Raphael Stevens

In this articleRY4C-IEA Ryanair Boeing 737-800 aircraft parked at Eindhoven airport in the Netherlands.Nicoloas Economou | NurPhoto | Getty ImagesLONDON — Climate awareness has come a long a way, according to Ryanair’s CEO Michael O’Leary, who concedes he was an initially an environmental skeptic himself.Speaking to CNBC on Wednesday, O’Leary said: “I was one of the original skeptics.”When asked what made him change his mind, he replied: “We learn from our experiences. Frankly, 20, 30 years ago we all thought the environmentalists were a bunch of nutters, you know. Clearly, it’s moved front and center, it is something that our customers and the people working here at Ryanair wants us to focus on and we tend to be very responsive.”The airline industry has come under immense pressure to reduce carbon emissions in recent years, and policymakers have faced renewed calls to enact measures designed to tackle the climate emergency in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.This is paramount from an environmental perspective, but also for the airline business itself. Trends such as “flight shaming,” a term which refers to the feeling of guilt of travelling via plane due to its environmental impact, have gained ground and could severely disrupt business models.In France, for example, lawmakers have voted to suspend domestic flights on routes that can be taken by a direct train in less than two-and-a-half hours.When asked about the initiative, however, O’Leary said he was concerned about this sort of step.”I get very worried about these, you know, big-stake initiatives. Largely speaking on flights below two-and-a-half hours, the trains (already) dominate that market,” he said, citing how traffic from London to Paris and Brussels is already done by train.Eurostar trains, for example, allow customers to go from Paris to London in two hours.But ultimately, the domestic short-haul flight was “never a big feature of our business,” O’Leary said. More

Combination: Jeff Bezos (L), Elon Musk (C) and Bill Gates (R).ReutersClimate change appears to be high on the agenda for tech billionaires like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates but some are questioning whether they’re focusing their efforts on the right areas.Broadly speaking, the three richest tech billionaires — who rank in the top five richest people on the planet — are all trying to develop new technologies that can reduce the world’s carbon dioxide emissions.Musk is largely focused on funding carbon capture technologies, Gates is particularly bullish on nuclear energy, and Bezos has created a dedicated “Bezos Earth fund.” All of them believe that technology has a major role to play in tackling climate change and they’re doing their utmost to ensure they’re pushing the boundaries when it comes to climate tech.”They basically think in the ‘Iron Man way,’ which is that we can build the technology to innovate ourselves out of it,” Christian Kroll, the founder and CEO of search engine Ecosia, told CNBC on a video call, adding that they should be focusing more on planting trees.”No technology will ever get there,” he said in reference to trees. “And on top of that, you’re getting so many things for free. You’re getting fertile soil, you’re doing something against the biodiversity crisis, and you’re helping the water cycle so you have less droughts and less floods.”Global carbon dioxide emissions have soared over the last 100 years, leading to unprecedented global warming and climate change.It’s widely known that trees are among the most efficient carbon-capture machines on earth. They remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through a chemical reaction known as photosynthesis where they turn the gas into energy that they use to grow. Empress trees, for example, can absorb about 103 tons of carbon a year per acre.Twelve of the top 20 climate solutions relate to either agriculture or forests, according to climate non-profit Project Drawdown, which is based in San Francisco.Last week, Britain’s Prince William underscored the importance of investing in nature to tackle climate change and protect our planet.”We must invest in nature through reforestation, sustainable agriculture, and supporting healthy oceans, because doing so is one of the most cost effective and impactful ways of tackling climate change,” he said.”It removes carbon from the atmosphere, helps build more resilient communities, tackles biodiversity loss, and protects people’s livelihoods. This is crucial if our children and grandchildren are to live sustainably on our precious planet.”Jack Kelly, the founder of Open Climate Fix and a former researcher at Alphabet-owned AI lab DeepMind, told CNBC that a mix of approaches is required. “I think we need a wide range of interventions, both tech and reforestation,” he said. Open Climate Fix announced Tuesday that it has raised over £500,000 ($689,000) from Google.Dave Waltham, a professor in the Department of Earth Sciences at Royal Holloway, University of London, told CNBC that “natural climate solutions” like tree planting can be viewed as “emergency first aid.””They buy us time to develop permanent solutions,” he said. “New forests, for example, absorb CO2 for 40 years or so and then reach an equilibrium. Buying time this way is immensely valuable as we still cannot produce completely climate-neutral food, steel, energy, and concrete.”Trees and reforestation, however, are relatively low down on the tech billionaire agenda