Silver Lining of Coronavirus, Return of Animals, Clear Skies, Quiet Streets And Tranquil Shores

With humans in lockdown, animals flourish. Silver Lining of Coronavirus, Return of Animals, Clear Skies, Quiet Streets And Tranquil Shores

Animals may not know why humans are making themselves so scarce.

A Sika Deer Crosses A Road Last Week In Nara, Japan. Free-Roaming Deer Are A Part Of Life In This City But With Humans In Lockdown, The Deer Have Been Roaming In The City’s Residential Areas Looking For Food.

  

Lockdowns that have kept millions of people in their homes — and social distancing measures meant to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus — have brought clear skies, quiet streets and tranquil shores.

These are challenging times for humanity. But for many of Earth’s other inhabitants, there’s a silver lining.

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Thanks to the absence of cruise ships, dolphins have returned in greater numbers to the Italian port of Cagliari. And the presence of swans in the canals of Burano — though initially placed incorrectly in Venice proper — sparked a flurry of social media attention, even though swans are often seen in this small island in the greater metro area of Venice.

Animals are not dramatically rebounding in the absence of humans, but they are timidly pushing their boundaries, with sika deer showing up outside their normal habitat in the park in Nara, Japan, or wild turkeys showing up in a park in Oakland, California.

“If anything, these times may serve as a reminder that animals have always lived in our area,” Seth Magle, who directs the Urban Wildlife Institute at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago, told The Guardian.

“We may not think of our cities as a part of nature, but they are.”

Regardless, this kind of reverse habitat-encroachment is comforting.

Nature Hates A Vacuum

When Humans Move Out Of A Space, Animals Move In As These Horses Did In The Aftermath Of The Chernobyl Nuclear Accident.

 

We’ve seen this kind of animal renaissance before — in the wake of very different catastrophes.

At the site of the former Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant — where a 2011 meltdown forced the evacuation of thousands of people — animals like wild boar, macaques, and Japanese hares are flourishing.

And, more than 30 years after the Chernobyl disaster, Geiger counters still scold furiously at lingering radiation levels in the area — but wildlife have made an unlikely comeback.

It’s Not All Good News For Animals

While swans and dolphins in Italy are certainly relishing in the retreat, other animals that have come to rely on humans may actually miss us.

Like the macaques of Lopburi, Thailand. Spending their days loafing around the city’s famed Phra Prang Sam Yot monkey temple, these primates have become all-too accustomed to human handouts. But with the coronavirus keeping tourists at bay — and handouts increasingly rare — they’ve gone all “Gangs of New York” on each other.

“The fall in tourist numbers because of COVID-19 may have indeed brought about a shortage of food supply for them,” Asmita Sengupta, an ecologist at the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and Environment in India, tells The New York Times.

“Once they get used to being fed by humans, they become habituated to humans and even display hyper-aggression if they are not given food.”

On the other hand, the swans of Venice don’t mind. Nor the dolphins. And, as more countries ground their citizens, experts suggest animals will take full advantage.

“I’ve seen what’s happened in Venice and we’ve been thinking about what that means in the UK as well for wildlife,” Martin Fowlie, media manager for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, tells Express.

“We are some weeks behind Italy, but I imagine there will be some things that will happen that will have an effect on wildlife and the changes we will see.

“Since World War 2, UK wildlife has been in general decline, there are some species doing better, but on the whole, the majority of species have been doing less well.”

But the hushing of cities and towns and countrysides, he adds, may not only benefit animals. Humans too may soon emerge from their homes with a new understanding of their relationship with the natural world.

We might even look to preserve that kind of peace.

Air Pollution Levels Drop Across London As Britons Stay At Home And Coronavirus Lockdowns Cut Dangerous Emissions Around The Globe

London nitrogen dioxide levels dropped by a third between Sunday and Monday.

Defra says air pollution levels for the whole country are low and should stay low.

This comes as Prime Minister Boris Johnson urges people to avoid traveling.

Air pollution in London has dropped by almost a third as people working from home or going into self isolation due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Readings for nitrogen dioxide – a harmful greenhouse gas – across London were lower on Sunday than on Monday for the first time.

The Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs reported that air pollution levels were ‘low’ across the country today and don’t expect that to change.

The impact of lockdowns in places like Italy and China have seen an even more dramatic drop in dangerous emissions from industry, air travel and cars.

Water In Venice Canals Goes Crystal Clear After Coronavirus Lockdown

Where pessimists see a half-empty glass, optimists come along to show that it’s actually half-full. Same goes for the ongoing chaos of the coronavirus—while some are hoarding away toilet paper like there’s no tomorrow, there are people who see positive outcomes even in a situation as dire as this.

  

So, as the streets are emptier, the air becomes clearer and the muddy waters have cleared up to reveal the life that lives in the canals of Venice but couldn’t be seen as clearly before.

Following The Lockdown Of Italy, People Are Noticing Positive Changes In Venice

As the global pandemic continues threatening the world, it has also brought some unexpected, but positive, side effects. Venice—one of the main tourist attractions in Italy—is usually swarmed with people all throughout the year.

However, right now, as the entire country is under lockdown, the city has become completely empty, with only pigeons walking the deserted sidewalks and town squares.

Apparently, The Waters Have Cleared Up Enough To Reveal Fish That Live There

Venice has already suffered enough from over-tourism, sinking foundations, and floods. Therefore, now seems like the perfect time to let the city ‘breathe.’ Scientists have already noticed that air pollution has dropped dramatically during the lockdown, but another positive side effect is that the canal waters in Venice have finally cleared up. In it, people can see actual fish living and swimming there. For many, the sight is a joyful one, even if a bit bizarre.

People Are Capturing Photos Of The Clearer Waters And Sharing It On Social Media

However, Venice mayor’s office is quick to debunk the rumors that the fish can be seen due to the changed and improved quality of water. “The water now looks clearer because there is less traffic on the canals, allowing the sediment to stay at the bottom,” a spokesman told CNN news. “It’s because there is less boat traffic that usually brings sediment to the top of the water’s surface.”

While There Were Always Fish Living There, They Could Not Be Seen Previously Due To The Heavy Traffic In The Canals

Nonetheless, the view is still pretty. And for many, this seems like the chance to finally re-evaluate our values and mindless consumerism. “Maybe there needs to be a yearly month-long lockdown every year so nature gets a break,” one woman comments on Facebook. “Above the worries of everybody, there’s always a positive impact that people don’t usually notice,” an optimist comments.

Jellyfish Spotted Gliding Through The Now Crystal Clear Venice Canals

While Italy has been on lockdown the past six weeks, the canals of Venice have been empty. Without any tourists exploring the city, boat traffic has reduced, and as a result, the usually murky waters are now clear enough to see fish and other marine life swimming around.

Last week, Andrea Mangoni was near San Marco Square when he spotted a jellyfish gliding through the crystal clear water. Mangoni started recording as the jellyfish swam amidst the reflections of the buildings, and shared the mesmerizing video on Instagram.

“Thanks to the exceptional calm of the canals of Venice due to the absence of boats, this sea lung jellyfish (Rhizostoma Pulmo) swam in the transparent waters near the bridge of Baretteri,” he wrote. “It seemed to slip through the reflection of the buildings, incredibly motionless.”

The Need To Report Carbon Emissions Amid The Coronavirus Pandemic

JPMorgan Chase, the first American bank to create and successfully test a digital coin representing a fiat currency, also provided the most fossil fuel financing out of any bank in the world, according to a 2019 report titled “Banking on Climate Change.”

The bank recently joined a chorus of other financial institutions and endowments that have declared that they will, going forward, be reluctant to provide funding to the fossil fuel industry — which energizes emerging digital technologies and companies — in order to mitigate the effects of climate change.

In a hard-hitting report released to clients on the same day as the World Health Organization published its 32nd coronavirus update, economists at JPMorgan Chase warned that human life “as we know it” could be threatened by climate change. Without action being taken, there could be “catastrophic outcomes.”

Carbon pollution defies national borders and is inescapable. The true cost of climate change is felt when it penetrates deep into our respiratory and circulatory systems and damages our lungs, which are highly vulnerable to the coronavirus, according to a report prepared by the WHO. The economists at JPMorgan Chase state that “climate change could affect economic growth, shares, health and how long people live.”

In order to mitigate the effects of climate change, there needs to be a global tax on carbon, the report added. This stance echoes that of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which has said that greater reliance on environmental taxation is needed to strengthen global efforts to tackle the principal source of both greenhouse-gas emissions and air pollution, particularly since society is now witnessing the implementation of digital currencies, artificial intelligence and blockchain technology worldwide.

These new digital technologies require very high consumptions of electricity, which is currently produced with coal and fossil fuels that have adverse environmental impacts.

Global Environmental Tax Policy

Environmental tax is used as an economic instrument to address environmental problems by taxing activities that burden the environment — like a direct carbon tax — or by providing incentives to lessen environmental burdens and preserve environmental activities — like tax credits or subsidies.

It’s used as part of a market-based climate policy that was pioneered in the United States, which also includes cap-and-trade programs that attempt to limit emissions by putting a cap and price on them.

Environmental taxes are designed to internalize environmental costs and provide economic incentives for people and businesses to promote ecologically sustainable activities, such as reducing carbon emissions, promoting green growth and fighting climate change through innovation.

Some governments make use of them to integrate climate and environmental costs into prices to reduce excessive emissions while also raising revenue to fund vital government services.

The top six global carbon emitters are: China, the U.S., the European Union, India, Russia and Japan.

Carbon Tax

Under a carbon tax regime, the government sets a price that carbon emitters must pay for each ton of greenhouse gases they emit. This encourages businesses and consumers to take the necessary steps, such as switching fuels or adopting new technologies, to reduce their emissions and avoid paying the tax.

These taxes are favored because assigning a fee to carbon pollution is administratively simple when compared to addressing climate change by setting, monitoring and enforcing caps on greenhouse gas emissions and regulating emissions of the energy-generation sector. Environmental taxes include energy taxes, transport taxes, pollution taxes and resources taxes.

According to the OECD, outside of road transport, 81% of carbon emissions are untaxed, and tax rates are below the low-end estimate of climate costs for 97% of emissions. Coal, which is characterized by high levels of harmful emissions and accounts for almost half of carbon emissions from energy use in the 42 countries examined by the OECD, is taxed at the lowest rates or goes untaxed.

Only 40 out of the 197 governments that have signed on to the first legally binding climate change agreement — the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s 2015 Paris Agreement — have adopted some sort of price on hydrocarbons, either through direct taxes on fossil fuels or through cap-and-trade programs.

Carbon taxes have been implemented in 29 of the jurisdictions that have signed on to the Paris Agreement. A Scandinavian wave starting in the early 1990s saw carbon taxes legislated in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden, among other countries.

A second wave in the mid-2000s saw carbon taxes put in place in Switzerland, Iceland, Ireland, Japan, Mexico, Portugal and the United Kingdom. In 2019, Canada, Argentina, South Africa and Singapore implemented a carbon tax. These tax rates range from $1 to $139 per ton.

According to the World Bank’s “Report of the High-Level Commission of Carbon Prices,” a carbon price/tax of between $50 to $100 per ton of carbon emissions would need to be implemented by signatories to deliver on Paris-Agreement commitments by 2030.

Tax Credits

Through tax credits, subsidies and other business incentives, governments can encourage companies to engage in behaviors and develop technologies, including blockchain, that can reduce carbon emissions. These credits could combat the use of fossil fuels. For example, a new study by the Overseas Development Institute titled “G20 Coal Subsidies:

Tracking Government Support to a Fading Industry” suggests that coal subsidies have increased threefold since the Paris Agreement, even though it commits its signatories to hold global warming to well below two degrees Celsius through significant greenhouse emission cuts.

According to the International Monetary Fund, as well as the International Energy Agency, the elimination of fossil fuel subsidies worldwide would be one of the most effective ways of reducing greenhouse gases and battling global warming.

