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Thu, 14th May 2020 16:42:00 |
COVID-19 Could Spark A Renewable Energy Boom |
There is a growing acceptance that the prospect of a V-shaped recovery is unrealistic. "A couple months ago I was optimistic, I was hopeful, that maybe we would have a 'V'-shaped recovery - shut things down, clamp down on the virus, and then have a quick recovery," Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank President Neel Kashkari said in an interview on the PBS Newshour. But Kashkari now says that "we are in for unfortunately a slow, long recovery," characterized by "devastating" job losses.
The world finds itself at a crossroads. The coronavirus pandemic has ravaged the global economy, leading to massive (and growing) unemployment.
At the same time, the climate problem is not going away. Last month was tied for the warmest April on record globally, and 2020 is on track to be the warmest year ever. Larger and more frequent natural disasters are increasingly likely to happen.
In the face of multiple crises, governments can kill two birds with one stone by going big on green stimulus, rescuing the economy while also making big cuts to greenhouse gas emissions. But failure to seize the opportunity may mean that we "leap from the COVID frying pan into the climate fire," according to a group of leading economists.
A new report from the University of Oxford examined over 700 fiscal stimulus policies under 25 umbrella categories. The options were gauged by four factors: speed of implementation, economic multiplier, climate impact potential and overall desirability.
The crisis has "demonstrated that governments can intervene decisively once the scale of an emergency is clear and public support is present," wrote the report’s authors, which included renowned economists Joseph Stiglitz and Nicholas Stern.
Facing the worst downturn since the Great Depression, governments are passing once unthinkable pieces of legislation, with price tags that boggle the mind. Still, they are still falling short, and more trillion-dollar fiscal packages are likely.
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