The oil industry is facing historic production shutdown amid crashing prices, the FT reports. It says: “The world’s oil market once fixated on how Saudi-led Opec [the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries] would tweak supply in small increments to boost prices. That concern suddenly feels quaint: the size of the global drop in consumption triggered by the coronavirus pandemic may be equivalent to the cartel’s entire output.” Demand is now down by up to a quarter, or roughly 25m barrels a day, the FT says, which is close to what Opec countries produce every day, or as if the US, Mexico and Canada had abruptly stopped consuming oil altogether. A second FT story highlights that US crude oil prices fell below $20 a barrel on Monday, close to their lowest level in 18 years. The drop in oil demand is largely being driven by lockdowns in place across the world, which, among other impacts, is leading to fewer people driving their cars, the FT notes. Reuters reports: “With the global lockdown of three billion people – roughly 40% of the world’s population – demand for fuel is in free fall.” Two trading source tell Reuters that in Europe, refiners have cut their production by at least 1.3m barrels per day so far for April and are expected to reduce output even further. Axios reports that Texas oil regulators are likely to hold a hearing in April on whether to take the historic step to curb the state’s oil production amid a global market collapse. According to Reuters, executives from Pioneer Natural Resources and Parsley Energy wrote a joint letter to the Texas’s energy regulatory commission on Monday saying that “large-scale production interruptions appear inevitable and imminent”. The Washington Post reports Shell has pulled out of a major liquefied natural gas (LNG) project in Louisiana following the crash. Elsewhere, a third FT story reports energy companies have asked the UK government to back a loan scheme worth up to £100m a month so they can offer payment holidays to households and businesses struggling to settle bills because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Elsewhere, Sky News this morning reports that British Airways has temporarily suspended all flights from London’s Gatwick Airport amid the pandemic.

Several publications report that Japan has not strengthened its carbon-cutting target in an updated climate plan submitted to the UN. Reuters reports that Japan has stuck to its 2030 target of cutting emissions by 26% from 2013 levels in its updated “nationally determined contribution” (its plan for tackling climate change). Climate Home News reports that Japan is the first G7 industrialised nation to submit an updated climate action plan this year, and the failure to raise ambition has drawn criticism from statesmen and activists. Laurence Tubiana, who was an architect of the 2015 Paris Agreement as France’s climate ambassador, tells CHN it was “disappointing to see the government has not increased its ambition in response to the climate crisis”. The Guardian notes that the UK, which plans to host the UN climate talks in Glasgow later this year, “hopes every country will produce renewed targets on curbing emissions and achieving net zero carbon by 2050”. The Independent and BusinessGreen also cover the news.

Barclays, the largest financier of fossil fuels in Europe, has become the first big UK bank to target net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, according to several reports. The FT says the UK lender has also pledged to align all of its financing activities with the 2015 Paris agreement, which aims to keep global temperature rise well below 2C. “The alignment of our portfolio will start with the energy and power sectors and will cover all sectors over time,” the bank said in a statement, according to the FT. The Guardian reports that Barclays faced “investor pressure” over its climate track record. “The proposal will be put to an investor vote at its annual general meeting on 7 May and is part of the response to a separate shareholder resolution urging the bank to phase out all lending and services to energy and fossil fuel companies that fail to align with Paris climate goals,” the FT says. Reuters, the Wall Street Journal and BusinessGreen all have the story.

The New York Times reports that the US government is today to announce its final rule to rollback Obama-era automobile fuel efficiency standards, “relaxing efforts to limit climate-warming tailpipe pollution and virtually undoing the government’s biggest effort to combat climate change”. The new rule, written by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Department of Transportation, would allow cars on American roads to emit nearly a billion tonnes more CO2 over the lifetime of the vehicles than they would have under the Obama standards, the New York Times says. EPA chief Andrew Wheeler said on Twitter on Monday that the final rule will raise US fleet fuel economy, reduce air pollution and “make new vehicles more affordable”, Reuters reports. E&E News reports that in a leaked draft of the bill, the US administration had failed to correct major errors in its rollback of clean car standards, “leaving the proposal vulnerable to legal challenges”.

BusinessGreen reports that UK members of parliament have launched an inquiry into the UK’s foreign diplomacy efforts around environmental issues, with a particular focus on preparations for the COP26 UN climate change summit that is set to take place in Glasgow later this year. The probe, from parliament’s foreign affairs committee, will examine how the government conducts green diplomacy, and how closely it works with other government departments, including the Department for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) and Defra, on climate and environmental issues, BusinessGreen says.

New Scientist’s chief reporter Adam Vaughan publishes an interview with climate activist Greta Thunberg, who has said the world needs to tackle the coronavirus pandemic and climate change simultaneously, and guard against people who try to use the current crisis to delay action on cutting carbon emissions. “If one virus can wipe out the entire economy in a matter of weeks and shut down societies, then that is a proof that our societies are not very resilient. It also shows that once we are in an emergency, we can act and we can change our behaviour quickly,” she says in a conversation on New Scientist’s Big Interview podcast. Elsewhere, Nature reporter Jeff Tollefson explores how economic bailouts to combat the coronavirus could represent “missed opportunities” for tackling climate change. For Project Syndicate, Nick Nuttall, former spokesperson for the UNFCCC and Dirk Messner, president of the German Environment Agency, write that those scrambling to address the Covid-19 pandemic “risk ignoring a far greater challenge to civilisation, climate change”. They add: “As in any emergency, time is of the essence. Without speedy intervention now, climate change could harm the lives and livelihoods of billions of people, put countless communities at grave risk, threaten the very existence of coastal cities and small island states, and trigger damage affecting generations to come.” Writing on Medium, Justin Guay, from the not-for-profit ClimateWorks Foundation, asks if coronavirus could “forever alter the fossil fuel”. He writes: “This event could lead to a wave of bankruptcies that accelerate the arrival of peak fossil fuels. Or It could lead to dramatic state intervention that papers over the glaring weakness’ in the fossil fuel industry creating a zombie industry forever dependent on state aid for survival.” In the Guardian, freelance writer Peter C Baker also looks at how lessons from Covid-19 could shape the world’s response to climate change. He says: “To think of this new level of state intervention as a temporary requirement is to ensure that we continue barrelling down the path to climate disaster.” This morning, Carbon Brief published a new piece where experts discuss the potential climate impacts of the lifestyle changes caused by the pandemic.

An editorial in the Times argues that, among gloomy news, the prospect of synthetic meat “offers a glimmer of hope”. The editorial comes after a research paper in the journal Nature Food detailed how a team of Israeli researchers have managed to create textured meat made from cow cell muscles in the lab. It concludes: “Synthetic meat could ultimately eliminate the waste of farming, such as manure and methane emissions, and the abattoir. The world would be a safer place for animals and humans.”

A new study investigates an ongoing limitation in global climate models – known as the “double‐Intertropical Convergence Zone” – through the different phases of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP). The Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) is a huge belt of low pressure that encircles the Earth near the equator, providing rainfall for billions of people. Climate models often simulate an ITCZ in both hemispheres “over the equatorial central and eastern Pacific and Atlantic instead of one ITCZ over the northern hemisphere in observations except for a short period in March and April”, the researchers say. The study finds “that the double‐ITCZ bias with a big inter‐model spread persists in all CMIP models and still remains a serious problem in the latest CMIP6 models”. However, the researchers add that the issue is “slightly reduced in CMIP6 models from CMIP3 or CMIP5 models based on several precipitation bias indices”. More detail on the double-ITCZ can be found in Carbon Brief’s in-depth Q&A on how climate models work.