For example, Saudi Arabia has the world’s second-largest oil reserves that sustain 90% of its total public revenues, and is the primary swing oil producer in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries.

According to a study on the country, its energy subsidies in 2012 were $80 billion, representing 11% of the country’s gross domestic product.

Saudi Arabia has undertaken blockchain-oriented national projects aimed at diversifying and modernizing its economy by backing numerous financial-technology initiatives, including the world’s first state-backed bilateral cryptocurrency with the United Arab Emirates called “Aber,” which is Arabic for passing by, crossing or traveling on a road.

Paris Agreement Climate Change Advocates

The urgency to wean off fossil fuels as a major energy source, given its negative consequences to the world’s climate and human life — which has recently been forced into a digital quarantine lifestyle — wasn’t only written in the reports by the OECD and JPMorgan Chase, however. There have been many other climate change advocates penning action.

An op-ed jointly written by the heads of the Bank of England, which is seriously weighing the pros and cons of issuing a central bank digital currency denominated in pounds sterling, and pf France’s central bank, which plans to test plans a central bank digital currency for financial institutions this year, said that any company that does not change strategically to the new energy reality “will fail to exist.”

In an open letter, the founder and CEO of investment giant BlackRock — which is setting up a working group to evaluate its potential involvement in the Bitcoin (BTC) market, including investments in Bitcoin futures — said that “climate change has become a defining factor in companies’ long-term prospects.”

And, investment advisors who manage nearly half the world’s invested capital, amounting to more than $34 trillion in assets, urged G-20 countries to comply with the Paris Agreement to save the global economy $160 trillion. They pointed to the alternative, which is that noncompliance would result in damages of $54 trillion.

In a landmark German class-action lawsuit, hundreds of thousands of diesel car owners sought compensation over emissions test cheating from Volkswagen, a company in which digitalization impacts all areas of business: development, vehicle production and the entire work environment on the shop floor and in the office.

In the biggest settlement of its kind, the Brazilian oil company Petróleo Brasileiro — commonly referred to as Petrobras — settled a U.S. class-action lawsuit for $2.95 billion that resulted from the “Operation Car Wash” money-laundering investigation.

A memo from the settlement stated that the company made materially false, misleading statements to U.S. investors about climate-related bribery, branding and lobbying payments — potentially also using cryptocurrencies — to politicians that were designed to control, delay or block binding climate-motivated policies in various countries, hindering the implementation of green-energy policies in the wake of the Paris Agreement.

In another class-action lawsuit, 17,000 Dutch citizens tried to stop Royal Dutch Shell from extracting oil and gas and force it to reduce its greenhouse-gas emissions to zero by 2050.

The company is in talks with a subsidiary of the Chinese oil and chemical giant Sinochem Group and Australian financial-services firm Macquarie Group to develop a blockchain platform, with the goal of reducing trade and settlement inefficiencies, improving transparency and reducing the risk of fraud in the oil industry.

A landmark legal opinion from the Dutch Supreme Court stated that the Dutch government, which has an upbeat blockchain and crypto action agenda, has explicit duties to protect citizens’ human rights in the face of climate change and must reduce emissions by at least 25% of 1990 levels by the end of 2020.

An article by a pioneering proteomics scientist said: “The need to dramatically reduce global emissions is a black swan moment that investors need to pay attention to” because of the significant near-term threat from climate change activism toward the top four global fossil fuel businesses — Exxon Mobil, Chevron, British Petroleum and Royal Dutch Shell, all of which recently formed a global blockchain consortium — that are behind more than 10% of the world’s carbon emissions since 1965, according to a recent report.

The writing has been on the wall for the oil markets for quite some time, given that fossil fuel energy was the worst-performing sector on the S&P 500 index in 2019. In 1980, the energy industry represented 28% of the index’s value, according to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.

Last year, it represented less than 5%. The shift away from oil loomed so large that Moody’s warned in 2018 that the energy transition represented “significant business and credit risk” for oil companies.

Accordingly, on March 8, Saudi Arabia announced oil price cuts and plans to increase oil production after expanding its downstream oil operations by acquiring Royal Dutch Shell’s 50% stake in their refining joint venture Saudi Aramco Shell Refinery Company, referred to as SASREF, for $631 million.

This kick-started a global oil price war sending prices, along with world stock market prices and crypto prices — which showed minute-by-minute correlation with the stock market, negating its status as an uncorrelated investment asset — into a free fall that spiraled into a bear market at the fastest rate in history. The resulting global economic downturn has been unprecedented.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average, which is seen as the benchmark index to gauge the health of the global economy, declined by 38% during mid-March before seeing a moderate recovery. This has been its worst month in 90 years and has been emblematic of those incurred during major recessions.

The magnitude of the stock and bond value losses that major corporations — 100 of which have been identified as being accountable for more than 70% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions — have sustained as a result of the ongoing global economic decline have been extraordinary, as they have occurred concurrently with the rapid, global spread of the lethal coronavirus in a border-blind fashion.

This has led to lockdowns of countries and shutdowns of businesses, sending millions of out-of-work people to the unemployment lines, cut off from health care plans, and with a severe loss of pension and retirement plan assets.

Corporate Internal Carbon Pricing

Public companies are generally required to disclose material information in their financial filings, including climate and related bribery, branding, and lobbying payments. Directors of these public companies are generally required to act in the best interests of the company and its shareholders, and to consider and manage material risks to a company’s business.

Shareholders are allowed to challenge companies and/or boards of directors for failure to do so under Rule 10b-5 of the Securities Exchange Act, which gives shareholders the right to file a lawsuit to recover economic losses sustained as a result of fraud related to the trading of their investments in stocks, bonds, tokens or initial coin offerings.

As the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has stated, tokens and ICOs that feature and market the potential for profits based on the entrepreneurial or managerial efforts of others contain the hallmarks of a security under U.S. law.

Fraud can come in many forms: corporate misgovernance through tax evasion; a lack of effective internal controls over corruption prevention involving bribery, lobbying, bid-rigging and money laundering; or poor financial recordkeeping, including statements regarding future environmental liabilities and climate change impacts.

Companies are coming under growing pressure from shareholders, activists and investment advisors who want companies to be transparent about how the physical impacts of a changing climate will affect their business. They are bringing class-action lawsuits based on climate change.

Originally a uniquely American undertaking, and historically prohibited in most other countries, class-action lawsuits have ramped up and spread across 33 countries. As of January, the total number of climate change cases filed thus far has reached approximately 1,444, with some success.

The threat of multi-jurisdictional class-action lawsuits stemming from environmental liabilities motivated nearly 1,400 public- and private-sector organizations — including global financial firms responsible for assets in excess of $118 trillion — to support the work of the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures, which has aligned with the Business Leadership Criteria on Carbon Pricing issued by the United Nations Global Compact’s Caring for Climate initiative. Internal carbon pricing has emerged as an important tool to help companies manage climate risks and identify opportunities in the low-carbon economy transition.

In the past two years, there has been a particularly strong increase in corporate internal carbon-pricing initiatives in China, Japan, Mexico and the U.S. Studies estimate that the financial value at risk could be up to 17% of global financial assets, if not more.

Digital companies, including crypto mining companies, that haven’t yet adopted an internal price/tax will soon have to do so as investors demand more and more insight into the risks of climate disruption, according to a report prepared by the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions.

Country-By-Country Reporting Scheme

Multinational enterprises in 90 countries, which include crypto exchanges and crypto mining companies, also adhere to country-by-country reporting policies as a part of a tax-transparency initiative included in OECD’s “Inclusive Framework on BEPS” — BEPS being an acronym for “base erosion and profit shifting.”

Country-by-country reporting, or CBCR, requires tax administrations to collect and share with other tax administrations information about multinational enterprises that operate in their countries, including MNE group revenue, profit before tax and tax accrued. The American Institute of Certified Public Accountants issued further nonbinding guidance in a practice aid on how to account for cryptocurrencies.

The goal is to give tax offices the information needed to assess if there is a risk that an MNE group is avoiding taxes through inappropriate transfer pricing or other means.

In the OECD’s March 6 CBCR-related public consultation, 21 of the 78 respondents requested that the OECD revise BEPS framework to adopt the first global standard on public tax disclosure, published in December 2019 by the Global Reporting Initiative, that brings tax transparency to thousands of MNEs by making CBCR disclosures publicly available.

One notable submission, signed by 33 U.S. Congresspeople, endorsed the GRI’s new CBCR standard by calling on the OECD to ensure CBCR reporting is “aligned with the GRI.” Meanwhile, members of the U.S. House of Representatives have introduced a tax-transparency bill that would require MNEs to publicly disclose key tax and financial information on a country-by-country basis.

The OECD’s scheduled second CBCR public consultation on March 17 was postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Conclusion

One-third of the world’s population is now locked down in order to mitigate the global spread of the coronavirus pandemic, which has already infected over 500,000 people and brings in its wake great losses in health and finance. This has led to a new quarantine lifestyle that necessitates increased digital social and business interaction. Even climate change protesters — who have swarmed the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, the United Nations Climate Conference, and the headquarters of Royal Dutch Shell — are holding digital climate change protest meetings via Twitter.

Digital technologies require a high consumption of electricity, which is currently mostly produced with fossil fuels that adversely impact the environment. A global shift toward green energy to meet Paris Agreement requirements is likely going to compel changes to the environmental tax policies and tax transparency reporting standards of digital companies, affecting their financing, technology, infrastructure and regulation.

Because human life “as we know it” is threatened by climate change, catastrophic outcomes will only get worse if no action is taken. Carbon pollution, which heightens the coronavirus’s lethal impact, is border blind and inescapable.

Updated: 4-1-2020

Endangered Sea Turtles Hatch On Brazil’s Deserted Beaches

Coronavirus keeps crowds that usually greet hatching of hawksbill turtles away.

Nearly 100 critically endangered sea turtles have hatched on a deserted beach in Brazil, their first steps going almost unnoticed because of coronavirus restrictions that prohibit people from gathering on the region’s sands.

The 97 hawksbill sea turtles, or tartarugas-de-pente as they are known in Brazil, hatched last Sunday in Paulista, a town in the north-eastern state of Pernambuco.

Photographs taken by government workers, the only people to witness the event, showed the tiny creatures making their way down the beach and into the Atlantic waves.

Locals have been forbidden from gathering on Pernambuco’s spectacular shoreline since last weekend, when the state governor, Paulo Câmara, ordered a partial shutdown and urged residents to stay indoors to slow the spread of coronavirus.

Speaking to the Guardian last week, Câmara said such measures – which the country’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, has actively undermined – were vital if Brazil were to avoid a crisis similar to the one that has taken hold in Europe. “Only isolation will stop the curve growing at the speed it is growing in other places,” he said.

Câmara said the government of Pernambuco, which has so far confirmed 68 Covid-19 cases and five deaths, was racing against time to make hospital beds available for patients.

“All of our efforts are now geared towards delaying its profileration … [so that] when this curve grows, and it will grow, we are as ready as we possibly can be to care for people,” he said.

According to Brazil’s Tamar conservation project, which protects sea turtles, hawksbills lay their eggs along the country’s north-eastern coast and are considered a critically endangered species.

They can grow up to 110cm in length, weigh 85kg and owe their Portuguese name, which translates as “comb turtles”, to the fact that their shells were once widely used to make combs and frames for glasses.

The turtle’s English name comes from its narrow, pointed beak, according to the WWF.

Paulista’s environmental secretary, Roberto Couto, said the town was home to four of the five types of turtle found along Brazil’s coastline: the hawksbill, the green sea turtle, the olive ridley turtle and the loggerhead turtle. More than 300 turtles have hatched there this year.

Couto said the animals normally lay their eggs from January each year and that the hatchlings emerge in April or May. “It’s really beautiful because you can see the exact instant they come out of the eggs and … watch their little march across the beach,” Couto said. “It’s marvellous. It’s a wonderful, extraordinary feeling.

