Most European Union countries have boosted their renewable plans since 2020, putting them on course to cut fossil fuel use this decade as the energy and COVID-19 crises have spurred, not derailed their green transition, Reuters reports. 

"The recovery has been wildly inconsistent around the world," said Brian O'Callaghan, lead researcher at Oxford University's Economic Recovery Project, pointing to Australia, China and India as having relatively small shares of green COVID-19 recovery spending.

Canada started taking orders for its inaugural green bond amid a renewed global push to reduce dependence on fossil fuels after the Russian invasion of Ukraine brought reliance on non-renewable sources of energy back into the spotlight.

Forbes' David Vetter explores a new working paper by Bethan Adams, Kaya Axelsson and Adam Parr on the concept of an international "Carbon Club." A Carbon Club is a group of countries who individually introduce a Border Carbon Adjustment (BCA) on carbon-intensive imported goods, working independently but in parallel. Adam Parr told Vetter that "Pricing signals are a fundamental principle of how markets operate, and taxing bad stuff is a fundamental tax principle of how governments operate."

Taxing meat could be an important lever for aligning Western diets with environmental goals and can be designed such that low-income households and farmers are compensated, find a forthcoming paper in the Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, co-authored by SSEE Director Cameron Hepburn.

Electricity, transport and heating account for a massive 80% of greenhouse gas emissions and are at the forefront of the battle to achieve Net Zero. But reaching Net Zero means also dealing with the hard-to-reach 20% of emissions: agriculture, plastics, cement, and waste, and extracting at least 5% extra from the atmosphere to account for the emissions that we simply cannot get rid of. Today, the Smith School published three reports from its 'Final 25%' series which explore ways of tackling this urgent problem.