After a week in which US crude oil prices fell below zero for the first time in history, an article in the Financial Times explores the response from an industry facing unprecedented challenges. It quotes Gordon Ballard, head of the International Association of Oil & Gas Producers, who says that while there have been dips in the past “now it’s not entirely clear if things just come back as normal, everything has changed”. While the article notes the disruption of the coronavirus pandemic has forced oil companies to make “trade-offs unthinkable just two months ago” there has been talk of significant changes to business models in preparation for a clean fuel transition. Both BP and Shell have “doubled down on net-zero emissions pledges in recent weeks”, it concludes. A piece in Reuters documents how US shale producers, refiners and pipeline companies are all “scrambling for cash”, with the threat of bankruptcy and likely restructuring hanging over them due to the on-going oil crisis. It quotes energy lawyers at law firm Haynes and Boone who say half of the nation’s top 60 independent oil producers “are in danger of restructuring”. Meanwhile, another Reuters piece reports that two Democratic senators in the US have asked the nation’s Federal Reserve to reject a request by the energy industry to use funding from a $600bn emergency lending facility to help pay off their debts. They warn it would be “a short-sighted misuse of taxpayer resources” and that propping up the fossil fuel industry “would only increase the financial toll of climate change and the environmental degradation it has wrought”. A Politico article provides further coverage of recent calls from officials, activists and analysts for the inclusion of green conditions in the trillions in stimulus funds being pumped by governments around the world into their economies to recover from the pandemic. Finally, another Reuters piece notes that oil prices rose on Friday, as some producers including Kuwait said they would cut output, however the prices are still expected to end the week “in the red”.

Separately, the Wall Street Journal reports that the pandemic “could hasten the end for some coal plants” in the US, as Americans consume less electricity and many utilities are cutting back on coal power first.

New analysis by the World Resources Institute (WRI) reported by the Independent has found that twice as many people will be affected by flooding in 2030 compared to 2010. The piece states that floods are an “increasing threat to the stability of life” around the world, in part due to extreme weather that can be exacerbated by climate change. It quotes Betsy Otto, director of WRI’s global water programme, who says: “Floods are a threat multiplier that could worsen the public health and economic impacts we’re seeing from covid-19″. BusinessGreen, which also covers the report, says flood are being made worse by “ballooning populations, climate change, and land sinkage from the overuse of groundwater”. The Guardian’s coverage of the same report notes that damages to urban property are expected to increase from $174bn to $712bn per year.

Elsewhere, the New York Times reports on another unfortunate side effect of the coronavirus pandemic, as its economic toll forces cities and states in the US to redirect money away from climate resilience projects. According to the paper, San Francisco, Miami Beach and New York City are all likely to delay projects such as sea walls due to the virus, which has slashed tax revenue and increased the pressure on emergency services. The piece notes concerns from some quarters that decisions to cut funding will leave cities vulnerable with Laura Lightbody, head of the Flood-Prepared Communities project for the Pew Charitable Trusts, stating: “Natural disasters won’t wait until this pandemic has run its course”.

The i newspaper reports on energy efficiency experts calling for the insulation of the UK’s inefficient housing stock to be a top priority following the coronavirus lockdown. The piece quotes Dr Jonathan Marshall from thinktank the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) who said it was fortunate the lockdown came in the spring as “if we were going through this in the winter months families would be facing higher gas bills”. The piece notes British homes are among the draughtiest in Europe and says a second possible lockdown in winter could push people into fuel poverty. It says that improvements to the nation’s housing stock could form part of a green stimulus plan “to jump start the UK economy after the crisis”.

In other pandemic news, Bloomberg reports on how climate activists are adapting their protest movements to indoor setting during the pandemic, and BusinessGreen has a story about the biogas industry moving to tackle “a spike in organic waste caused by the covid-19 lockdown”.