“This time, because of coronavirus, we couldn’t even tell people it was happening.”

Câmara said he hoped the coronavirus restrictions could eventually be relaxed in his state, which is home to about nine million of Brazil’s 209 million citizens. But for now, they are essential.

“Brazil isn’t ready for an exponential growth [in cases], so we need to buy time … so we can put together the infrastructure to treat as many infected people as possible,” he said.

Updated: 4-5-2020

Coronavirus Lockdowns Clear the Air, but the Green Effect Could Be Fleeting

Some worry long-term environmental efforts will suffer as governments look to stimulate growth.

The Los Angeles smog has lifted, water in Venice’s canals has cleared and China’s factory emissions have fallen so dramatically the change can be seen from space.

International travel restrictions and city lockdowns designed to slow the spread of coronavirus have led to swift and sometimes surprising environmental benefits.

The long-term implications are unclear but many climate scientists now expect greenhouse gas emissions to fall for the first time since the financial crisis more than a decade ago, when they dropped by 7%.

“I expect a bigger impact than the great recession of the late 2000s or early 2010s and a drop, perhaps several percent, in global carbon emissions,” said Michael E. Mann, Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science at Penn State.

In the U.S., more than three-quarters of annual greenhouse gases are produced by transportation, industry and power generation—three sectors hit hard as many governments around the world have tried to stem the spread of infection by shutting down swaths of their economies.

Transport has been badly disrupted as airlines ground empty aircraft and commuters stay off the road. Australian carrier Qantas Airways Ltd. canceled all international flights from late March through to the end of May.

More than 30 states have ordered residents to stay at home except for essential activities, clearing millions of people from the country’s streets.

The crisis is also tamping down industrial activity, such as auto manufacturing. General Motors Co., Ford Motor Co. and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV have shut down assembly lines in the U.S., Mexico and Canada to limit the spread of the coronavirus. Honda Motor Co. and Toyota Motor Corp. also suspended their North American production.

A decade ago, emissions rebounded sharply as governments rolled out economic stimulus packages that often focused on infrastructure and heavy industry.

Within two years, global emissions had surpassed their 2008 peak. Climate scientists worry that history will repeat itself as restrictions on movement ease and governments and central banks inject money into their economies to hasten their recovery.

“There are a lot of scenarios where coronavirus could make things worse,” said Rob Jackson, an environmental scientist at Stanford University who chairs the Global Carbon Project. “That’s the nightmare scenario for me: when the coronavirus leads to a global recession and in response we set aside the kinds of climate action and fuel-efficiency measures that would have happened without it.”

Workers who lose their jobs won’t have cash to buy more-energy-efficient goods, such as washing machines or electric cars. Tesla Inc.’s share price has reflected those concerns, and is down more than 40% since Feb. 19.

“A lot of people may not be able to afford any new car, or even a secondhand car,” Prof. Jackson said.

Government responses to industry requests for financial assistance could signal how quickly and by how much emissions snap back, scientists say.

Boeing Co., a major manufacturer and the largest U.S. exporter, would have access to $17 billion in loans and loan guarantees as part of the $2 trillion stimulus package hammered out by the White House and lawmakers. While the measure imposed limits on stock buybacks and dividends for airlines and other companies, it didn’t include requirements sought by eight Senate Democrats that recipients reduce greenhouse gas emissions over time.

Carbon emissions dropped when the global economy contracted 1.7% in 2009, only to surge to a record nine billion tons in 2010 as growth resumed.

“The consensus is for economic activity to eventually return to normal together with the associated levels of greenhouse gas emissions,” said Mike Wilkins, S&P Global Ratings’ head of research and analytics for sustainable finance. So, measures to decarbonize the economy, such as a shift away from fossil fuels, will still be required to meet targets set under the Paris climate agreement.

That could prove tough. Governments that take on big debts to steer their economies through the virus crisis could later find it hard to justify spending on clean energy technologies, such as carbon capture and storage.

Advocates for any kind of environmentally driven stimulus may also need to dial back some of their ambition if measures are to be enacted quickly enough to save jobs and growth, said Zoe Whitton, Citi’s head of environmental, social and governance research.

“It would be a tragedy if we decided we wanted growth to be green and then ended up not being able to have the human recovery we wanted because we spent so long negotiating,” Ms. Whitton said.

Consumers and businesses could again lead change. People may give up their commutes willingly, after becoming used to working from home and communicating with colleagues via videoconferencing platforms. Companies may also accelerate a trend of requiring employees to share desks.

Stanford’s Prof. Jackson is skeptical this would make much difference. “If the past is any guide, the emissions decline won’t be substantial or long-lived,” he said.

Updated: 5-3-2020

Coronavirus Offers A Clear View of What Causes Air Pollution

With factories and vehicles idle, nitrogen dioxide levels hit lows not seen since the early 20th century; ‘We didn’t know…how significantly it could drop’.

The coronavirus shutdowns are giving scientists an opportunity they never thought they would have: to see what would happen to the planet if the world’s economy went on hiatus.

The result has been drops in air pollutants to levels not seen in at least 70 years, easier breathing for people with respiratory ailments and consistently clear views of landmarks often obscured by smog, such as the Hollywood sign in Los Angeles and the Manhattan skyline.

“There have been some interesting pseudo-experiments, like when Beijing closed its plants for the [2008 Summer] Olympics, but only for a few days,” said Melissa Lunden, chief scientist for Aclima, a San Francisco company that measures pollution with street-level sensors. “Now, everyone on the planet can see the changes.”

The reasons, experts say, is that factories have shut down, and people who can’t go to the office, church or restaurants have stopped driving. Vehicle traffic in Los Angeles and New York has plunged about 90% from levels in January 2020, according to data analytics firm StreetLight Data Inc.

One of the biggest airborne pollutants to fall off has been nitrogen dioxide, which is a byproduct of fossil-fuel emissions that most scientists believe is contributing to climate change.

Satellite data from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration show NO2 levels in the Northeastern U.S. dropped 30% during March from the previous four-year average for the month.

San Francisco-based Aclima has compiled data that shows the NO2 readings dropping in lockstep as the coronavirus swept first from China in January to Europe in February and the U.S. in March. Scientists said it was the first time they could remember so many cities going clean all at once.

 

In addition, Aclima found a 39% drop in particulate matter such as from smoke and a 41% plunge in soot created by diesel fumes and other human sources. The company’s scientists say they believe those are the lowest levels since the first half of the last century.

“We knew how bad the pollution was,” said Davida Herzl, Aclima’s co-founder and chief executive officer. “What we didn’t know was how significantly it could drop.”

The reductions in air pollution weren’t evenly distributed in the Bay Area, however. In the northwest corner of Oakland known as West Oakland, the level of human-caused carbon dioxide fell 56% over that April 6 time period compared with 43% for the Bay Area as a whole.

Aclima officials attribute the drop to the fact that West Oakland, a majority African-American neighborhood, is in an industrial zone surrounded by ships, trucks, trains and factories.

Environmental activists say the readings support what they have long argued, that lower-income communities such as West Oakland suffer from more pollution than other parts of cities.

The rate of childhood asthma in West Oakland is five times higher than the statewide average, according to Brian Beveridge, co-director of the West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project.

“This tells me, look, there really is a direct correlation between the health outcomes in communities like West Oakland and the levels of pollution,” Mr. Beveridge said.

Pollution levels will inevitably rise in the U.S., as they have in other parts of the world that have begun to return to normal, Ms. Herzl said. But she said it was likely to be more gradual than the drop, as the economy won’t restart as quickly as it slowed.

Updated: 5-7-2020

Four-Legged City Dwellers Get Their Moment While Humans Are Stuck Inside

Coyotes, foxes, toads venture out into cities on coronavirus lockdown; ‘They were here all the time’.

Add to the list of what we’ve learned about our communities during the coronavirus lockdown: Wilderness is not as far as it seems.

It turns out boar, deer, coyotes and birds have been right under our noses all along.

Cornelius Gati, a research scientist at Stanford University, stumbled across some coyotes while out walking as part of his permitted exercise near his home in San Francisco’s Twin Peaks neighborhood. “To see a coyote in broad daylight in what is typically one of the most touristy places in San Francisco was just mind blowing,” he said.

In fact, the animals have been in and around the city since the early 2000s, after California restricted the use of snares and poison bait. They largely kept out of sight. But now, said Janet Kessler, who has been watching them for 13 years, the same coyotes are being spotted again and again, often during the day, as the city’s human residents stay home or venture out for occasional runs.

“All of a sudden, people either gush over them or worry they are going to eat them or rip out the livers of the children,” she said. “They were here all the time.”

Ms. Kessler worries that more people might start feeding them now they know coyotes are around. “There’s nothing more pitiful than a coyote hanging around waiting for food,” she said. “We don’t want to turn them into stray dogs.”

Animals have always been at the edges of cities, especially as development has pushed farther into the wild. Now they’re making themselves more at home, enjoying the relative calm while humans are stuck inside.

Alastair Driver, a conservationist and director of Rewilding Britain, said he has noticed more roe deer than normal wandering near his home just west of London. “They’re exploiting the quietness to come out and see what’s going on,” he said. “But it’s also because we’re becoming more observant.”

He hopes it leads to better things after the pandemic. “If it brings us a little closer to nature, then hopefully that will give us a better understanding of how to coexist with the world around us,” he said.

Before the lockdowns, London had a love-hate relationship with its population of urban foxes—as many as 28,000 of them.

“Usually you only hear or see them at night. They can make a right nuisance of themselves,” said Robert Wilson, who lives in the Crystal Palace neighborhood in the south of the city. “It’s different when you see them during the day. It feels more like you’re sharing the city with them. I saw one yesterday, like it was just out for a morning stroll.”

In Marin County, across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco, people have started howling like coyotes each evening at 8 p.m. to show support for health workers and to let off a little steam.

Camilla Fox, who founded Project Coyote, a nonprofit in the area that aims to help people and coyotes get along, said she hopes the choice of the howl as a symbol of resolve might make for better coyote-human relations in the region. “It’s a good sign,” Ms. Fox said.

There may be less hope for humans and seagulls. The local council in East Riding, in northeast England, issued a warning to locals to take special care.

“Coastal residents are being advised that, due to a lack of food sources, seagulls may be more hungry than normal and may behave aggressively” to snatch food, it said.

Having fewer people around is helping other species. Authorities at Janga Beach in Brazil said baby hawksbill sea turtles had a clearer path to the ocean after hatching from their eggs buried in the sand there in March. The people who usually crowd the area were kept away by pandemic control orders, city environment chief Herbert Andrade said.

The toads of Riddlesden in northern England could also be in for a bumper mating season this spring thanks to the pandemic.

Typically they risk life and limb as they hop their way down from the moor and attempt to cross a busy road before spawning in a nearby reservoir.

Sue Patchett of the Riddlesden Toad Patrol, a group that helps the amphibians safely to their destination, reports fewer deaths than usual this year because the U.K.’s shelter-in-place instructions are keeping people home.

“There are far fewer cars than normal,” she said. “The toads are going to have a rare old time.”

Updated: 10-14-2020

Covid Gives Tourism Chance To Curb Future Environmental Damage

A plunge in visitors allowed nature to recover at overrun hotspots. Now, some countries don’t want to go back to to the destruction of mass tourism, even when Covid ends.

Thai Environment Minister Varawut Silpa-archa has wanted for decades to give the country’s national parks time to recover from the damage caused by an endless stream of tourists. Covid-19 gave him the chance.

Now, able to see the benefit of giving nature a respite, Varawut is going further. He has decreed that all national parks in Thailand will close for an annual average of three months, beginning in 2021.

It’s a bold move to make the nation’s vital tourism industry more sustainable — one that puts him at odds with many businesses in hotspots like Phuket that are being crushed by re-opening delays.

“We have to find balance and should use this pandemic as a lesson,” said Varawut, 47. “If humans keep on abusing Mother Nature, one day she will take it back. She’s taking it back now.”

