News and Prophecy Staff

Decades after the worst nuclear disaster in history, the now-shuttered nuclear power plant in Chernobyl, Ukraine, is in the news again. Thirty-four years ago, the plant’s reactor number 4 melted down. Since that time, the surrounding radioactive towns have been almost vacant, and the site has become a tourist attraction. In the last few weeks, a major forest fire burned very close to the now closed but still hot nuclear reactor (BBC, April 13, 2020).

Oil prices are plummeting, and for Middle Eastern nations that rely on oil revenues to support their economies, this is very bad news. Iraq’s 2020 budget assumes that oil’s average price for the year will be $56 (U.S. dollars) per barrel (The Spectator, April 4, 2020), yet oil has dropped to less than $20 per barrel (as of this writing) and continues to show weakness.

“Whatever it takes” is the now-famous comment of Mario Draghi when he was the European Central Bank chairman. He was addressing the European debt crisis of 2012—and his sentiment is now shared by many world leaders and national governments as they attempt to deal with the economic consequences of the coronavirus shutdown of national economies (The Economist, March 19, 2020).

“The European Experiment”—a description applied to the European Union by many—is in serious trouble. Old divides that have plagued the continent for centuries are reemerging. A couple of weeks ago, EU leaders met to come up with a unified financial response to the COVID-19 pandemic but struggled to agree (Reuters, March 27, 2020).

The Financial Times makes a grave case concerning the impact of the current pandemic: “It is no exaggeration to say the oil industry faces its gravest crisis of the past 100 years” (March 24, 2020). As many citizens of industrialized nations settle into life at home, travel by land, sea, and air has fallen drastically. Experts estimate that between 10 and 25 percent of global oil consumption could disappear in the coming months.