list, according to Kroll.While the tech billionaires wouldn’t necessarily be able to “solve” climate change by planting more trees, they could have a “massive impact” if they dedicated more of their capital to the matter, he said.According to the Bloomberg Billionaire Index, Amazon founder Bezos is worth $197 billion, Tesla founder Musk is worth $181 billion, and Microsoft founder Gates is worth $145 billion.Representatives for Musk and Gates did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment, while a representative for Bezos declined to comment.Forests or fusion?There’s no denying that tech billionaires are becoming increasingly interested in climate change.In January, Tesla CEO Musk pledged to invest $100 million in new carbon capture technologies. Carbon capture is the process of trapping waste carbon dioxide either directly from the air, or just before it gets emitted from factories and power plants.His investment in new carbon capture technologies dwarfs the $1 million he spent on trees in 2019 when he gave YouTuber Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson a donation to help him reach a $20 million tree planting target.  Musk’s stance on climate change is complicated, however. While he runs a relatively green electric vehicle company, he has also been criticized for his love of bitcoin, which is now one of the world’s biggest CO2 emitters. Meanwhile, Gates thinks nuclear energy is the future and his TerraPower company, which he founded in 2008, is aiming to build a fully functional advanced nuclear reactor.In his new book “How to avoid a climate disaster,” Gates doesn’t seem to be convinced that trees are worth investing in.”It has obvious appeal for those of us who love trees, but it opens up a very complicated subject … its effect on climate change appears to be overblown,” he writes.Gates argues that the most effective reforestation strategy is to stop cutting down so many of the trees we already have and says that “you’d need somewhere around 50 acres’ worth of trees planted in tropical areas to absorb the emissions produced by an average American in their lifetime.”The Microsoft mogul clarified his stance on trees in a podcast interview with New York Times journalist Kara Swisher in February.”If you’re going to fund for 10,000 years constantly replanting it, then that’s a legitimate offset,” said Gates. “If you’re just planting one generation of trees, it doesn’t get you much. You know, I’m not saying it’s a mistake or anything. But that will not make a significant dent in this problem.”Gates, who is now the largest owner of farmland in the U.S., added: “The idea that there’s a place to plant a trillion trees, that’s just wrong.”Elsewhere, Bezos created the $10 billion Bezos Earth Fund last February to provide financial support to scientists, non-governmental organizations, activists and the private sector.So far, the Bezos Earth Fund has issued grants to several organizations that focus on reforestation including Eden Reforestation Projects, The Nature Conservancy, and The Natural Resources Defense Council.Amazon, however, has been criticized for increasing pollution with its planes and vans, and for using excessive amounts of cardboard when packaging its products. Amazon says that its packaging is 100% renewable and that it doesn’t use plastic clamshells and wire ties.Amazon Web Services, the company’s cloud computing behemoth, and Microsoft also operate energy intensive data centers around the world.Turning profits in plantsBut Kroll thinks the tech billionaires are still relatively “obsessed” with dreaming up new technologies to take on the problem. His company, Ecosia, has made tree planting a major part of its identity.Headquartered in Berlin, Ecosia donates 80% of its profits to charities that focus on reforestation. Essentially, if a person goes on the Ecosia search engine and performs a search, almost all of the money that the company makes from digital ads will be used to plant trees.The company has partnered with over 60 tree planting organizations who have planted over 123 million trees, Kroll said, adding that they’re mostly in developing countries in the tropics.”Through our tree planting, each search is removing around 1kg of CO2 from the atmosphere,” said Kroll. “I’m doing dozens of searches every day so thousands of searches every year. That’s a few tons of CO2 removed from the atmosphere just by searching.”Kroll suggested that people should only be classed as billionaires when they remove a billion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere.”All the others are just dollar billionaires,” he said. “That’s boring. We don’t need that in a 21st century anymore.” More