Tourism has been among the biggest economic victims of the pandemic, with the industry losing 440 million visitors and $460 billion globally in the first half of the year, according to the United Nations World Tourism Organization.

But the virus, which has killed more than a million people, has also forced an awareness of the effects industries from power generation to air travel have had on the environment.

Since Thailand banned overseas visitors because of the pandemic, more killer whales and dugongs have been spotted roaming Thai waters, Varawut said. Rare leatherback turtles have been laying eggs in droves on beaches normally packed with sunbathers.

Other tourism-dependent countries have noticed benefits to nature. Bryan Celeste, the 24-year-old mayor of Alaminos in the Philippines, said in his constituency’s Hundred Islands National Park, the local scubasureros — divers who collect garbage — have been retrieving only a few kilograms a month recently, compared with hundreds before the pandemic.

He’s also pushing for longer-term tourism restrictions even as the local government faces an estimated loss of about 40 million pesos ($824,165) in revenue this year, without accounting for the damage to businesses.

Celeste commissioned a “carrying capacity” study to help decide visitor limits to the park and is considering using a digital visitor management platform such as homegrown Visita to help monitor tourist numbers.

The moves to shorten tourism seasons have met with resistance from travel-related businesses, most of whom are counting on a recovery in visitor numbers once global restrictions ease. Travel and tourism contributed about 12% of Southeast Asia’s GDP last year and 13% of employment, according to the World Travel & Tourism Council.

“It’s the rule that looks good on paper,” said Kalawin Kumnaung in Koh Samet, Thailand, a fire dance performer also known as Petch. “But in reality, especially for small business operators who have rent to pay, the two-month closures will be devastating,” said Kalawin, who also owns a bar on the island where he’s lived for more than 30 years.

Tourism authorities also are being cautioned to not appear to be excluding key segments of the tourist population while promoting sustainability measures — and to focus instead on “how do we bring back the quantity and improve the quality at the same time,” said Steve Saxon, a partner for McKinsey & Co. in Shenzhen.

“Countries need to be careful how they talk about reducing tourism to not mean elite tourism only,” said Saxon. “Higher-end or more affluent tourism does support a bit more in terms of jobs and GDP, but in terms of flights coming in, hotel rooms you need — that’s dependent on the number of guests.”

Suvarin Mayazes, vice president of the Tourism Council of Thailand, said the government should worry more about damage from illegal activities rather than tourists.

“Only illegal fishing boats will benefit from the park closures, not the environment, because they can operate freely without anybody seeing them,” said Suvarin, who owns Siam Catamaran Co. Ltd., a diving company that operates in the popular Mu Ko Chumphon National Park.

Mobility restrictions “caused a huge blow to the tourism industry, but did enable our environment to ‘rest and recuperate,’” said the municipal tourism office in Donsol, a Philippine dive site that’s home to endangered whale sharks.

Donsol has had a longer-than-usual off-season this year as the virus struck before the naturally quieter July-October, when the whale sharks migrate elsewhere.

The drop in tourism may also allow officials an opportunity to assess the hidden costs of mass tourism, including pollution, groundwater contamination and infrastructure.

Most countries that rely on tourism for an economic boost have been more focused on trying to make up for lost income by promoting domestic travel, or using the downtime to spruce up attractions while awaiting the return of tourist hordes.

Sri Lanka is enjoying something of a boom in domestic tourism, while at Cambodia’s world-famous Angkor Wat temple complex, authorities are adding flower beds and some 3,000 trees to the surrounding park and relocating unsightly shops and stalls from the front of the complex, according to a local news report.

New Zealand, which is also encouraging locals to take domestic holidays, has set up a task force to look at the impact of tourism on the environment on concern that surging visitor numbers had begun to spoil the clean-green image that the nation promotes.

“Environmental and tourism priorities should be seen as partners in recovery,” said Billie Dumaliang, a Philippines-based conservationist and co-founder of Visita, who advocates higher-value, lower-volume tourism. But without government intervention to force the industry to take a more sustainable path, the onslaught of visitors may return.

“Most of the gains, like reduced carbon emissions and pollution, are immediately reversible once lockdowns are lifted,” Dumaliang said.

Updated: 10-20-2020

Birds Really Did Sound Louder During Lockdowns

When traffic noise disappeared from San Francisco, the city’s white-crowned sparrows took advantage of the silence, researchers found.

You can tell what part of the Bay Area a male white-crowned sparrow is from just by a few notes of its song. The buzzes and trills of the North American birds can vary dramatically over just a few miles. (Think Bronx versus Brooklyn accents, but for birds.)

These distinctive dialects have made the species a focus of ornithological attention for decades; since the 1960s, researchers have mapped 10 birdsong dialects across San Francisco, their borders shifting and evolving over time.

But in recent years many of the urban sparrows’ melodies had been “masked” by noise pollution, and the birds began singing at a higher frequency to overcome the cacophony of cars and city life.

That changed in March, when Bay Area counties went into coronavirus lockdown. Traffic disappeared, coyotes began prowling the traffic-free streets, and nature, famously, began healing.

Elizabeth Derryberry, an associate professor of behavioral evolution and phylogenetics at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, wondered about the white-crowned sparrows in the San Francisco region that she’d been studying since 2012. What would they sound like, unmasked?

Using recordings collected from April through June 2015 as a comparison point, Derryberry and four other colleagues analyzed the vocal performance of male white-crowned sparrows in the period from April to May of this year.

The sample area spanned breeding grounds from the rural forests and grasslands of Abbotts Lagoon and Commonweal in Marin County, north of the city, to the more urban East Bay city of Richmond, and Golden Gate Bridge-adjacent Lands End.

There, co-author Jennifer Phillips, a postdoc at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, recorded four distinct songs, with four distinct trill patterns.

What the researchers found is that as the city’s sounds dimmed, the urban sparrows’ songs changed. They didn’t get louder, though you may have noticed them more. Instead, they got “sexier.” The birds were able to say more, and say it better, because they didn’t have to shout so much.

Pre-pandemic, urban and rural soundscapes varied widely in these birds’ habitats: The white-crowned sparrow’s San Francisco breeding grounds are typically three times noisier than that of less-dense Marin County.

In these normal conditions, urban males often have to sing more loudly than rural ones, at higher frequencies and at lower bandwidths, to compete with the high “sound energy” of a city. But they face a tradeoff between having their songs detected at a far distance and communicating information in the signals that they’re sending.

When lockdowns hit, the sound patterns of urban and rural areas converged into a blanket of quiet. Ambient noise — intermittent loud sounds like dogs barking or airplanes crossing the sky — dropped in both urban and rural locations, while the disappearance of background low-frequency noises like the hum of cars and buses was noticed more dramatically in cities.

Derryberry’s team did their analysis before the city released comprehensive traffic data that quantified the slowdown, but they knew that vehicle crossings on the Golden Gate Bridge were down in April and May to “levels not seen since 1954.”

“[A] relatively brief but dramatic change in human behavior effectively erased more than a half-century of urban noise pollution and concomitant soundscape divergence between urban and nearby rural areas,” the authors wrote in their paper, which was recently published in Science. “In other words, the Covid-19 shutdown created a proverbial silent spring across the SF Bay Area.”

Urban white-crowned sparrows, whose breeding season started at the same time as the shutdowns, took advantage of this silence.

“When the noise disappeared, that tradeoff went away,” said Derryberry. “Suddenly, their signal could go a long distance and contain a lot of information.”

Male sparrows started singing about 30% more softly, but since the roar of the urban world had dropped by more than 50%, their signal carried twice as far. Features that hadn’t been heard since the 1970s reappeared, along with new trill patterns.

“They weren’t actually louder, but they sounded louder,” she said.

To understand how that works, imagine you’re at a party, Derryberry suggested. (Bittersweet, I know.) As more people fill the room, voices creep louder and louder; vocal cords strain and get shrill, and still, you can barely hear the person in front of you.

By the end of the night, though, when only a few stragglers remain, everyone speaks more softly and their words carry farther. You can’t help but perk up if you hear something juicy a couple of conversations away.

That emptying room is what the sparrows suddenly found themselves in this spring. Through the stillness, San Franciscans were able to hear four times the number of white-crowned sparrows as before.

For male birds, who use their birdsongs to repel rivals from their territory and to attract mates, being heard is essential to survival. Their tune is both a “keep out” and a “come hither” signal:

The frequency exudes strength, and the trilling demonstrates stamina, says Derryberry. Better vocal performance can translate into more mates, and improved odds for successful breeding.

Because the life span of the sparrow is only about 13 months on average, Derryberry says it’s possible that male birds who were already suited to this emerging soundscape were favored for reproduction, and that what we’re hearing is the beginnings of an evolutionary adaptation.

Even as traffic returns, Derryberry believes that the legacy of this “silent spring” will be long-lasting, and that songbirds in other cities may be experiencing similar effects.

“Whether it’s plasticity or selection, whatever it is, I think these birds are on a new trajectory,” she said. “Their songs have entered an acoustic space they haven’t been in over 30 years. I really doubt they’re just going to go right back to where they were before.”

Updated: 11-23-2020

This Year’s Emissions Drop Is A ‘Tiny Blip,’ UN Agency Says

The impact of coronavirus lockdowns on greenhouse gas emissions can’t be distinguished from natural variability, WMO says.

Human emissions of the greenhouse gases responsible for climate change will fall between 4.2% and 7.5% this year due to the global industrial slowdown caused by coronavirus lockdowns.

But carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere will continue to go up, albeit at a slightly reduced pace, according to preliminary data by the World Meteorological Organization released on Monday. The short-term impact of the Covid-19 pandemic can’t be distinguished from natural variability, the United Nations agency said.

“The lockdown-related fall in emissions is just a tiny blip on the long-term graph,” WMO secretary general Petteri Taalas said in a statement. “We need a sustained flattening of the curve.”

Carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere for centuries, and in the ocean for even longer. That means concentrations of the warming gas will continue to rise for years, even if human emissions fall or are brought to a halt. In 2019, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere breached a new threshold of 410 parts per million, from 400 parts per million in 2015, according to the WMO’s Greenhouse Gas Bulletin released on Monday.

“Such a rate of increase has never been seen in the history of our records,” Taalas said. “The last time the Earth experienced a comparable concentration of CO₂ was 3-5 million years ago, when the temperature was 2-3°C warmer and sea level was 10-20 meters higher than now —but there weren’t 7.7 billion inhabitants.”

Concentrations of CO₂ in the atmosphere were 48% higher in 2019 than 1750, according to the report. The increase observed from 2018 to 2019 was larger than that observed during the previous one-year period, and larger than the average over the last decade.

Methane presence in the atmosphere were up by 160% from pre-industrial times, while nitrous oxide was up 23%.

Air Pollution In Some Parts Of Italy And Spain Fell As Much As 70% During Coronavirus Lockdowns This Year

The decrease in Europe’s pollution due to stricter environmental regulations over the decade to 2018 helped lower deaths caused by heart and lung disease, according to the European Environment Agency.

Around 60,000 fewer people died prematurely due to fine particulate matter pollution in 2018, compared with 2009, the agency’s annual Air quality in Europe report showed on Monday.

During that decade, emissions decoupled from economic activity, meaning there are now fewer emissions for each unit of gross domestic product generated each year.

“Better air quality is an investment for better health and productivity for all Europeans,” said Hans Bruyninckx, executive director at the EEA. “Policies and actions that are consistent with Europe’s zero pollution ambition lead to longer and healthier lives and more resilient societies.”

Air pollutants emitted by the transport, manufacturing or energy sectors were associated with cardiovascular and respiratory diseases that caused about 417,000 premature deaths in 41 European countries in 2018, according to the agency. Gas emissions from transport declined even as mobility demand rose, while progress in reducing building and agriculture emissions has been slow.

In 2018, only Estonia, Finland, Iceland and Ireland had fine particulate matter concentrations below the World Health Organization’s stricter guideline values. Eight countries including Italy and Poland exceeded the European Union’s limit value for fine particulate matter.

