nascent technology. Critics, meanwhile, see the move as a gamble aimed at justifying Microsoft’s ongoing deals with fossil fuel firms.

Microsoft releases less carbon a year than Amazon and Apple, but more than Google. The company has 150,000 employees across offices in more than 100 countries, and is still focused on developing the software and consumer electronics that made them a household name – Windows, PCs, Xbox. But after a temporary slump following their heyday in the 1990s, they have also once again become innovators, developing world-leading artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud computing products.

The company hopes to bring that innovative approach to its climate policies, in part by widening how it calculates its carbon footprint, beyond most corporate responsibility plans. Historically, Microsoft has only counted those emissions that fall within the scope of their own business operations – employee travel, company vehicles, heat and electricity in company buildings, and so on.

From now on, it plans to take responsibility for the emissions produced by its entire supply chain, including the full lifespan of the products it makes and the electricity that customers may consume when using its products.

Meanwhile, increasing the scrutiny on Microsoft’s plan are its dealings with fossil fuel companies, which have been highlighted by some as evidence of hypocrisy as it makes climate pledges. In 2019 alone, the technology company had entered into long-term partnerships with three major oil companies, including ExxonMobil, that will be using Microsoft’s technology to expand oil production by as much as 50,000 barrels a day over the coming years. The staggering amount of carbon this would release into the atmosphere would not be included on Microsoft’s expanded carbon ledger.

For Microsoft, however, partnering with oil companies is not considered hypocritical. The company is hedging its climate bets on carbon capture and removal technologies that they believe will be able to offset some of the environmental harm caused by fossil fuels during the transition to a more sustainable future, despite such technologies being still in their nascent stages and not yet proven to work at scale.

Those who devised the plan at Microsoft argue that they are responding directly to a new reality: cutting emissions is not enough and all routes to non-catastrophic temperature increase will also require removing carbon from the atmosphere. So, as well as shifting to a 100% supply of renewable energy for all of their data centers, buildings and campuses by 2025, Microsoft outlines a number of carbon reduction methods it is backing to try and hit its bold targets.

Protecting forests

To begin, Microsoft will focus on protecting forests and planting trees to capture carbon. This strategy has long been used to offset emissions, but Microsoft is hoping to improve their outcomes by using remote-sensing technology to accurately estimate the carbon storage potential of forests to ensure no major deforestation is occurring in their allotments. To achieve these goals, Microsoft will be partnering with Pachama, a Silicon Valley startup that will survey 60,000 hectares of rainforest in the Amazon, plus an additional 20,000 hectares across north-eastern states of the US for the company.

According to Kesley Perlman, a climate campaigner at the forest conservation NGO Fern, Microsoft’s commitment to hi-tech reforestation is encouraging, but she stressed that conservation is a complex, multifaceted process that goes beyond technical issues. “It’s not only about how much carbon a forest can hold but also who traditionally uses the forest, how they might be kept out, and how biodiversity will be prioritized,” she said.

Biomass energy carbon capture storage

Microsoft will initially focus on nature-based solutions to reduce their carbon footprint over the next five or so years. But in order to start drawing more carbon from the atmosphere than they emit by 2030, it will need to shift to technology-based solutions that can scale up and accelerate carbon removal.

To this end, Microsoft is betting on biomass energy carbon capture storage, otherwise known as BECCS, to transform how energy is generated. Instead of burning coal, a BECCS power plant burns biomass, like wood chips. The carbon produced when burning the biomass is captured before it is released into the atmosphere and then injected at a very high pressure into rock formations deep underground. Not only does this remove carbon from the natural cycle, the biomass absorbs CO2 as it grows.

A world powered by biofuel, however, raises two looming questions. First, scientists are not yet certain if biomass energy will be carbon neutral.

The second concern is that the transition from coal to biofuel would require setting aside vast tracts of arable land – some estimates say one to two times the size of India. According to climate campaigner Perlman this would mean that the energy industry would probably have to compete with food production in a world where 10 billion people will need to be fed, while vastly enlarging industrialized plantations and reducing biodiversity. “We would likely see massive land use change and massive private purchases of land, the knock on impacts of which could be quite dangerous,” she said.

Direct air capture

Perhaps the most futuristic of the technologies outlined in Microsoft’s carbon negative plan is direct air capture (DAC). This involves machines that essentially function like highly efficient artificial trees, drawing existing carbon out of the air and transforming it into non-harmful carbon-based solids or gasses.

