COVID 19
What will be open on Friday, April 24th and under what conditions?
What
Covid Is Exposing About the Climate Movement
Michael Grunwald, Politico, April 21, 2020
In recent years, green activists have pivoted away from guilt-tripping us about our carbon footprints and embraced a more politically appealing message: Our personal choices don’t really matter, so we should stop worrying so much about what we eat or drive and whether we recycle or compost. The new environmentally correct message is that only large-scale political and institutional change can save the climate, so lecturing ordinary people about using plastic straws and other individual behaviors with relatively paltry climate impacts is a distraction from government policies and corporate abuses with catastrophic impacts.
OIL
The
Oil Inventory Challenge
Ben Cahill, Senior Fellow, Energy Security and Climate Change Program, CSIS,
April, 2020
It is increasingly clear that oil demand is dropping too quickly for supply agreements to keep pace. The IEA anticipates a year-on-year decline of 23.1 million barrels per day in the second quarter and a 9.3 million barrels per day demand drop for the full year. Even a theoretical OPEC+ cut of 12 million barrels per day—based on 100 percent compliance with the deal as well as steeper declines pledged by Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, and Kuwait—plus sharp declines in the United States and elsewhere would not balance the market.
GAS
Infographic:
Global LNG markets brace for unprecedented shock in 2020 on COVID-19
Platts Global S & P, April 22, 2020
The spread of coronavirus across the world has generated an unprecedented global health and economic crisis and presented the LNG industry with a demand shock like no other in its history. The outbreak has hit global LNG demand, incited contract disputes, disrupted trade flows and derailed project investment plans amid uncertainty over the length and depth of the crisis.
MINING
American
quandary: how to secure weapons-grade minerals without China
Ernest Scheyder, Reuters, April 22, 2020
The United States wants to curb its reliance on China for specialized minerals used to make weapons and high-tech equipment, but it faces a Catch-22. It only has one rare earths mine – and government scientists have been told not to work with it because of its Chinese ties.
POLITICS
How Not to Celebrate Earth Day
Hint: Don’t cheer the pandemic for giving the earth a ‘rest.’