Lockdowns implemented this year by several European nations to contain the spread of the coronavirus pandemic led to significant drops in pollution. Traffic stations in Spain and Italy, which implemented some of the most strict lockdowns, detected some of the sharpest reductions, with nitrogen dioxide emissions down as much as 70% in some places.

A more comprehensive statistical model used by EEA estimated an average reduction of pollution of about 40% in Spain and about 35% in Italy.

Several scientific studies over the past few months have pointed to the links between coronavirus and air pollution. Poor air quality can cause heart and lung diseases which are risk factors for death in Covid-19 patients.

Therefore, long-term exposure to air pollution is expected to increase vulnerability to the virus, in the same way that previous studies indicated exposure to particulate matter worsens the impact of respiratory illnesses, the report said.

Updated: 4-12-2021

Here’s Some Good Climate News For A Change

A butterfly highway, a greener India, and more stories to brighten your day.

The fourth issue of Bloomberg Green’s magazine is coming, and already you can read some outstanding stories featured in its pages. There’s the one about Mexico’s tree-planting program, which has had the perverse effect of encouraging residents of poor districts to cut down historic forests.

Just days after that investigation published online, Mexico’s President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador announced a review of the program.

This new magazine also spotlights an investigation into a program meant to help low-income U.S. homeowners afford climate-friendly home renovations that has often amounts to predatory lending with a green veneer.

Contractors target the elderly and non-English speakers, locking them into unaffordable agreements for solar panels and energy-efficient air conditioning. It’s the return of subprime deal, only this time it’s for solar.

Also in this issue: a look inside Global Thermostat, one of the pioneers in removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Current and former employees and business partners say the crucial climate startup has been trapped in years of dysfunction and disappointment by its brilliant co-founder and chief executive.

But why focus on the negative? Ever wonder how a carbon border tax might work? This magazine has you covered.

(Here’s the first trick: don’t make it a tax.) What about where to buy the most eco-friendly yoga mat? Try the recycled wetsuit mat made from, you guessed it, recycled wetsuits.

The new magazine pulls together entries in our Carbon Benchmark series, which drills down into the targets countries will have to hit on their way to reaching net-zero emissions by 2050.

As always, in the name of keeping an eye on progress, the latest issue of Bloomberg Green ends with a roundup of positive developments in recent months. Because, yes, climate news is often bad but it would be even worse to lose hope.

U.S. Limits Planet-Warming Chemicals

The stimulus bill passed in December included some surprise climate initiatives, including an agreement to phase out hydrofluorocarbons, chemicals used in air conditioning and refrigeration that contribute to global warming. That finally puts the U.S. on par with other nations that have either banned or agreed to phase out their use.

In Sweden

The movement, which translates as “flight shame,” started as a way to get Swedes to choose travel by land rather than air. Now, the Guardian reports that the country will start charging extra fees to high-­emitting planes at takeoff and landing.

One flight between Stockholm and Gothenburg, the country’s two most populous cities, emits as much carbon dioxide as 40,000 train trips, according to Swedish Railways.

Court Ruling Thaws Some Climate Cases

A U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on a Ford Motor Co. product liability case in March clears a hurdle for a group of idled climate lawsuits. Justices ruled that state courts could decide cases involving out-of-state defendants with certain in-state ties.

The resolution allows lawsuits targeting oil companies for their role in climate change to proceed in Maryland, Rhode Island, and Washington.

Iconic Paris Road Has Leafy Future

The city has approved a €250m ($298 million) project to add major greenery to the Champs-Élysées. The 1.2-mile avenue is used by about 64,000 vehicles daily that have become a significant source of pollution. The plan will invest in plants to beautify the area and clean the air.

India Looks To Go Greener, Faster

The world’s third-biggest greenhouse gas emitter is ­debating whether to try to zero out its greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, according to people familiar with discussions among top Indian government officials. The people asked not to be identified, as the discussions are private. A dramatic low-­carbon transformation in less than 30 years would challenge India’s coal-­dependent economy.

BlackRock Demands Climate Strategies

BlackRock Inc., the world’s largest asset manager, upped the pressure on companies to disclose a business plan compatible with achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

In his annual letter to chief executive officers in January, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink warned that for companies not sufficiently focused on this transition, his company will consider voting against management and potentially selling shares from its active portfolios.

A wetlands reserve has welcomed its first cheetahs in almost a century. The addition of three males from South Africa to the Bangweulu Wetlands is meant to help restore the biodiversity of the area. There are fewer than 6,700 African cheetahs remaining in the wild. The species is the fastest land animal in the world.

Rhino Poaching Declines

The number of rhinos killed by poachers in South Africa, which has the world’s biggest population of the animal, fell 33% last year as Covid-19 lockdowns reduced the movement of illegal hunters.

That’s the sixth straight year of decline, South Africa’s Department of Environment, Forestry and Fisheries said in a statement. Only about 27,000 rhinos remain in the wild, according to conservation organization WWF.

African Nation Creates Ocean Haven

Ivory Coast created its first-ever marine-protected area, off the coastal town of Grand-Béréby. The 1,000-square-mile zone, which includes mangroves and reefs, is considered a globally important nesting ground for sea turtles and will protect more than 20 species of sharks and rays. The location will also have space for sustainable fishing and ecotourism activities.

A Butterfly Superhighway

U.K. nonprofit Buglife announced in March that it had completed the first phase of its B-Line project, aiming to create connected wildflower habitats—pollinator pathways—around the country. England has lost more than 97% of its grasslands in less than a century, the group says. So far, Buglife has either created or restored 1,500 hectares of butterfly habitat, 10% of its goal.

Cheetahs Return To Zambia

Nepal’s Rhino Population Grows, Likely Boosted by Covid-19 Closures

With nature reserves shut for most of last year, endangered animals had more freedom to roam, congregate and mate.

The herd of rare rhinoceroses that calls Nepal home has expanded, likely with a little help from the country’s Covid-19 lockdowns.

The endangered, one-horned rhinos got a long holiday from camera-toting tourists as the country’s nature reserves were shut for most of last year. That gave them more freedom to roam, congregate and mate, conservation officials said.

A census showed that the country’s herd of rhinos—also called a crash—increased about 17%, to 752, from the previous survey six years earlier, Nepal’s Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation said Saturday.

“It’s great news for all of us who care for conservation of rhinos,” said Deepak Kumar Kharal, the department’s director general. “Covid-19 had a small but an important role helping the growth in our rhinos’ population.”

The population of greater one-horned rhinos has been growing since it almost disappeared, falling below 100 in the 1960s—rebounding thanks to national efforts to protect them from poaching and preserve the riverine grasslands and jungles of southern Nepal that make up their habitat.

Rangers performed the national survey on the backs of 57 elephants.

In Chitwan National Park, one of the largest nature reserves for rhinos, some rangers and conservation officials involved in this year’s survey said, they found evidence of a baby boom.

The gestation period for rhinos is as long as 18 months, so any conceived during the lockdowns wouldn’t have arrived. However, the rangers saw more baby rhinos than they have before and say more babies may have survived last year without the stress and distraction of hiding from hordes of tourists in jeeps.

“Covid lockdown gave the best environment for the birth and growth of baby rhinos,” said Bishnu Lama, a 64-year wildlife technician called out of retirement for the census.

During their 20 days of counting, Mr. Lama and other trackers counted 694 rhinos inside Chitwan reserve, the main rhino habitat in Nepal. Of those, 125 were children, a group that comprises rhinos as old as 3½ when seen with their mothers. In 2015, they counted 116 rhino children inside the reserve and 111 in 2011.

“Most of the rhino calves we saw this time were very small, probably born within the last four months,” Mr. Lama said. “They seemed happy and relaxed with less human disturbances.”

Updated: 8-21-2021

Venice Is Open For Tourists, But Not Cruise Ships

Ruling to ban mega ships from lagoon splits a city reliant on foreign visitors.

Gianluigi Rizo, a porter at Venice’s iconic Piazza San Marco, pushes a cart of luggage as scores of tourists hop off water taxis, coming in from the airport through the medieval city’s canals.

Business is picking up as Covid-19 restrictions are lifted. But a ruling last month by the Italian government to ban cruise ships from approaching Venice’s lagoon is threatening to deprive the city of its most lucrative visitors for another summer season.

“It’s good that tourists are back, but the real money comes from the cruise ships with the Americans and the well-off Asians,” Mr. Rizo said. “They spend big in a short time, before sailing out.”

Venice, which averaged around 20 million tourists a year before the pandemic, is desperate to bring back the foreign visitors that keep its economy afloat. Tourism revenue dried up over the past two years, but the city’s canals and piazzas are busy again and hotels are 80% full on average in August.

Access to the lagoon and Piazza San Marco has for years been a bone of contention between environmental campaigners, tourism bodies and cruise operators.

Critics argue that runaway tourism—fed by the massive ships that move more than 5,000 passengers each—has pushed out many of Venice’s permanent residents, put a strain on housing and destroyed jobs not related to travel and hospitality. Tensions heightened in 2019 when a cruise ship crashed into a small tourist boat inside the lagoon, injuring five people.

“With Covid the city was a ghost town, and we spent our savings on food and rent,” said Stefano Esposito, who owns a Murano glassware shop at Rialto Bridge, one of Venice’s busiest crossings. “The cruise crowds can be overwhelming, but they put food on the table and if the ships don’t come back, we are finished.”

Before the pandemic, Venice hotels hosted around 10.5 million foreign guests a year, according to Italy’s statistics bureau. The number doesn’t account for day visitors from cruise ships; they boost overall tourism arrivals to around 20 million annually, according to Italy’s tourism ministry.

The tourists, who mostly concentrate in an area of two square miles around Piazza San Marco, pour in about $3.3 billion annually, according to tourism ministry officials. About a fifth of the city’s 50,000 year-round residents depend directly on cruise ships for work, officials say.

The government has outlined a plan to temporarily divert ships to the nearby port of Marghera, while work is being done to build a cruise terminal outside the lagoon. Unesco, the United Nations culture and heritage agency, said in July that it could put Venice on its endangered list if a permanent ban on cruise ships docking in the city center wasn’t addressed.

Venice bans could have wider ramifications for the cruise industry, which is trying to lure back passengers after onboard Covid-19 outbreaks and travel restrictions halted most sailings in 2020. Itineraries in the Adriatic hinge on Venice being a home port, where passengers fly in and get on a ship or arrive on one vessel and board another after spending a few days in the city.

“If you can’t call at Venice, you might as well cancel many itineraries in the Adriatic Sea,” said Francesco Galietti, director for Italy at the Cruise Lines International Association, the industry’s main trade body.

The cruise season here lasts from late March to early October. In 2019, before the pandemic, 600 ships called at Venice. There were practically zero arrivals in 2020, and through late September this year only 20 ships were scheduled to come in, docking at nearby ports like Ravenna and Falcone.

Gianmatteo Zampieri, the general manager of Baglioni Hotel Luna that overlooks the lagoon, says the debate on the cruise ships is mostly political, and that practical steps are needed for crowd control. “You can’t have half a dozen ships in the lagoon,” he said. “The ship arrivals need to be spaced out.”

Yet, many Venetians can’t wait for the foreign masses to return.

“If Athens, Paris and Barcelona can handle mass tourism, so can we,” said Luigi Rossi, who takes tourists around Venice’s canals in his gondola. “Stopping the ships so abruptly is absurd.”

Venice Set To Charge Tourists For Entry From Next Summer

Venice plans to charge visitors for access and set entrance quotas from the summer of 2022, according to newspaper Stampa.

The Italian city, one of the world’s top tourist destinations, will also require prospective visitors to reserve access in advance, according to the newspaper. Turnstiles will be installed at the main access points of the city’s historical center.

