Transformation of energy supply & new energy security architecture
The shift in oil prices posed the most recent challenge to an already complicated global energy chessboard | Image posted here from Wall Street International.
7 May 2020 (Wall Street International)* — Despite of permanent worldwide intentions to forecast the future of energy supply, where the estimates just a decade ago undeniably foresaw the barrel should gradually give way to gas, sun and wind, nowadays we can discuss the potential of increasingly diversified energy mix, however we are in a difficult position to provide any precise information regarding even the next day energy market situation.
The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) stands with those suffering from the COVID-19 pandemic. UNEP is responding in a number of ways, including by supproting global efforts to protect biodiversity, to put an end to the illegal trade in wildlife, to safeguard the handling of chemicals and waste and to promote economic recovery plans that take nature and the climate emergency into account. This article is one of several highlighting UNEP’s duty to help nations build back better after the pandemic to increase resilience to future crises.
8 May 2020 (UN Environment)* — With scientists saying the polar ice caps are melting six times faster than in the 1990s there is an urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as quickly as possible to prevent catastrophic sea-level rise.
(UN News)* — Thousands of migrants have been stranded “all over the world” where they face a heightened risk of COVID-19 infection, the head of UN migration agency, IOM, said on Thursday [7 May 2020].
“Health is the new wealth,” António Vitorino insisted, citing proposals by some countries to introduce so-called immunity passports and use mobile phone apps that are designed to prevent the spread of new coronavirus.
(UN News)* — To the millions around the world who celebrate the birth, enlightenment and passing of Lord Buddha, the UN chief sent warm wishes on Thursday [7 May 2020], officially marked as the Day of Vesak, noting that “we can all be inspired by his teachings”.
UN News/Jing Zhang | The Shwedagon is the most sacred Buddhist pagoda in Myanmar.
“As the human family suffers the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, we are reminded of the sutra, ‘because all living beings are subject to illness, I am ill as well’”, Secretary-General António Guterres said on Thursday, in his message.
UNITED NATIONS, May 7 2020 (IPS)* – The world’s poorer nations, reeling under an unrelenting attack on their fragile economies by the COVID-19 pandemic, have suffered an equally deadly body blow: being buried under heavy debt burdens.
6 May 2020 (UN News)* — Lockdowns, travel restrictions, resource cutbacks and other measures to curb the spread of the new coronavirus are putting victims of human trafficking at risk of further exploitation, while organized crime networks could further profit from the pandemic, according to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).
7 May 2020 (UN Environment)* — The coronavirus pandemic is reminding us that we live in a connected world. It’s an opportunity to revisit our relationship with nature and rebuild a more environmentally responsible world.
It highlights the importance of conserving and restoring the ecosystems that support the natural cycles essential for the survival and well-being of migratory birds.
Migratory birds are part of our shared natural heritage and they depend on a network of sites along their migration routes for breeding, feeding, resting and overwintering.
3 May 2020 (Wall Street International)* – “The Past is a Foreign Country; they do things differently there”, so stated L.P. Hartley in his award-winning novel the Go-Between (1953). Beyond the mainstream critique of that text and accusations of its culturally narrow reference base, I would argue that before long we will have need to revisit textbook diagrammatic representations of the human timeline, and perhaps even the dendrochronological carbon record as we traverse this momentous watershed called Coronavirus.
What happened to balanced budgets, austerity, tight money, cut-backs in public spending, restructuring, streamlining, debt? – the entire architecture of fiscal and financial orthodoxy?
.
Agence Olloweb on Unsplash. | Some rights reserved.
The world is changed. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air. Galadriel
5 May 2020 (openDemocracy)* — There is a prevailing journalistic narrative that the COVID-19 emergency will prove to be the portal to a brave new world of increasingly powerless citizens and increasingly powerful governments.
6 May 2020 (UN News)* — The COVID-19 pandemic is not only a health crisis, but it is also proving to be an economic disaster for huge numbers of people worldwide. A senior UN official with the UN Development Programme (UNDP) is calling for countries to provide citizens with a universal basic income, to help the millions who have lost their jobs, because of measures to curb the virus, combined with increasing levels of inequality.
UN Photo/Kibae Park | A woman in Viet Nam makes environmentally-friendly biomass briquettes, a biofuel substitute to coal and charcoal cooking fuel.
Kanni Wignaraja, who runs the UNDP’s Asia-Pacific bureau, spoke to UN News and started by explaining why the idea of universal basic income (where governments give a minimum sum of money to all citizens, based on work status or income) is starting to gain traction.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 