While the image of air-conditioner-like machines sucking carbon out of the air is captivating, capturing CO2 directly from the atmosphere requires a lot of energy and is very expensive. In 2011, extracting carbon from the air cost $600 a ton of CO2. In 2018, estimates brought this down to anywhere between $94 to $232 a ton. But given that Microsoft expects to emit 16m metric tons of carbon this year, if they were to reach carbon zero using only DAC, their bill might cost as much as $3.5bn.

According to Lucas Joppa, chief environmental officer at Microsoft, a large part of the reason why carbon removal remains so expensive is because the markets around these technologies are still immature. The company’s strategy over the coming decades is maturing these markets through intensive and directed investment. “We’re making a bet on certain technologies that don’t exist at the scale or price point we need them to,” he said. “But if we want to get them, we need to start investing.”

The company, he said, already has a model for raising funds internally to support climate innovation. In July 2012, Microsoft became one of the first companies to institute an internal carbon price, charging different divisions in the business $15 a metric ton of carbon emitted. The funds raised were then used to pay for sustainability improvements, which helped the company achieve their goal of going carbon neutral.

Previously, this carbon price only extended over emissions Microsoft was directly responsible for. According to their new plan, in July this year Microsoft will extend this internal carbon price over emissions produced across direct and indirect emissions. The increased revenue raised from the expanded internal carbon tax, along with a $1bn climate innovation fund, will be used to invest in capture and removal technology. “What we’re going to do is put this money in the market in a way that is highly additional,” Joppa said. “This is how we’re going to get nature-based solutions and tech solutions at a price point and scale we need.”

Microsoft’s plan for intensive investment in this industry is exciting for those working in the field. Klaus Lackner, a theoretical physicist working on DAC, has been arguing since the 1990s that carbon removal is the only feasible way to stop significant temperature rises. “We’ve shown that this method is technologically feasible, but nobody has wanted them,” he said. “Microsoft have said ‘we get it’. It will cost them money, but it will allow the technologies to come online and for the next company to follow their footsteps.”

While the technologies that Microsoft are betting on are still in their nascent stages, in the past few years there has been some encouraging progress in the negative emissions industry. Lackner and Arizona State University recently signed a deal with Silicon Kingdom, an Irish-based company, to manufacture his carbon-suck machines. The plan is to install them on wind and solar farms, and then sell the captured carbon to beverage companies to make carbonated drinks. In the UK, Drax power plant, which was once among Europe’s most polluting, transitioned from coal to biofuel this year.

But many attempts at scaling carbon negative projects have also failed. The Kemper Project in Mississippi, which was billed as America’s flagship carbon capture project, was abandoned in 2017 – it was $5bn over budget, three years late and still not operational.

Moral hazard

Given the not insignificant risk of failure, some propose that relying on nascent or future technology as a solution to the climate crisis represents a moral hazard – the promise of carbon removal functions as an incentive for governments and major polluters to not change their behavior now.

According to Chris Adams, a tech worker who organizes an online community of technology professionals agitating for climate action from within the industry, the fact that Microsoft is still partnering with big oil companies demonstrates the moral hazard in action. “They are protecting the fossil fuel industry from changing while the rest of the world will pay most from this gamble if it fails in the long term,” he said.

Adams added that many of the encouraging ideas around carbon reduction in Microsoft’s plan have come from internal organizing from concerned employees, but that this mostly goes unacknowledged in Microsoft’s official vision. Emphasizing future technology while overlooking activism in the present, Adams said, represents a certain way of approaching problems that is typical of technology companies. “If you have spent the last 10 years amassing influence by approaching most problems with technology it’s understandable you see all problems through this lens, particularly if you don’t have to have conversations about power,” he said.

When asked about this concern by the Guardian, Microsoft’s Joppa responded that in the short term, the energy demands of a growing global population will probably still need a mix of renewable and traditional energy sources. By remaining in discourse with these industries, he said, Microsoft hopes to help them change and transition to a better model in the future. “It’s extremely hard to lead if there’s no one there to follow,” he added.

As to whether the technology outlined in their plan will scale, he said there is inherent risk, but this is why they call it a “moonshot”. “When it comes to our plan it’s not like we’ve got it all figured out,” he said. “We’re just trying to do what the science says the whole world needs to do. There’s really no other choice.”