Measures to control the inflow of tourists had been debated for years before the pandemic all but halted arrivals in 2020. This year, with travel slowly resuming, the restrictions are back on the agenda, as global tourism hotspots try to restrain mass arrivals and improve the quality of the experience for both visitors and residents.

Last month, Italy banned large cruise ships from the Venice lagoon to protect the site from over-tourism, in what might be just a first step in the push to reinvent and regulate mass tourism.

Entry into Venice might cost anything from 3 euros ($3.5) to 10 euros, La Stampa reported, depending on the season and on how many tourists are expected on that day.

Locals, relatives of residents, and tourists who have booked in a Venice hotel will be among those exempt from the entry fee.

Charging visitors remains controversial. City councillor Marco Gasparinetti said it will turn Venice into a “theme park,” according to the newspaper, and proposes to restrict access only for particularly crowded areas, like San Marco square.

Updated: 5-30-2021

The English-Speaking Country With Ancient Ruins, Spectacular Wildlife – But Hardly Any Tourists

elize, one of only two English-speaking nations in Latin America (the other is Guyana), offers wildlife, underwater wonders, idyllic beaches and Maya ruins – yet fewer than 500,000 tourists went there in 2018, according to the latest UNWTO statistics. More people visit Colchester Zoo each year than this entire country.

Here Are Seven Good Reasons To Make It Your Next Holiday Destination:

Jungle Tours

The day I entered the Toledo jungle to spend the afternoon with a chocolate farmer named Eladio was the day I fell in love with Belize. More than just being a cacao or chocolate tour, this adventure – which departs from the village of San Pedro Columbia – was a love letter to nature, food, spices, and medicinal remedies.

Instead of carrying water bottles to rehydrate, Eladio would simply cut down a fresh coconut. Instead of trail mix, we munched on fresh cacao beans. A jungle tour of the region, and a trip to nearby Tiger Cave, is a must.

Spicy Cuisine – And No Fast Food

Belizean food stands out in Latin American as much as Cajun food does in the United States. It’s spicy, usually stewed, heavy on seafood, usually comes with beans and rice, and is often topped with Marie Sharp’s famous hot sauce.

Look out for the national dish of stewed chicken, meaty barracuda (aka “the steak of the sea”), king mackerel with berry vinegar sauce, and soursop fruit juice. As a bonus that can only lead you to better food, there are no McDonald’s, Burger Kings, Starbucks, or KFC’s in the entire country.

Island life

Belize is a popular destination for beach goers, but don’t expect the sort of crowded resorts found in Mexico. It offers a picturesque and stress-free environment, not least on its 450 tiny island cayes (pronounced “keys”).

Take Laughing Bird Caye, for example. It’s home to nothing more than palm trees, a reef, white sand, a few grills and a thatched pavilion – all you need for a relaxing day. Visit on a boat trip from the mainland town of Placencia.

Sharks And Jaguars

In between all of those wonderful cayes, you’ll find some of the greatest dive sites on Earth. The 185-mile Belize Barrier Reef is world’s second largest coral reef system, and home to more than 400 species of fish, including – the most impressive thing I saw while I was there – the docile but imposing nurse shark.

Its diverse land animals are also impressive; be sure to visit Cockscomb Basin, the first jaguar reserve on the planet.

Maya Ruins

In addition to inventing chocolate, the Mayans erected some 1,000 temples in Belize alone, many of which are still being excavated. In fact, the tallest building in Belize is still an ancient Maya temple, the Caana pyramid at Caracol. Of the numerous sites open to the public, Xunantunich, Caracol, and Lamanai are among the finest.

Getting Around Has Got Easier

As recently as the 1990s, it could take several days to traverse the country by car, with a four wheel drive a necessity. Thanks to the Hummingbird Highway, however, traffic now flows easily throughout most of the country.

You’ll still encounter slow dirt tracks from time to time, but the combination of modern roads, plentiful tour buses, and small commercial airlines such as Tropic Air and Maya Airways, have opened up the whole of Belize.

You Can Mingle With The Locals

With English spoken everywhere, Belize offers the promise of easy interactions. US visitors also benefit from its willingness to accept dollars. It’s also popular among ex-pats – testament, surely, to its charms. During my trip, I encountered a German named Bruno who moved there in the 1980s, an American couple who visited in 2002 and decided to stay, and a British man who went in his twenties but never left. He’s now 77.

How To Get There

To avoid the rainy season go between November and May. The majority of tourists are American, so avoid US public and school holidays, if possible. British Airways (ba.com) flies from London Heathrow to Belize City via Miami. Tropic Air (tropicair.com) operates a dependable network of domestic flights. See our guide to the best hotels.

Updated: 12-31-2019

Carnival Is On Probation For Polluting The Ocean. They’re Still Doing It, Court Records Show

In the year after Carnival Corporation was convicted of systematically dumping oily waste into the ocean and lying about it to regulators, its ships illegally discharged more than a half-million gallons of treated sewage, gray water, oil and food waste, and burned heavy fuel oil in ports and waters close to shores around the world, according to a court-appointed monitor.

The findings are part of a pattern of illegal behavior during Carnival Corp.’s first of five years on probation that led U.S. District Judge Patricia Seitz to publish a previously confidential report last week. In the 205-page report, the monitor overseeing Carnival Corp.’s environmental compliance flagged more than 800 incidents from April 2017 to April 2018.

The Miami Herald reviewed each incident and found that 24 were for illegally dumping sewage, food waste or oil; 19 were for illegally burning heavy fuel oil in protected areas; and more than 150 were the result of items like furniture accidentally going overboard. Carnival Corp. reported the violations to authorities directly or noted them in their internal records. None of the violations was intentional, according to the report.

Subsequent court filings show Carnival Corp. has continued to violate environmental laws in its second year on probation.

The monitor’s written report applauded the company’s cooperativeness on board and ashore, and noted the company had corrected conditions that led to the original charges.

“The Company expended considerable efforts to meet the [probationary] Year One requirements, and has substantially complied with them,” the report states. “ Numerous individuals…have exhibited a strong commitment to creating a sustainable culture of environmental compliance.” The report also praised the company’s training initiatives.

But the report also called Carnival Corp.’s internal investigations “critically flawed” and said the company has not given enough authority to Chris Donald, its court-mandated corporate compliance manager.

Donald told the Herald he has the authority and the confidence of Carnival Corp.’s executives. (Though he and company’s chief executive have the same surname, they are not related.)

Carnival Corp. CEO Arnold Donald said Tuesday that the company will do what it takes to ensure it meets all expectations of its probation and strive to be “best in class on environmental compliance.”

“Our environmental responsibility has been and remains a top priority for the company,” he said. “Our aspiration is to leave the places we touch even better than when we first arrived. This is in the best interest of our guests, our company and the oceans upon which we travel. We look forward to clarifying any issues and demonstrating our commitment.”

Hundreds of Violations

In 2016, Miami-based Carnival Corp., the largest cruise company in the world and owner of nine cruise brands, pleaded guilty to seven felony charges in relation to its eight-year-long “conspiracy” of illegal oil dumping and subsequent cover up on five of its Princess Cruise Line ships. Carnival Corp. agreed to pay a $40 million fine — the largest-ever criminal penalty involving deliberate vessel pollution — and five years of probation.

Updated: 3-23-2021

A Cruise Executive On What He Will—And Won’t—Do For Customer Safety

As of now, Seabourn President Josh Leibowitz says a mandatory vaccine rule doesn’t look necessary to maintain the safety of passengers.

U.S. airports are seeing more travelers than at any point throughout the pandemic, with daily passenger volumes consistently topping 1 million. Some hotels are selling out well past their peak seasons.

The pent-up demand for travel is finally materializing into movement—whether the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention approves or not.

But one sector of the industry is still stuck in place. After a disastrous few months in early 2020, when large cruise ships became early superspreaders for Covid-19, the CDC has kept them moored until further notice, calling cruising a Level 4 (maximum) risk.

Now, with hopes for future voyages starting to ignite—certain itineraries have been selling out well into 2023—cruise companies have more to repair than just their bottom lines. For months the industry has dealt with blows of bad press, from a poor track record with Covid cases to environmental risks and overtourism issues during normal times.

Josh Leibowitz has plenty to say about all that. As the new president of Carnival Corp.’s ultraluxury line Seabourn—he was brought into the role in the midst of the pandemic, in July 2020—he’s awaiting his first day on the job when he can greet paying guests. It’s unclear when that may happen.

The company recently canceled 2021 voyages through at least July, including some of its most lucrative summer Mediterranean trips.

While some of his competitors have grown impatient with the CDC and launched unprecedented, Caribbean-only itineraries to avoid its jurisdiction, Leibowitz has been a holdout, continuing to wait for the agency’s blessing before resuming commercial service.

Until then, he’s out to set the record straight about the ways he says his industry has been unfairly characterized, and why his company’s five small ships might actually be some of the safest places on Earth.

Cruising’s Double Standard

The first myth Leibowitz dispels is the idea that his ships are not operational. While they aren’t shuttling passengers to Bandol, France, or St-Tropez, the ships are “still operating, for the majority, with crew only,” he says.

And keeping those staff members safe has been a way to pressure-test Covid-19 protocols for almost a year: “We have masks, social distancing, UV lighting, advanced HVAC filtration, and some of the most rigorous testing in the world.”

Companywide, he adds, there have been only “isolated cases” among those skeleton crews, all pinpointed through the “advanced testing processes” that have earned preliminary nods from the CDC.

Leibowitz thinks of the cruise industry as being in the same league as the 2020 NBA playoffs when it comes to Covid safety. “If we’re all being judged on two axes—the ability to test for cases and the ability to control for them—then the NBA bubble, when it first came out, that’s the top right corner.

Highly tested, highly controlled.” The bottom left, he says, is your average grocery store, where nobody is tested and mask enforcement can be poor. Airlines are on the bottom right: good controls, no tests. “The cruise industry is the only industry in travel that is, as an industry, pushing itself to the top right quadrant,” he says.

Cruising isn’t actually in that quadrant alone. A large number of hotels—especially in the luxury sector—are taking it upon themselves to require guests to have a negative PCR test before arrival, even if their destination’s government doesn’t have such a requirement in place.

And since the U.S. mandated PCR tests for reentry, most international five-star hotels have added the capacity for testing. Baha Mar, in the Bahamas, told Bloomberg in March that it had carried out 40,000 tests since reopening in December.

But Leibowitz’s broader point holds: Testing is meant to uncover the positives. And if not everyone in the travel industry is testing or tracing, then it’s impossible to know how disproportionately cruise ships have been spreading the virus. The idea that the industry is bringing bad news upon itself is what Leibowitz calls the double-edged-sword effect.

“We have to step back and recognize that having hospitals and testing on board isn’t a source of reputational ill,” he says. “It’s an advantage.”

There Probably Won’t Be a Vaccine Rule

Seabourn competitor Crystal Cruises recently announced its own return to the sea with Bahamas-only voyages that flout the CDC by not touching the waters within the agency’s jurisdiction.

Instead, that company decided to come up with its own safety rules by looking to the success of sister line Dream Cruises—which has sailed without incident in Singapore since November—and listening to what cruisers said they wanted to make them feel safe. Eighty percent said they preferred traveling among vaccinated guests only.

But that’s not a rule Leibowitz is ready to employ at Seabourn. “The public-health experts are genuinely in charge,” he says, adding that while vaccines offer a layer of protection, they’re not the only way forward.

“We have to see whether there are populations who are already immune and may not need a vaccine immediately—maybe they already had the disease.

Or maybe they have an allergic reaction to vaccines the same way they might have an allergy to sesame. Does that mean they can’t come on board? We’re not yet in the stage where we can say this has to be the rule.”

Leibowitz says sister lines Costa and Aida have been successful sailing in Europe mid-pandemic without requiring vaccines, and by focusing instead on “detecting, preventing, and managing.”

Although both companies have had Covid outbreaks on board, he says that shouldn’t be the decisive metric.