A blog post co-authored by the Danish minister for climate, energy and utilities Dan Jørgensen and executive director of the International Energy Agency Fatih Birol explores the promise of clean energy transitions to “reignite the engines of economic growth” around the world. They note that while emissions are set to drop this year, this “will not be anything to celebrate” and must be accompanied by structural changes that ensure long-term declines as well. (See Carbon Brief’s recent analysis which shows coronavirus is set to cause the largest ever annual fall in CO2 emissions). As world leaders prepare massive stimulus packages to get their economies back on track, the two authors identify three important “recovery actions” they say will be vital to ensure an effective post-pandemic clean energy transition. These are “ambitious agenda setting” for job creation and climate change goals, public sector leadership on investing in clean energy and putting energy efficiency, renewables and battery storage at the centre of the recovery process. “When designing stimulus packages, governments should bear in mind the structural benefits that renewables can bring in terms of economic development and job creation while also reducing emissions and fostering technology innovation,” they write. They conclude their piece with a mention of the virtual ministerial roundtable being held today to discuss these issues, which includes the authors as well as representative from the UN, EU and various world governments.

Another piece focusing on green recovery following the pandemic by Julian Popov, a fellow of the European Climate Foundation, appears in the Financial Times. He considers the practicalities of such a transition, citing the low-carbon investments of nations such as China and South Korea in recent years and particularly following the last financial crisis. “The recovery after 2008 showed that ‘green growth’ is not an oxymoron. Since then, anxieties over climate change – and awareness of the need for action – have only become more pressing,” he concludes.

A column by the Daily Telegraph’s assistant editor Jeremy Warner considers the “Alice in Wonderland world” caused by the pandemic in which oil producers are “having to pay to get others to take the stuff off their hands”. He calls on readers to remember Brexit and the “climate change agenda” of groups such as Extinction Rebellion, issues he says have been “rendered almost wholly irrelevant by the pandemic”. On the subject of oil, he notes that as storage is filled to capacity and much of the industry has been rendered uneconomic, this might be “music to the ears of climate change campaigners”. “But they shouldn’t celebrate too soon; a persistently low oil price may strip out a lot of capacity, but is unlikely to be helpful to the goal of a zero-carbon economy,” he writes. Warner notes that while high oil prices might encourage a switch to cleaner fuels, low prices will make it “tempting” to stick to fossil fuels, particularly “in poorer, less high minded societies, where climate change goals have always been seen as a bit of a rich man’s luxury”. He concludes: “Commitment to the climate change agenda is going to be very hard to sustain in an age of very low oil prices, prompting renewed trade wars and protectionism as countries attempt to steal competitive advantage from each other via energy costs”.

Meanwhile, a piece in the Financial Times written by RBC Capital Markets global head of commodity strategy Helima Croft is titled “it is hard to pick any winners from oil’s collapse”. She warns that “if the oil-producing countries fail to make progress on reform and volatile prices continue to put pressure on government finances” there could be mass public protests and unrest in poorer oil producing nations.

Predicting how much the East Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS) will contribute to global sea level rise is critical to the welfare of the global community. This study models a large sector of EAIS to 2100 using a variety of different ocean melting representations including both ocean temperature and snowfall predictions taken from two suites of climate model output. It finds that by 2100, increases in snowfall outweigh increases in ice loss and this sector of the EAIS will be responsible for a 10 mm decrease in global sea level under the highest climate warming scenarios. They find that Totten Glacier is most at‐risk to enhanced ocean warming, with the southern‐most portion of this glacier acting as an important control on whether it loses ice or remains at its present day configuration. If this portion of Totten is melted, this glacier may lose enough ice mass to raise global sea levels by 6 mm by 2100.

Heat waves are detrimental to human health and the environment, and are projected to intensify in the future. However, observed upward trends in heat wave severity have not previously been detected in some regions of the globe, including the United States. This study considers heat waves as spatiotemporal events allowing for detection of significant increases in severity and coverage across the United States. The study outlines a novel approach that combines geometric concepts with a clustering algorithm to investigate how heat waves evolve. The authors track heat waves daily across the ground surface and capture the combination of frequency, magnitude, duration, and areal extent using a new index that provides a more complete picture of heat waves. Their results indicate significant increases in heat waves across the United States during the last four decades.

Marine heatwaves, like their counterparts in the atmosphere, are becoming more frequent and intense relative to historical norms owing to the long term increase of ocean temperature. This study used the century‐long, continuous ocean surface temperature measurements at La Jolla, CA USA are to put the August 2018 record‐breaking temperature into context. The duration and intensity of the event are altered significantly by the removal of the long term ocean warming trend, indicating the trend itself is largely responsible for the increase in MHW conditions.