22 April 2020 | Nineteen-seventy was a simpler time. (February was a simpler time too, but for a moment let’s think outside the pandemic bubble.)

Simpler because our environmental troubles could be easily seen. The air above our cities was filthy, and the water in our lakes and streams was gross. There was nothing subtle about it. In New York City, the environmental lawyer Albert Butzel described a permanently yellow horizon: “I not only saw the pollution, I wiped it off my windowsills.” Or consider the testimony of a city medical examiner: “The person who spent his life in the Adirondacks has nice pink lungs. The city dweller’s are black as coal.” You’ve likely heard of Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River catching fire, but here’s how New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller described the Hudson south of Albany: “one great septic tank that has been rendered nearly useless for water supply, for swimming, or to support the rich fish life that once abounded there.” Everything that people say about the air and water in China and India right now was said of America’s cities then.

It’s no wonder that people mobilized: 20 million Americans took to the streets for the first Earth Day in 1970—10 percent of America’s population at the time, perhaps the single greatest day of political protest in the country’s history. And it worked. Worked politically because Congress quickly passed the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act and scientifically because those laws had the desired effect. In essence, they stuck enough filters on smokestacks, car exhausts, and factory effluent pipes that, before long, the air and water were unmistakably cleaner. The nascent Environmental Protection Agency commissioned a series of photos that showed just how filthy things were. Even for those of us who were alive then, it’s hard to imagine that we tolerated this.

But we should believe it, because now we face even greater challenges that we’re doing next to nothing about. And one reason is you can’t see them.

The carbon dioxide molecule is invisible; at today’s levels you can’t see it or smell it, and it doesn’t do anything to you. Carbon with one oxygen molecule? That’s what kills you in a closed garage if you leave the car running. But two oxygen molecules? All that does is trap heat in the atmosphere. Melt ice caps. Raise seas. Change weather patterns. But slowly enough that most of the time, we don’t quite see it.

And it’s a more complex moment for another reason. You can filter carbon monoxide easily. It’s a trace gas, a tiny percentage of what comes from a power plant. But carbon dioxide is the exact opposite. It’s most of what comes pouring out when you burn coal or gas or oil. There’s no catalytic converter for CO2, which means you have to take down the fossil fuel industry.

That in turn means you have to take on not just the oil companies but also the banks, asset managers, and insurance companies that invest in them (and may even own them, in the wake of the current economic crash). You have to take on, that is, the heart of global capital.

And so we are. Stop the Money Pipeline, a coalition of environmental and climate justice groups running from the small and specialized to the Sierra Club and Greenpeace, formed last fall to try to tackle the biggest money on earth. Banks like Chase—the planet’s largest by market capitalization—which has funneled a quarter-trillion dollars to the fossil fuel industry since the Paris Agreement of 2015. Insurers like Liberty Mutual, still insuring tar sands projects even as pipeline builders endanger Native communities by trying to build the Keystone XL during a pandemic.

This campaign sounds quixotic, but it seemed to be getting traction until the coronavirus pandemic hit. In January, BlackRock announced that it was going to put climate at the heart of its investment analyses. Liberty Mutual, under similar pressure from activists, began to edge away from coal. And Chase—well, Earth Day would have seen activists engaging in civil disobedience in several thousand bank lobbies across America, sort of like the protest in January that helped launch the campaign (and sent me, among others, off in handcuffs). But we called that off; there’s no way we were going to risk carrying the microbe into jails, where the people already locked inside have little chance of social distancing.

Still, the pandemic may be causing as much trouble for the fossil fuel industry as our campaign hoped to. With the demand for oil cratering, it’s clear that these companies have no future. The divestment campaign that, over a decade, has enlisted $14 trillion in endowments and portfolios in the climate fight has a new head of steam.

Our job—a more complex one than faced our Earth Day predecessors 50 years ago—is to force the spring. We need to speed the transition to the solar panels and wind turbines that engineers have worked so mightily to improve and are now the cheapest way to generate power. The only thing standing in the way is the political power of the fossil fuel companies, on clear display as President Trump does everything in his power to preserve their dominance. That’s hard to overcome. Hard but simple. Just as in 1970, it demands unrelenting pressure from citizens. That pressure is coming. Indigenous nations, frontline communities, faith groups, climate scientists, and savvy investors are joining together, and their voices are getting louder. Seven million of us were in the streets last September. That’s not 20 million, but it’s on the way.