“We have to move beyond whether there’s a positive or negative and train our eyes on the outcome of the event. Did you get the R down? [Meaning, did you minimize spread from that positive case?] Was the affected person cared for in the best possible way? The fact that there was a case or not on any one cruise should not be ‘game over’ for that experience,” he says.

The First Steps Forward

Hotels have decided, amid the pandemic, that some business is better than none at all—most are operating at 30% to 40% occupancy, says industry analyst STR. For cruising, that’s not economically feasible.

Breakeven in the seafaring sector requires occupancies of closer to 50%, depending on the size of the ship and the prices a trip can command, according to comments made last year by Carnival Chief Financial Officer David Bernstein.

Add the fact that cruises can’t sail to destinations where international borders remain closed, and it’s clear why cruise companies have largely opted to keep their ships in layup.

But Leibowitz sees a path to scaled-down operations that can make sense in the current environment. Cruises to nowhere, he says, have room to grow. “Trans-Atlantic sea days are some of the most popular days on Cunard cruises,” he explains, referring to the British line best known for its two-week ocean-crossing trips.

Singapore and Taiwan have seen such success with their “cruises to nowhere,” Seabourn sister company P&O is now offering similar concepts in England.

Cruises that focus on private islands—many of which are owned by cruise companies themselves—are another option. These types of trips, says Leibowitz, would easily enable a line to extend its Covid protocols to dry land. And then there’s the approach that competitors are taking: bypassing U.S. ports and departing from tourism-dependent Caribbean nations.

While he currently has no such developments to share, Leibowitz says Seabourn is “in active discussions with a few destinations to discuss the possibility of restarting cruises and will share more details when the time is right.”

With or without the pandemic, Seabourn is intent on delivering uncrowded experiences—battling against the industry’s reputation for dumping thousands of passengers into densely crowded ports that can’t easily absorb so many footprints.

The company is building two ultraluxury expedition ships meant to visit remote corners of the Arctic and Antarctic, from the White Continent itself to the unexplored and fjord-filled Scoresby Sound, in Greenland. Says Leibowitz: “People are wanting to explore in a way that allows them to enjoy nature and have less people around them.”

Updated: 8-20-2021

The Cruise Trips Most In Demand Don’t Embark Until 2022 And Beyond

As they track Covid-19, many fans of sailings on Carnival, Royal Caribbean and other lines are booking far in advance to hedge their bets.

Lovers of cruise ships are fired up to head back out to sea. How quickly they embark is another question.

While some die-hards have jumped at boarding the first ship to leave the harbor this summer, many other cruisers, as they call themselves, are cautiously watching new guidelines and checking for altered itineraries and reports of Covid-19 cases.

As a result, cruise lines and travel agents are already seeing crowds gathering to reserve space for voyages in 2022 and beyond.

Many cruise lines say they expect 2022 to be a strong year. As of early August, Viking Cruises’ bookings for 2022 were 42% ahead of where they were at the same point in 2019. Royal Caribbean, Carnival and Norwegian Cruise Line have also said demand for 2022 is strong when compared with 2019, even considering higher prices.

The strong demand extends past next year. Regent Seven Seas Cruises’ 132-night world cruise, set to sail in 2024, sold out its 350 two-person rooms in less than three hours, even with tickets starting at over $73,000.

Christine Hardenberger, owner of Modern Travel Professionals, based in Fredericksburg, Va., says her clients want cruise vacations and are willing to book. But some are hesitant to travel in the short term because they have questions about changing protocols.

She typically sees an even mix of short-term bookings, for trips that take place within three months, and longer-term bookings. Lately she is seeing far fewer last-minute bookings.

Dean Barnett, a retired nurse who lives in Pueblo, Colo., generally travels on a cruise every other year. This would typically be the year he and his wife go, but they haven’t booked anything yet.

Mr. Barnett says he is keeping an eye on deals. He is hoping to go on a European river cruise and says some companies are offering big discounts for those who book now.

He adds that he is going to wait until he and his wife get their booster shots against Covid-19. “Then [we’ll] pull the trigger on booking a cruise as soon as possible after that,” he says. They are likely to travel next year, he says.

Some travel agents say those hoping to embark in the next few months can find good deals from cruise lines. “They’re making it really affordable for people to just jump on and travel,” says Jasmin Samlal, a travel agent based in the Fort Lauderdale, Fla., area. The Cruise Lines International Association says it projects that about 56% of oceangoing ship capacity will have resumed sailing by the end of September.

Cruise operators working in U.S. waters must satisfy guidelines set by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Those requirements allow ships to begin regular operations without first conducting test cruises if they attest that 95% of crew members and passengers are fully vaccinated against Covid-19.

Norwegian Cruise Line requires 100% of passengers and crew to be vaccinated, a policy that has been upheld in federal court but that the state of Florida has appealed.

Passengers have tested positive for Covid-19 on U.S. cruises this summer. Most cruise lines decline to provide information about how many passengers and crew members have been infected. In a Facebook post, Royal Caribbean Chief Executive Michael Bayley said typically one to two guests test positive out of the more than one thousand people on board each ship.

Some cruise-goers say the high vaccination rates have left them feeling reassured about their trips. Jay Rainey, who owns an insurance agency outside of Cincinnati, has been on more than two dozen cruises. He and his husband will embark next month on the Carnival Mardi Gras for a seven-night sail.

They are both vaccinated and plan to social distance on the ship. He says he wasn’t too concerned that another Carnival cruise ship had 27 people test positive, including 26 crew members and one passenger, because they represented a small fraction of the more than 4,000 people on board.

“That speaks to masks and vaccinations working, plus the cruise-ship safety policy,” he says.

With the rise of the Covid-19 Delta variant, cruise lines have instituted additional policies, with many requiring even fully vaccinated passengers to submit a negative coronavirus test within three days of departure and wear masks in certain indoor spaces.

Viking is requiring frequent PCR, or polymerase chain reaction, tests throughout every itinerary. The tests search for the virus’s genetic code.

“Once we had our vaccines and negative tests, we were so excited to go,” says Carah Buscho, a master’s student in Galveston, Texas, who recently returned from a Royal Caribbean cruise with her family.

Cruise lines are still operating under restricted capacity. Ms. Buscho says that with her ship far from capacity she missed out on the big gatherings she experienced in the past. Still, she says, “we didn’t hate that it was so quiet, because it really let us relax.”

The additional policies have led some cruise-goers to postpone their trips. Tony D’Aiuto, an airport-operations-center training manager who lives in Central Florida, planned to go on a Disney cruise with his wife and 2-year-old daughter in September.

Mr. D’Aiuto says he is pro-mask and pro-vaccine, but after Disney said all passengers 2 and older needed to wear masks indoors, he began to have doubts about the trip. It has been difficult for his daughter to consistently keep her mask on.

“It just didn’t seem to make sense for us this time,” he says. They were able to get a full refund and plan to look into rescheduling, potentially for next year.

Anna Pickel, a child-care provider near Portland, Ore., and her husband made a deposit earlier this month on a Carnival cruise for December 2022.

Ms. Pickel has two children, ages 9 and 3, and says she won’t get on a plane with them until they are vaccinated. They are hoping the Covid-19 situation will have improved by then, and vaccinations will be available for children. “We wanted to give all of us something to look forward to and have something fun planned,” she says.

Updated: 8-23-2021

Croatia On Brink Of Record Tourism Revenue As Covid Chill Eases

Croatia, the European Union member most dependent on tourism, may see annual revenue from the industry exceed 10.5 billion euros ($12.3 billion), the current record set in 2019.

While total tourism revenue so far this year has reached 90% of 2019 levels, reported income from the peak summer period shows a 10% increase compared with two years ago, Tourism Minister Nikolina Brnjac told the Slovenian Delo newspaper.

The higher revenue came despite a lower number of visitors than in the same period in 2019.

“A combination of factors influenced the increase,” said Zeljko Lovrincevic, senior economist at the Economic Institute in Zagreb. “The grey economy was suppressed by the Covid situation as more landlords reported their holiday guests. Also, prices are higher, and more people are shopping in big chains.”

The Adriatic nation of 4.2 million relies on revenue from tourism for about 20% of gross domestic product, according to a 2019 Tourism Ministry report.

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Music Distributor DistroKid Raises Money At $1.3 Billion Valuation

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Housing Boom Brings A Shortage Of Land To Build New Homes

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Cryptocurrency Litigation Tracker Shows Details Of More Than 300 Active And Settled Court Cases Since 2013

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Bitcoin Buyers Flock To Investment Clubs Such As “Black Bitcoin Billionaires” To Learn Rules of The Road

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Unicef To Accept Donations In Bitcoin (#GotBitcoin?)

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Bitcoin Developer Amir Taaki, “We Can Crash National Economies” (#GotBitcoin?)

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OpenLibra Plans To Launch Permissionless Fork Of Facebook’s Stablecoin (#GotBitcoin?)

Tiny $217 Options Trade On Bitcoin Blockchain Could Be Wall Street’s Death Knell (#GotBitcoin?)

Class Action Accuses Tether And Bitfinex Of Market Manipulation (#GotBitcoin?)

Sharia Goldbugs: How ISIS Created A Currency For World Domination (#GotBitcoin?)

Bitcoin Eyes Demand As Hong Kong Protestors Announce Bank Run (#GotBitcoin?)

How To Securely Transfer Crypto To Your Heirs

‘Gold-Backed’ Crypto Token Promoter Karatbars Investigated By Florida Regulators (#GotBitcoin?)

Crypto News From The Spanish-Speaking World (#GotBitcoin?)

Financial Services Giant Morningstar To Offer Ratings For Crypto Assets (#GotBitcoin?)

‘Gold-Backed’ Crypto Token Promoter Karatbars Investigated By Florida Regulators (#GotBitcoin?)

The Original Sins Of Cryptocurrencies (#GotBitcoin?)

Bitcoin Is The Fraud? JPMorgan Metals Desk Fixed Gold Prices For Years (#GotBitcoin?)

Israeli Startup That Allows Offline Crypto Transactions Secures $4M (#GotBitcoin?)

[PSA] Non-genuine Trezor One Devices Spotted (#GotBitcoin?)

Bitcoin Stronger Than Ever But No One Seems To Care: Google Trends (#GotBitcoin?)

First-Ever SEC-Qualified Token Offering In US Raises $23 Million (#GotBitcoin?)

You Can Now Prove A Whole Blockchain With One Math Problem – Really

Crypto Mining Supply Fails To Meet Market Demand In Q2: TokenInsight

$2 Billion Lost In Mt. Gox Bitcoin Hack Can Be Recovered, Lawyer Claims (#GotBitcoin?)

Fed Chair Says Agency Monitoring Crypto But Not Developing Its Own (#GotBitcoin?)

Wesley Snipes Is Launching A Tokenized $25 Million Movie Fund (#GotBitcoin?)

Mystery 94K BTC Transaction Becomes Richest Non-Exchange Address (#GotBitcoin?)

A Crypto Fix For A Broken International Monetary System (#GotBitcoin?)

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Waves Platform And The Abyss To Jointly Launch Blockchain-Based Games Marketplace (#GotBitcoin?)

Bitmain Ramps Up Power And Efficiency With New Bitcoin Mining Machine (#GotBitcoin?)

Ledger Live Now Supports Over 1,250 Ethereum-Based ERC-20 Tokens (#GotBitcoin?)

Miss Finland: Bitcoin’s Risk Keeps Most Women Away From Cryptocurrency (#GotBitcoin?)

Artist Akon Loves BTC And Says, “It’s Controlled By The People” (#GotBitcoin?)

Ledger Live Now Supports Over 1,250 Ethereum-Based ERC-20 Tokens (#GotBitcoin?)

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NSA Working To Develop Quantum-Resistant Cryptocurrency: Report (#GotBitcoin?)

Custody Provider Legacy Trust Launches Crypto Pension Plan (#GotBitcoin?)

Vaneck, SolidX To Offer Limited Bitcoin ETF For Institutions Via Exemption (#GotBitcoin?)

