Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said it was “immoral” that the biggest energy companies in the first quarter of the year made a combined profit of close to $100 billion. He urged all governments to tax these excess profits “and use the funds to support the most vulnerable people in these difficult times”. Guterres urged people everywhere to send a message to the fossil fuel industry and their financiers that “this tragic greed is punishing the poorest and most vulnerable people while destroying our only common home, the planet.” The secretary-general spoke at the press conference presenting a report by the Global Crisis Response Group that he created to address the triple interconnected crises of food, energy and finance that have particularly hit countries trying to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic and deal with the devastating impact of the war in Ukraine. Guterres told reporters that “we are seeing excessive, outrageous profits of the oil and gas industry at a time when we are all losing money” due to inflation around 7-8%. And “nothing will be more popular than taxing excess profits … and distributing that money to the most vulnerable families,” he said. The crisis team has already presented recommendations on food and finance, and Guterres said he believed “we are making some progress” in those areas, especially food. The report released on Wednesday focuses on the energy crisis, and the secretary-general said he aims to achieve the equivalent of the grain deal he initially proposed to the Russian and Ukrainian presidents to allow Ukrainian grain to be shipped from Russian-blocked Black Sea ports to the world markets in desperate need of food supplies. The first ship to leave Ukraine headed for Lebanon on Wednesday after a three-hour inspection in Turkish waters. Guterres said speculators and barriers to grain and fertilizer shipments to world markets during the war in Ukraine had sent food prices skyrocketing. But once the grain deal negotiations “gained traction”, he said, there was a “significant drop” and today prices of most food and fertilizers are roughly at their pre-war prices. “But that doesn’t mean the bread in the bakery is at the same price as before the war, because these are prices in wholesale markets, some of them related to futures contracts,” he said, and there are many other factors contributing to rising prices, including of transport and insurance costs and supply chain disruptions. UN trade chief Rebeca Grynspan, who coordinated the crisis team, said wheat prices have fallen nearly 50 percent since their peak, corn and fertilizer prices have fallen nearly 25 percent in the past month and crude Oil is now around $93 a barrel compared to $120 a barrel in June. “Only natural gas has reversed the trend and is still higher than a month ago,” he told reporters via video from Geneva. Falling prices are “good news,” Greenspan said, but they have been high for too long, and since June projections for extreme poverty have risen by 71 million people and projections for food insecurity by 47 million. In another key recommendation, the crisis group urges wealthier developed countries, in particular, to save energy, including by reducing the use of air conditioning and heating and by promoting public transport “and nature-based solutions”. Guterres said new technologies, including battery storage, “must become public goods” and governments must scale up and diversify supply chains for raw materials and renewable energy technologies. The group also recommends scaling up private and multilateral financing for the “green energy transition.” And he supported the International Energy Agency’s goal to increase investment in renewable energy by a factor of seven to meet the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to “net zero” by 2050 to help limit man-made climate change. “Today, developing countries spend about $150 billion on clean energy,” said Greenspan, the secretary-general of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. “They have to spend $1 trillion in investments.”