Has there been a trade war thaw?
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Recruitment, development, career transition. LHH, a beautiful working world. Discover recruitment solutions at LHH.com slash beautiful. So there's been a trade war thaw. Hello. This is the Marketplace Morning Report and we're live from the BBC World Service. I'm Leanna Byrne. Thanks for tuning in.

The US and China say they've sketched out a framework to dial down their trade fight after slapping big tariffs on each other. The two sides spent two days locked in talks in London. From Beijing, here's the BBC's Stephen Macdonald.

This agreement won't end the US-China trade war. However, the deal struck in London by senior government representatives from Beijing and Washington has been described as a framework to pave the way for further talks if Xi Jinping and Donald Trump both approve its wording. Though specific details have not been revealed, it's thought to include several olive branches, including an easing of Beijing's restrictions on rare earth sales to the US and

and a partial freeing up of China's access to American computer chip technology. Stephen MacDonald reporting. So what's all this trade tension between the US and China doing to the global economy? Well, the World Bank's the latest to slash its growth forecast, as the BBC's Michelle Flurry reports.

In its latest economic outlook, the World Bank has revised down its forecast for global growth this year. It now expects the world economy to expand by just 2.3%, a notable downgrade from the 2.7% growth that it was projecting back in January. If these latest figures do prove accurate, it would mark the slowest pace of global growth over a seven-year period since the 1960s.

The US isn't immune to this slowdown. Growth in the world's largest economy is now expected to come in at just 1.4% this year, almost a full percentage point lower than earlier estimates. A significant adjustment. But China, America's biggest economic rival, is expected to weather the storm more effectively. According to the World Bank, Beijing has the financial resilience to weather ongoing trade tensions and political uncertainty.

Despite all this, the World Bank stopped short of predicting an outright global recession, saying the chance of that happening remains below 10%. But the bank joins other major institutions, including the IMF and the OECD, in warning that Trump's trade policies pose a serious threat to global growth. Michelle Flurry there. Now let's do the numbers. ♪

Markets like what they heard. Stocks rallied after the U.S. and China said they'd agreed a framework to ease trade tensions. Hong Kong's Hang Seng closed up eight-tenths of a percent, and China's CSI 300 closed up seven-tenths of a percent. Investors are hoping it's a step towards rolling back tariffs, but some analysts warn the details are vague, and without real action, this rally could be a disaster.

could fizzle. From giant mirrors and space to algae farms, there's no shortage of bold ideas to fight climate change. And one company in India is testing a more down-to-earth approach, quite literally. Altcarbon is scattering crushed rock dust on a tea plantation in Darjeeling. The goal is to soak up planet-warming carbon dioxide as it comes down in the rain. It's called enhanced rock weathering. The BBC's Chavi Suchdev has the story.

I'm standing surrounded by tea bushes here in Salem Hill Tea Estate, two hours from Darjeeling City in this region that is so famous for its tea. It's called the Champagne of India. And from here, I can see mountains dotted with dark green tea bushes. Hi, my name is Shreya Garwal. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Alt Carbon. I'm also a fourth-generational tea planter. Happy to show you around. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste.

Shrey told me that during the COVID-19 pandemic, they were going to sell this tea garden because it wasn't productive. When we came here, we fell in love with this tea garden. And that's when, I think, Sparshna, we decided, let's do something about this.

And that's when, you know, after researching a lot, we realized that enhanced rock weathering could be a great proposition for this region. We take rock dust, which has very high surface area. We spread it on different kinds of agricultural lands. So whenever you deploy any kind of rock dust on farmlands, when it reacts with rainwater, it removes carbon from the rainwater, puts it into the soil as bicarbonate ions. That's how we're removing carbon.

So basically, it's clever chemistry that binds the carbon dioxide to the rocks, taking it out of the atmosphere. But why do we need to do this? Why can't we just stop emitting carbon altogether?

Here's Dr Steve Smith, the Arnell Associate Professor of Greenhouse Gas Removal at Oxford University. There are lots of sectors where we can completely decarbonise, go carbon-free, but we might not be perfectly successful even if we know how to do that. It looks very hard currently to get all the way down to zero.

in the big assessment reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, they tend to show that if we were serious about staying close to 1.5 degrees, well below 2 degrees, that might involve scaling up carbon dioxide removal, anything from several hundred million tonnes per year to maybe even 10 billion tonnes per year by 2050.

Enhanced rock weathering is just one method of carbon dioxide removal. And whilst the basic chemistry works, there are questions around how much carbon gets locked up and how quickly that happens. But Shrey believes that India is the perfect place for it.

You see the sun's heat affecting us? That's how the rock weather is faster. We have really high rainfall hitting us between the months of May to September. When a rock weather is faster, you can remove carbon faster. So the other big advantage is that you are close to a lot of different silicate rocks, which gives you abundant feedstock to be able to reach the billion ton carbon removal scale, which makes India a very ideal geography.

We want India to be the carbon removal hub for the world. For us, our costs are between 200 to 250 dollars, which is one of the most cost effective in the world. And that's something that we do see as a huge advantage when it comes to the Indian subcontinent.

That was Chavi Suchdev reporting. And finally, a group of Tesla owners in France is suing the company not over faulty brakes or dodgy batteries, but Elon Musk's politics. They say his support for far-right figures has made it impossible to enjoy driving the car without facing a backlash. Now they want their leasing money back. I'm Leanna Byrne with the Marketplace Morning Report from the BBC World Service.

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