A portion of the Stafford Hill solar power project gathers energy from the sun in Rutland, Vt., on Tuesday, Sept. 15, 2015. With the completion of the project developed by Green Mountain Power, Vermont’s largest electric utility, the city of Rutland claimed it has more solar capacity, 7.8 megawatts, per capita than any other city in the New England region.Wilson Ring | APLONDON — Google is backing a climate change start-up founded by an ex-DeepMind employee through its philanthropic arm, Google.org.Open Climate Fix, a non-profit lab focused on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, announced Tuesday that it had been awarded over £500,000 ($686,350) by Google.org’s Impact Challenge on Climate, which has committed 10 million euros to funding new green technologies.The London-headquartered start-up is aiming to build an online solar electricity forecasting service for the U.K. and Europe.The service will aim to predict cloud cover, which determines how much electricity solar panels can generate, through a combination of satellite images and new artificial intelligence software.Jack Kelly, the co-founder of Open Climate Fix and a former research engineer at Alphabet-owned DeepMind, told CNBC on Tuesday that the U.K. currently has to keep “lots of fossil fuel generators spinning at less than their full capacity” in case “a large cloud comes along and covers Cornwall.”These generators are a lot less efficient when they’re ramped down, said Kelly.”It would be more fuel efficient and more cost efficient to run a small number of generators at nearer to their max, but that requires that we have better forecasts because to do that you’re running the system with less headroom,” he added.Open Climate Fix hopes that its solar forecasting service will provide better forecasts to electricity grid operators so they can make more accurate predictions.Kelly said the company is currently in talks with National Grid, which owns and operates the infrastructure that provides electricity to homes and businesses around Britain. National Grid was also talking to DeepMind at one stage but ultimately the talks didn’t come to anything and climate change has fallen down the agenda at DeepMind.The entrepreneur added that a lot of legacy energy companies are not very good at innovating.”That’s not their fault,” he said. “They have heritage, of 100 plus years, (of) building large bits of physical hardware and they haven’t historically been innovators in software and data.””We hope that by taking cutting edge research and modern approaches to building computer systems that it’s possible to massively improve the efficiency of the electricity system.”DeepMind co-founder and CEO Demis Hassabis told The Guardian newspaper in 2016 that no one had ever left his company, despite it being five years old with hundreds of staff. Fast forward a few years, and DeepMind now has around 1,000 staff and several former employees have quit to start their own businesses.Other examples include former DeepMind energy lead Jim Gao, and staff research engineer Vedavyas Panneershelvam, who now runs an AI company called Phaidra. Elsewhere, former DeepMind engineering executive Andrew Eland left to set up a new startup that aims to find ways to improve towns and cities.Rowan Barnett, head of Google.org for EMEA and APAC, said in a statement: “Among the many applications we’ve received to our Google.org Impact Challenge on Climate, the expert jury were convinced by Open Climate Fix’s innovative and tech driven approach.””We know that artificial intelligence can have a transformative impact when applied to challenges in the climate change sector, and we’re excited to be supporting this work.”Kelly said the money from Google will mostly be used to expand the size of his team, which currently sits at three people.Google also backed a company called Normative, which helps companies automatically compile carbon reports, and Dark Matter Labs, which is building a financial platform to support investments in urban forest management and restoration.Other tech giants including Microsoft and Amazon are also investing heavily in technologies that have the potential to reduce carbon emissions, as are the company’s billionaire founders. More

In this article4021.T-JP7201.T-JPZUR.N-CHSustainability has made its way onto the dashboard of many company executives, and the money is set to follow — particularly in the electric vehicle space, if investment trends and research and development commitments are anything to go by.”ESG (environmental, social and corporate governance) has become a priority for our industry, not only for the long -term impact of the emissions but also … quality of the governance issue,” Nissan CEO Makoto Uchida told CNBC’s “Street Signs Europe” Tuesday. “And ESG has a significant impact on how we, carmakers, do our business. Of course for the past couple of decades industry has come under considerable pressure from government and society to be more sustainable, but dealing with a more conscious consumer,” Uchida said, has prompted “more emphasis on areas like electrification, autonomy and connectivity, which I think the industry has to move on.”Nissan recently announced its goal to be carbon-neutral by 2050, and plans to electrify 100% of its new vehicles on offer by the early 2030s. The fully electric Nissan Leaf hit 500,000 units in sales in 2020, a car that the company has been producing since 2010.Investment into EVs and EV components appears to be on a runway. California-based investment firm Wedbush believes EV stocks could climb as high as 50% this year, stressing that there’s room in the market for more than just Tesla. And in 2020, market research firm Fortune Business Insights valued the EV industry at around $250 billion.EV components and materials are also set to gain. Goldman Sachs in a February note highlighted six EV battery specialists with significant potential upside.  ‘There is a business imperative’For Mario Greco, CEO of Zurich Insurance and a founding member of CNBC’s ESG Council, there really isn’t any other option but to pursue ESG solutions in the face of climate change. “There is a business imperative,” Greco told CNBC. “The most important thing is to work on prevention. Insuring again the climate risk, it is expensive and it will become more expensive.” Zurich Insurance has set new climate targets for its investments and operations as it seeks to become a net zero emissions business by 2050.”We need to transform the industrial sector and transform our societies,” the CEO said. “And insurance can support this transformation — the thing insurance cannot do is to pay just the damages of the climate transformation. But the transformation of the industrial sectors and the transformation of the way we live today is something that we will be living and we will be happy to continue pushing forward.”Insuring against climate risk will be a major challenge as weather events become more extreme; what’s necessary in this context is “work on prevention and work on transforming these risks into different business models,” Greco said.But none of this means fossil fuels are going away anytime soon; in fact, demand for fossil fuels is set to rise significantly in the coming years as urban populations continue to boom. To counter that, Greco said, “I think we need to embed the carbon cost into the pricing mechanism — today the pricing does not affect the final price of any good we buy. We have to fully embed that in the cost of the goods and that will speed up and facilitate the transformation of the oil industries.”—CNBC’s Sam Shead contributed to this report. More

Traveling abroad is getting less complicated for vaccinated travelers.  A growing list of countries is reducing or eliminating quarantine and Covid-19 testing requirements for those who have been fully vaccinated, while keeping restrictions in place for those who haven’t.Where vaccines are easing travel restrictionsBarbados announced this week that quarantine requirements for vaccinated travelers will be reduced to zero to two days, during which they can move around their hotels. Unvaccinated visitors, however, must stay in their hotel rooms until they pass a Covid test on the fifth day, and wait several more days for results.The new protocols start May 8.Children aren’t eligible to be vaccinated yet, a fact which is complicating family travel plans this year, but Barbados doesn’t leave them out. Kids under 18 years old who are traveling with vaccinated parents are subject to the same rules as vaccinated travelers, according to Barbados’ tourism marketing website.Mixed groups of vaccinated and unvaccinated travelers aren’t quite as lucky. Vaccinated adults traveling with unvaccinated adult companions who “choose not to be separated” are subject to the more onerous requirements imposed on the uninoculated.Barbados’ relaxed policy toward vaccinated travelers starts on May 8.Atlantide Phototravel | Corbis Documentary | Getty ImagesWith its new bifurcated restrictions, Barbados joins Estonia, Guatemala and Slovenia in creating different entrance requirements for vaccinated and unvaccinated travelers. Most require vaccinations to be completed within two weeks of arrival, and some accept only U.S.-made or Europe-made vaccines.Here’s how several countries are approaching the divide:·        Croatia: Vaccinated travelers only need to show vaccine certificates to enter, but unvaccinated travelers need to test negative for Covid-19 (or show proof of recovery) and possibly self-isolate while awaiting test results.·        Iceland: Lets vaccinated (and previously infected) travelers, regardless of origin, enter if they test negative on arrival. Many unvaccinated European travelers — plus residents of Australia, New Zealand, Rwanda, Singapore, South Korea and Thailand — can enter by testing negative twice and quarantining for five to six days. All other unvaccinated travelers, including Americans and Canadians, are prohibited from entering.·        Belize: Vaccinated travelers need no tests to enter, but unvaccinated travelers (including children 5 years and older) must test negative before or after landing. Those who test positive must quarantine for at least 14 days at the traveler’s expense.·        Georgia: Vaccinated travelers from all countries can enter by air,  while unvaccinated travelers must hail from certain countries and test negative before and after arriving.Will more places use vaccine-based policies?  Yes, said Gloria Guevara, president of the London-based World Travel & Tourism Council.”As the vaccine rollout continues to pick up pace, more and more countries will no doubt follow suit,” she said.The U.S. state of Hawaii is currently working on letting vaccinated visitors bypass testing and quarantine requirements, according to local media. Lt. Gov. Josh Green indicated children will still need to test negative to enter, but kids of vaccinated parents may be exempt from testing if Hawaii reaches herd immunity, as reported by the Honolulu Star-Advertiser.Complaints about fairness are, in my view, ridiculous.Harry NelsonFounder of Nelson HardimanPhuket, Thailand, and Greece have indicated less restrictive vaccine-based protocols are in the works.Such policies make “perfect sense,” said Harry Nelson, the founder of Los Angeles-based health care law firm Nelson Hardiman.”My anticipation is that this will eventually be the rule in the vast majority of countries and that, at some point in the future … we will see some countries shift to a vaccination requirement,” he said.Are these policies fair?  