We can’t be on the streets right now. So we’ll do what we can on the boulevards of the Internet. Join us for Earth Day Live, three days of digital activism beginning April 22. We’re in a race, and we’re gaining fast.

2 April 2020 | COVID-19 has flattened the global economy, and it will hurt countless people before we flatten the curve. That, however, hasn’t stopped some from declaring this human tragedy an ecological “blessing” that could also save a lot of lives if it ends up supporting both national climate policies and the Paris Agreement.

Aside from a shared sense that this tragedy can be harvested for good, however, there’s little agreement on how, exactly, this awakening will happen. Some, for example, argue that our global response to COVID-19, if successful, can provide some sort of nebulous energy for tackling climate change. Others argue that we’ll solve our problems by letting airlines and fossil fuel companies die so we can start from scratch. Neither of these notions really takes stock of the existing “vaccines” and “treatments” already being brought to bear in the effort to end climate change, and that could be a tragedy in itself if it means this moment is allowed to pass.

I’m skeptical of those who argue this crisis will automatically turn climate skeptics into climate warriors, but I do believe this moment can be leveraged to provide more general support to a greener economy and to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement through a more aggressive application of existing economic, governmental, and technological “treatments” combined with the organic behavioral changes we’re already making in response to COVID-19.

Clear Skies and Fresh Eyes

One reason to believe people will feel more motivation to act is that our negative impact on the environment has drastically decreased, and many of us are directly experiencing clean air and reviving nature around us. In China, climate policy has actually historically been driven more by a need to reduce air pollution than to mitigate climate impacts. This already led to more solar energy and less coal-powered energy. In recent weeks, the sky has been visibly cleaner over China, northern Italy, South Korea, and even the United Kingdom, satellite images showed.

Source: The Guardian, nitrogen emissions from China

To be clear, these visible reductions mainly concern NO₂ emissions (nitrogen oxide) and not greenhouse gasses, but they come from the same sources that also emit greenhouse gas: power plants, factories and motor vehicles.

Here in the Netherlands, with the high population and roads density and busy airport hub, there was clearly less noise nuisance, less nitrogen, a bluer sky and less CO₂.

Structural Low CO₂ Emissions Trend and Available Offsets “Vaccine”

Last year, in the “Urgenda” climate ruling, the Supreme Court of the Netherlands ruled that the government was responsible for reducing the country’s greenhouse gas emissions to a level 25 percent below 1990 levels by the end of 2020 instead of its legally binding 20-percent target – a feat that’s inconceivable without extra expenses. In China, however, CO₂ emissions fell 25 percent, or by100 billion metric tons of CO₂, as a result of the country’s response to COVID-19.

The combination of lower CO₂ levels, less capital in business sector and available carbon offsets may offer a welcome vaccine to meet a low carbon economy sooner that we thought. Hence, the deep crisis may teach us not to make climate policy solely a political clash, but a positive and sensible change – a new “business as usual”. Let’s be more pragmatic: the antidote is here!

How do we Make the Change Sustainable?
Trend watcher Li Edelkoort advises us to go through the COVID-19 crisis in a sort of “consumption quarantine” that becomes a “blank page for a new beginning…[that involves] less consumption and less, but cleaner production.”

It’s an admirable ambition, but history shows that this doesn’t happen automatically.

The 2008 financial crisis, for example, also raised hopes for a green re-set, but that re-set failed to materialize. Yes, global CO₂ emissions from fossil fuel combustion and cement production fell 1.4 percent during the crisis, but they rose 5.9 percent when it finished.

This is a pattern we’ve seen after several previous crises, each of which came with declarations of a new, green future.

Previous Crises Also Failed to Yield Lasting Environmental Benefits

Conditional Stimulus: Unused Carrot?

Governments have stepped up to rescue key industries and jobs, but future support should be offered with an eye on accelerating a low-carbon restart. This means attaching sustainability conditions such as the use of renewable energy or adoption of energy efficiency strategies that lead to cleaner air quality and new jobs. The head of the International Energy Agency, Fatih Birol, and the World Resources Institute have already called on countries to put renewable energy at the heart of their stimulus plans to emerge from the crisis.

