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Elon Musk’s surprise reversal on accepting bitcoin payments for Tesla cars has triggered a sharp plunge in the cryptocurrency spelling trouble for other coins that have notched shocking returns in recent months.
What’s happening: Bitcoin prices have plummeted about 12% to less than $50,000 in the last 24 hours, according to Coindesk. The decline comes after Musk, Tesla’s CEO and a vocal bitcoin advocate, said his company was suspending plans to accept the cryptocurrency as payment for electric vehicles, citing its “high environmental cost.”
“We are concerned about rapidly increasing use of fossil fuels for bitcoin mining and transactions, especially coal, which has the worst emissions of any fuel,” Musk said in a note posted on Twitter Wednesday. “Cryptocurrency is a good idea on many levels and we believe it has a promising future, but this cannot come at great cost to the environment.”
By Luigi Serenelli2021-05-07T14:57:00+01:00
Allianz’s new exclusion policy on coal and oil sands announced earlier this week has signalled an important step forward, however, the magnitude of the challenges laying ahead to keep global warming at bay may require bigger efforts faster.
Lucie Pinson, executive director of the NGO Reclaim Finance, told IPE that Allianz was one of the first global investors and insurers to take action on coal. But, she added, “what seems bold is actually baby steps with regard to the scale of the changes that need to happen in the coming years.”
A spokesperson for Allianz said that the rationale of the new policies is to accelerate the phase out from coal and reach a net zero position globally.
Greetings and welcome to EURACTIV’s Green Brief. Below you’ll find the latest roundup of news covering energy & environment from across Europe. You can subscribe to the weekly newsletter here.
Since she took office in December 2019, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has been talking big about climate change, saying global warming is “an existential crisis” and dubbing the European Green Deal as “Europe’s man on the moon moment”.
That EU leaders are finally addressing climate change is a welcome development. But it also creates expectations. What if Europe fails to deliver? What if the transition to a green economy creates social and economic disparities within the EU?
UK banks’ support for coal industry has risen since 2015 Paris climate pact Jasper Jolly and Kalyeena Makortoff
British banks’ financial support for companies involved in the coal industry has risen since the 2015 Paris agreement, despite their pledges to wind down financing for a sector seen as a significant obstacle to tackling global heating.
UK lenders provided loans and underwriting services worth $30.3bn (£21.9bn) to companies that sold or burned coal, or provided coal industry services, during 2019, the latest year for which complete data is available, according to research by the campaign groups Reclaim Finance and Urgewald. That represented a significant increase compared with $21.5bn in financing provided in 2016.
04.05.21 )
More than five years after the Paris Agreement, the UK financial sector is actively undermining Government efforts to phase out coal, according to a new report from NGO Reclaim Finance (1). The group’s research, undertaken in collaboration with German NGO Urgewald, has found that five leading UK banks provided $56 billion of support to companies on the Global Coal Exit List (GCEL) between October 2018 and October 2020 (2). Investors led by Legal & General (L&G) likewise held $47bn in GCEL companies in January 2021. Worse still, the report unveils widespread support for companies planning on expanding coal among UK banks and investors.
Leading Banks Under the Spotlight