No, said Nelson, “but the complaints about fairness are, in my view, ridiculous.”He cited long-standing precedents for countries imposing proof of vaccinations for visitor entry, particularly with yeIlow fever. He said that the ongoing threat of Covid-19 variants makes it “fully reasonable for countries to impose vaccination requirements.””Fair is a concept that is irrelevant when it comes to controlling a highly infectious virus that is transmitted around the world,” he said.Regarding Hawaii’s vaccine-based plans, Lt. Gov. Green told Honolulu local television station KHON that “We don’t discriminate against anyone. If they are against being vaccinated and they want to travel, they can just get [a] test, no big deal.” “Every country has the right to set its public health policy as it sees fit,” said health care attorney Harry Nelson.LEREXIS | Moment | Getty ImagesGuevara said while the World Travel & Tourism Council is against requiring vaccines to travel, the organization supports the introduction of a short-term health pass such as the European Commission’s “digital green certificate” to further enable safe international travel.”We should not discriminate against those who wish to travel, but have not been vaccinated,” she said. “We know it will take a significant amount of time to vaccinate the global population, particularly those in less advanced countries, or in different age groups.”Travel security firm International SOS is working with the International Chamber of Commerce to establish standards for the digital AOKpass, said Dr. Robert Quigley, global medical director at International SOS.He said digital vaccine passport apps “are not being developed to be discriminatory, but conversely to help the travel industry get back on track and to help ensure the health and safety of citizens and travelers.”Nelson said “the politics” related to fairness arguments and opposition to vaccine passports is a hindrance.”We need to acknowledge the practical reality we are living with in these times and deal with it,” he said. More

People wait for their baggage in the terminal at Boston Logan International Airport in Boston.Erin Clark | Boston Globe | Getty ImagesA new Senate subcomittee on travel and tourism held its first hearing on Tuesday, and called for the U.S. government to enact specific steps to kickstart U.S. tourism after a devastating 2020.Lawmakers were eager to know when international inbound restrictions that have hit tourism-dependent states like Florida, Nevada and Washington would be lifted, and pushed for a pathway for cruise lines to resume sailing, among other steps. “There is a hesitancy to create a roadmap to reopen international travel,” said Tori Barnes, executive vice president of the U.S. Travel Association. She said allowing international travel to resume would shorten the recovery timeline for the beaten down travel industry.Lawmakers also made the point that more travel representation at the cabinet level would help travel and tourism.”There is no cabinet-level position that focuses on tourism. We think leadership is needed,” said Barnes. Alaska Senator Dan Sullivan raised concerns about the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s conditional sail order for the cruise lines.The Republican senator recently met with CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, and said, “She really didn’t have a clue on these issues. Cruise lines in America by mid-July was what she thought we could do … none of that turned out to be true.”Earlier Tuesday, Sullivan, along with Florida Senators Rick Scott and Marco Rubio, announced a bill that is aimed at overriding the CDC’s current framework for getting cruise lines back to sea. In this new legislation, called the CRUISE Act, or Careful Resumption Under Improved Safety Enhancements, lawmakers are calling on U.S. health officials to change current guidelines.The proposal is just the latest effort by Republican lawmakers in states that heavily rely on the industry to urge the CDC to provide a clearer roadmap for the cruise lines. Democratic representatives from Florida have been notably silent on the cruise lines being sidelined.Last year, several Democratic lawmakers took steps to block financial aid to the cruise industry. “They aren’t American. … They don’t pay taxes in the United States of America,” said Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., in mid-March 2020.But Florida’s and Alaska’s economies are feeling the impact after more than a year without cruises. In the first six months of the pandemic, Florida lost $3.2 billion from the cruise industry shutdown, including almost 50,000 jobs paying $2.3 billion in wages, according to a September 2020 report from the Federal Maritime Commission. Meanwhile, Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy estimated that the total impact of the 2020 and 2021 cruise sailings being canceled will results in more than $3.3 billion in loss domestic product.Last Thursday, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis filed a lawsuit against the CDC, calling the agency’s existing guidelines “irrational.”Dunleavy has also been critical. In a strongly worded statement last week to Jeff Zients, the White House Covid-19 task force coordinator, Dunleavy wrote, “The CDC’s recent decision to extend the 2020 ‘conditional sail order’ effectively eliminates any potential for a 2021 cruise ship sailing season, and places the future of thousands of Alaskan families’ businesses in peril.”The CDC has said the coronavirus spreads easily in a cruise ship environment, and has recommended caution. Its latest guidelines suggest it will require daily reporting of Covid illness, frequent testing and vaccination when sailings are allowed to resume. More