Russell Okung: From NFL Superstar To Bitcoin Educator In 2 Years (#GotBitcoin?)

Bitcoin Miners Made $14 Billion To Date Securing The Network (#GotBitcoin?)

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Argentina’s Economy Is In A Technical Default (#GotBitcoin?)

Blockchain-Based Fractional Ownership Used To Sell High-End Art (#GotBitcoin?)

Portugal Tax Authority: Bitcoin Trading And Payments Are Tax-Free (#GotBitcoin?)

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Bitcoin Dev Reveals Multisig UI Teaser For Hardware Wallets, Full Nodes (#GotBitcoin?)

Bitcoin Price: $10K Holds For Now As 50% Of CME Futures Set To Expire (#GotBitcoin?)

Bitcoin Realized Market Cap Hits $100 Billion For The First Time (#GotBitcoin?)

Stablecoins Begin To Look Beyond The Dollar (#GotBitcoin?)

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Binance Reveals ‘Venus’ — Its Own Project To Rival Facebook’s Libra (#GotBitcoin?)

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CommBank Develops Blockchain Market To Boost Biodiversity (#GotBitcoin?)

SEC Approves Blockchain Tech Startup Securitize To Record Stock Transfers (#GotBitcoin?)

SegWit Creator Introduces New Language For Bitcoin Smart Contracts (#GotBitcoin?)

You Can Now Earn Bitcoin Rewards For Postmates Purchases (#GotBitcoin?)

Bitcoin Price ‘Will Struggle’ In Big Financial Crisis, Says Investor (#GotBitcoin?)

Fidelity Charitable Received Over $100M In Crypto Donations Since 2015 (#GotBitcoin?)

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Just The Existence Of Bitcoin Impacts Monetary Policy (#GotBitcoin?)

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IRS To Cryptocurrency Owners: Come Clean, Or Else!

Coinbase Accidentally Saves Unencrypted Passwords Of 3,420 Customers (#GotBitcoin?)

Bitcoin Is A ‘Chaos Hedge, Or Schmuck Insurance‘ (#GotBitcoin?)

Bakkt Announces September 23 Launch Of Futures And Custody

Coinbase CEO: Institutions Depositing $200-400M Into Crypto Per Week (#GotBitcoin?)

Researchers Find Monero Mining Malware That Hides From Task Manager (#GotBitcoin?)

Crypto Dusting Attack Affects Nearly 300,000 Addresses (#GotBitcoin?)

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SEC Guidance Gives Ammo To Lawsuit Claiming XRP Is Unregistered Security (#GotBitcoin?)

15 Countries To Develop Crypto Transaction Tracking System: Report (#GotBitcoin?)

US Department Of Commerce Offering 6-Figure Salary To Crypto Expert (#GotBitcoin?)

Mastercard Is Building A Team To Develop Crypto, Wallet Projects (#GotBitcoin?)

Canadian Bitcoin Educator Scams The Scammer And Donates Proceeds (#GotBitcoin?)

Amazon Wants To Build A Blockchain For Ads, New Job Listing Shows (#GotBitcoin?)

Shield Bitcoin Wallets From Theft Via Time Delay (#GotBitcoin?)

Blockstream Launches Bitcoin Mining Farm With Fidelity As Early Customer (#GotBitcoin?)

Commerzbank Tests Blockchain Machine To Machine Payments With Daimler (#GotBitcoin?)

Bitcoin’s Historical Returns Look Very Attractive As Online Banks Lower Payouts On Savings Accounts (#GotBitcoin?)

Man Takes Bitcoin Miner Seller To Tribunal Over Electricity Bill And Wins (#GotBitcoin?)

Bitcoin’s Computing Power Sets Record As Over 100K New Miners Go Online (#GotBitcoin?)

Walmart Coin And Libra Perform Major Public Relations For Bitcoin (#GotBitcoin?)

Judge Says Buying Bitcoin Via Credit Card Not Necessarily A Cash Advance (#GotBitcoin?)

Poll: If You’re A Stockowner Or Crypto-Currency Holder. What Will You Do When The Recession Comes?

1 In 5 Crypto Holders Are Women, New Report Reveals (#GotBitcoin?)

Beating Bakkt, Ledgerx Is First To Launch ‘Physical’ Bitcoin Futures In Us (#GotBitcoin?)

Facebook Warns Investors That Libra Stablecoin May Never Launch (#GotBitcoin?)

Government Money Printing Is ‘Rocket Fuel’ For Bitcoin (#GotBitcoin?)

Bitcoin-Friendly Square Cash App Stock Price Up 56% In 2019 (#GotBitcoin?)

Safeway Shoppers Can Now Get Bitcoin Back As Change At 894 US Stores (#GotBitcoin?)

TD Ameritrade CEO: There’s ‘Heightened Interest Again’ With Bitcoin (#GotBitcoin?)

Venezuela Sets New Bitcoin Volume Record Thanks To 10,000,000% Inflation (#GotBitcoin?)

Newegg Adds Bitcoin Payment Option To 73 More Countries (#GotBitcoin?)

China’s Schizophrenic Relationship With Bitcoin (#GotBitcoin?)

More Companies Build Products Around Crypto Hardware Wallets (#GotBitcoin?)

Bakkt Is Scheduled To Start Testing Its Bitcoin Futures Contracts Today (#GotBitcoin?)

Bitcoin Network Now 8 Times More Powerful Than It Was At $20K Price (#GotBitcoin?)

Crypto Exchange BitMEX Under Investigation By CFTC: Bloomberg (#GotBitcoin?)

“Bitcoin An ‘Unstoppable Force,” Says US Congressman At Crypto Hearing (#GotBitcoin?)

Bitcoin Network Is Moving $3 Billion Daily, Up 210% Since April (#GotBitcoin?)

Cryptocurrency Startups Get Partial Green Light From Washington

Fundstrat’s Tom Lee: Bitcoin Pullback Is Healthy, Fewer Searches Аre Good (#GotBitcoin?)

Bitcoin Lightning Nodes Are Snatching Funds From Bad Actors (#GotBitcoin?)

The Provident Bank Now Offers Deposit Services For Crypto-Related Entities (#GotBitcoin?)

Bitcoin Could Help Stop News Censorship From Space (#GotBitcoin?)

US Sanctions On Iran Crypto Mining — Inevitable Or Impossible? (#GotBitcoin?)

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EU Central Bank Won’t Add Bitcoin To Reserves — Says It’s Not A Currency (#GotBitcoin?)

The Miami Dolphins Now Accept Bitcoin And Litecoin Crypt-Currency Payments (#GotBitcoin?)

Trump Bashes Bitcoin And Alt-Right Is Mad As Hell (#GotBitcoin?)

Goldman Sachs Ramps Up Development Of New Secret Crypto Project (#GotBitcoin?)

Blockchain And AI Bond, Explained (#GotBitcoin?)

Grayscale Bitcoin Trust Outperformed Indexes In First Half Of 2019 (#GotBitcoin?)

XRP Is The Worst Performing Major Crypto Of 2019 (GotBitcoin?)

Bitcoin Back Near $12K As BTC Shorters Lose $44 Million In One Morning (#GotBitcoin?)

As Deutsche Bank Axes 18K Jobs, Bitcoin Offers A ‘Plan ฿”: VanEck Exec (#GotBitcoin?)

Argentina Drives Global LocalBitcoins Volume To Highest Since November (#GotBitcoin?)

‘I Would Buy’ Bitcoin If Growth Continues — Investment Legend Mobius (#GotBitcoin?)

Lawmakers Push For New Bitcoin Rules (#GotBitcoin?)

Facebook’s Libra Is Bad For African Americans (#GotBitcoin?)

Crypto Firm Charity Announces Alliance To Support Feminine Health (#GotBitcoin?)

Canadian Startup Wants To Upgrade Millions Of ATMs To Sell Bitcoin (#GotBitcoin?)

Trump Says US ‘Should Match’ China’s Money Printing Game (#GotBitcoin?)

Casa Launches Lightning Node Mobile App For Bitcoin Newbies (#GotBitcoin?)

Bitcoin Rally Fuels Market In Crypto Derivatives (#GotBitcoin?)

World’s First Zero-Fiat ‘Bitcoin Bond’ Now Available On Bloomberg Terminal (#GotBitcoin?)

Buying Bitcoin Has Been Profitable 98.2% Of The Days Since Creation (#GotBitcoin?)

Another Crypto Exchange Receives License For Crypto Futures

From ‘Ponzi’ To ‘We’re Working On It’ — BIS Chief Reverses Stance On Crypto (#GotBitcoin?)

These Are The Cities Googling ‘Bitcoin’ As Interest Hits 17-Month High (#GotBitcoin?)

Venezuelan Explains How Bitcoin Saves His Family (#GotBitcoin?)

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This Fund Is Riding Bitcoin To Top (#GotBitcoin?)

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Bitcoin Exchange Hits $1 Trillion In Trading Volume (#GotBitcoin?)

Bitcoin Breaks $200 Billion Market Cap For The First Time In 17 Months (#GotBitcoin?)

You Can Now Make State Tax Payments In Bitcoin (#GotBitcoin?)

Religious Organizations Make Ideal Places To Mine Bitcoin (#GotBitcoin?)

Goldman Sacs And JP Morgan Chase Finally Concede To Crypto-Currencies (#GotBitcoin?)

Bitcoin Heading For Fifth Month Of Gains Despite Price Correction (#GotBitcoin?)

Breez Reveals Lightning-Powered Bitcoin Payments App For IPhone (#GotBitcoin?)

Big Four Auditing Firm PwC Releases Cryptocurrency Auditing Software (#GotBitcoin?)

Amazon-Owned Twitch Quietly Brings Back Bitcoin Payments (#GotBitcoin?)

JPMorgan Will Pilot ‘JPM Coin’ Stablecoin By End Of 2019: Report (#GotBitcoin?)

Is There A Big Short In Bitcoin? (#GotBitcoin?)

Coinbase Hit With Outage As Bitcoin Price Drops $1.8K In 15 Minutes

Samourai Wallet Releases Privacy-Enhancing CoinJoin Feature (#GotBitcoin?)

There Are Now More Than 5,000 Bitcoin ATMs Around The World (#GotBitcoin?)

You Can Now Get Bitcoin Rewards When Booking At Hotels.Com (#GotBitcoin?)

North America’s Largest Solar Bitcoin Mining Farm Coming To California (#GotBitcoin?)

Bitcoin On Track For Best Second Quarter Price Gain On Record (#GotBitcoin?)

Bitcoin Hash Rate Climbs To New Record High Boosting Network Security (#GotBitcoin?)

Bitcoin Exceeds 1Million Active Addresses While Coinbase Custodies $1.3B In Assets

Why Bitcoin’s Price Suddenly Surged Back $5K (#GotBitcoin?)

Zebpay Becomes First Exchange To Add Lightning Payments For All Users (#GotBitcoin?)

Coinbase’s New Customer Incentive: Interest Payments, With A Crypto Twist (#GotBitcoin?)

The Best Bitcoin Debit (Cashback) Cards Of 2019 (#GotBitcoin?)

Real Estate Brokerages Now Accepting Bitcoin (#GotBitcoin?)

Ernst & Young Introduces Tax Tool For Reporting Cryptocurrencies (#GotBitcoin?)

Recession Is Looming, or Not. Here’s How To Know (#GotBitcoin?)

How Will Bitcoin Behave During A Recession? (#GotBitcoin?)

Many U.S. Financial Officers Think a Recession Will Hit Next Year (#GotBitcoin?)

Definite Signs of An Imminent Recession (#GotBitcoin?)

What A Recession Could Mean for Women’s Unemployment (#GotBitcoin?)

Investors Run Out of Options As Bitcoin, Stocks, Bonds, Oil Cave To Recession Fears (#GotBitcoin?)

Goldman Is Looking To Reduce “Marcus” Lending Goal On Credit (Recession) Caution (#GotBitcoin?)

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