Oil prices may soar to US$200 a barrel if the world doesn’t move more rapidly to a clean-energy economy, Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Atlantic Airways Ltd, said in an interview.
“It’s certainly conceivable unless we can start to conserve energy quickly and come up with alternative fuels,” Branson said on Saturday in Cancun, Mexico, where countries are meeting to negotiate a new accord to combat climate change.
Branson predicts an “unbelievably painful” economic slump if governments don’t do more to encourage renewable energy as an alternative to fossil fuels such as oil.
In the US, where efforts to cap carbon-dioxide emissions failed in the Senate earlier this year, unemployment could reach record highs, the British billionaire said.
“We are going to have the mother of all recessions if we don’t sort out our energy policy fast,” Branson said earlier in the day at the World Climate Summit in Cancun. “We think we’ve got it bad today. In five years time unemployment could go to 15 percent without any difficulty at all in America.”
Branson, 60, spoke alongside US billionaire Ted Turner, founder of Cable News Network. Branson and Turner, 72, also will speak today at the two-day conference focused on how businesses can help combat climate change.
Meanwhile, negotiators from about 190 countries are grappling with how to proceed in UN-led treaty talks to cut greenhouse-gas emissions. Industrialized and developing nations are divided over the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.
Japan, Russia and Canada have refused to sign up for a second round of emissions reductions once the current ones written into Kyoto expire in 2012.
Emerging economies such as China, India and Brazil are “completely unanimous” in their position that developed countries must agree on a new commitment period, UN climate chief Christiana Figueres said on Saturday. Discord over Kyoto threatens to take attention away from talks for a new global climate agreement that includes the US, she said. The US is the only developed nation not part of Kyoto.
Turner urged countries to reach agreement.
“Let’s do it,” he said. “Let’s do it now before it’s too late.”
China’s economic planning agency yesterday outlined details of measures aimed at boosting the economy, but refrained from major spending initiatives. The piecemeal nature of the plans announced yesterday appeared to disappoint investors who were hoping for bolder moves, and the Shanghai Composite Index gave up a 10 percent initial gain as markets reopened after a weeklong holiday to end 4.59 percent higher, while Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index dived 9.41 percent. Chinese National Development and Reform Commission Chairman Zheng Shanjie (鄭珊潔) said the government would frontload 100 billion yuan (US$14.2 billion) in spending from the government’s budget for next year in addition
Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) suffered its biggest stock decline in more than a month after the company unveiled new artificial intelligence (AI) chips, but did not provide hoped-for information on customers or financial performance. The stock slid 4 percent to US$164.18 on Thursday, the biggest single-day drop since Sept. 3. Shares of the company remain up 11 percent this year. AMD has emerged as the biggest contender to Nvidia Corp in the lucrative market of AI processors. The company’s latest chips would exceed some capabilities of its rival, AMD chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) said at an event hosted by
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TECH JUGGERNAUT: TSMC shares have more than doubled since ChatGPT’s launch in late 2022, as demand for cutting-edge artificial intelligence chips remains high Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday posted a better-than-expected 39 percent rise in quarterly revenue, assuaging concerns that artificial intelligence (AI) hardware spending is beginning to taper off. The main chipmaker for Nvidia Corp and Apple Inc reported third-quarter sales of NT$759.69 billion (US$23.6 billion), compared with the average analyst projection of NT$748 billion. For last month alone, TSMC reported revenue jumped 39.6 percent year-on-year to NT$251.87 billion. Taiwan’s largest company is to disclose its full third-quarter earnings on Thursday next week and update its outlook. Hsinchu-based TSMC produces the cutting-edge chips needed to train AI. The company now makes more
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