"World Has Six Months to Avert Climate Crisis" (June 20th)
This past Thursday, June 18, The Guardian reported (at: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jun/18/world-has-six-months-to-avert-climate-crisis-says-energy-expert) on the just-published International Energy Agency's special report, "Sustainable Recovery" (at: https://www.iea.org/) in which the Paris-based sustainable energy research organization concluded world leaders have through the remainder of this year to design a COVID-19-related economic recovery that, from an energy perspective, is sustainable. "As they design economic recovery plans," Dr. Fatih Birol, the IEA's Executive Director, states in the report's forward, "policy makers are having to make enormously consequential decisions in a very short time of space. These decisions will shape economic and energy infrastructure for decades to come and will almost certainly determine whether the world has a chance of meeting its long-term energy and climate goals." Dr. Birol told The Guardian, "if we do not [take action] we will surely see a rebound in [carbon] emissions. If emissions rebound, it is very difficult to see how they will be brought down in the future." Per Bloomberg New Energy Finance, to date $509 billion in economic recovery moneys worldwide have been given to high-carbon industries while only $12 billion to low-carbon industries.