CO₂ Emissions Trading Systems Support Long-Term Sustainability
The turmoil in the financial markets is also impacting emissions trading. The price of an emission reduction representing a ton of CO₂ either kept out of or removed from the atmosphere under the European Union Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) fell in two weeks from €24 to just under €15 euros. In the United States, California Carbon Allowances (CCAs) traded below the floor price for the first time in nearly three years. The Mar-20 V20 CCA contract tumbled to $16.48, a 25-cent drop on the ICE platform because there are fewer CO₂ emissions, and as a result the demand for offsets has decreased. At the same time, companies are unloading allowances and offsets to meet their cash-flow requirements, accelerating the price drop.

We may have low price levels for months into the future, and this will not impact the environmental integrity of these programs for now because the overall budget of allowances will ensure targets are met. Lower price levels make it a bit easier and cheaper, which is also suitable in times of shrinking economy.

The COVID-19 challenge is different from the 2008 financial meltdown because it’s based on a real-world event rather than a structural flaw in the financial system. Because of this, we can expect a rapid recovery once the COVID-19 crisis is over. To prevent an oversupply from accumulating and then driving down prices in the recovery, the EU uses a so-called “Market Stability Reserve” to reduce the number of allowances auctioned. There is simply less auctioning with a surplus, so that the CO₂ price will recover again next year. In California the price floor keeps prices from falling too low as well.

Long-term expectations for cap and trade are still positive, and the European Commission will even propose to increase the CO2 target for 2030 to 50 to 55 percent to comply with the Paris Agreement. This is supported by most EU member states. Ultimately, the number of allowances will decrease, fewer allowances will circulate every year.

Further State Aid is an Opportunity to Make Aviation Sustainable Faster

Let’s take a look at just one sector: aviation. Research agency CAPA expects that without support airlines will go bankrupt at the end of May. Indeed, flights from European airports are down anywhere from 50 percent to 88 percent.

EU and US governments understandably focused their first rescue on life support and job preservation, but I see further state aid as an indispensable opportunity to make aviation more sustainable by promoting the use of cleaner fuels and more fuel-efficient aircraft and practices.

I’m in the camp that believes we’ll fly less in the future as distributed working and virtual conferences become the new normal – in part because we’ve gotten used to it, but also because of budgetary constraints after economic activities begin to pick up.

Governments can anticipate this in their next round of aid packages – insisting, for example, on airlines prioritizing the use of newer, more fuel-efficient aircraft and low-emission fuels. The Dutch national carrier, KLM, already plans to take the old, polluting Boeing 747 out of service – why not insist they do it a year earlier?

We can also make any future aid contingent on reduced future emissions, which any reductions that can’t be achieved organically being achieved by high-quality offsets.

CO₂ Vaccines are Required, as Well as Behavioral Changes
In summary, the COVID-19 crisis offers the opportunity to come out greener, but that is certainly not automatic. The parallels are, however, striking.

A vaccine is required for COVID-19 – an inhibitory drug that prevents it from taking hold again – but so are behavioral changes, including better treatment of animals.

For the climate test, “CO₂ vaccines” are required, as well as behavioral changes. Airlines can adopt better practices and offset those emissions they can’t eliminate, but we can all fly less.

In this way, we can turn Li Edelkoort’s “consumption quarantine” into something permanent.

10 March 2020 | Global airlines are committed to delivering “carbon neutral growth” in flights between countries, even if international air traffic doubles or triples, as some are projecting. That commitment kicks in next year, and a key vehicle for meeting it is the Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation (CORSIA).

Created through the UN’s International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), CORSIA will only deliver carbon-neutral growth if it recognizes a universe of offsets that’s large enough to meet variable demand but small enough to incentivize new activities that reduce emissions. A new analysis by Ecosystem Marketplace finds that current proposals do just that.

Click here to download.

3 February 2020 | China’s stock market plunged 8 percent on Monday after a new strain of coronavirus shuttered half the country, including the factories of Ford, Apple, and Tesla. The country’s GDP growth is expected to fall by a third this quarter, and publications from the Financial Times to the Wall Street Journal have warned of economic contagion following in the virus’s path as disruptions in global supply chains translate into slower growth around the world, and that’s if we’re lucky. At current rates of contamination, the virus will infect a quarter of the world before it’s done, killing between 3 and 6 percent of those it infects, or between 60 and 120 million people.

We can’t say they didn’t warn us – “they” being experts like Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO). He’s long said the world is ill-prepared for a global pandemic, and on Monday he used the outbreak to remind us that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.