Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Jason Palmer.

Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

It's Earth Day, the 50th annual pause for thought about the state of the planet, but one

of its most striking features is in trouble. Bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef this year

is more widespread than ever. Each time a full recovery becomes more unlikely.

And as humans have been locked indoors, the animals have come out to play, and forage

and hunt. Partly it's that the fauna are more fearless as the streets have stayed empty.

Partly it may be that busy people simply hadn't noticed them before.

Even in the midst of the pandemic, companies have been busy reporting their first quarter

earnings this week. It's not all bad news. Yesterday, Netflix set it at at 16 million

new subscribers in the first three months of the year, because much of the world has had

to stay in and chill.

Our small contribution of these difficult times is to make home confinement a little

more bearable. Today, it's AT&T's turn. The owner of HBO and Warner Media, unlike Netflix,

pays its shareholders a regular dividend, a big one. Over the past year, it's returned

more than $14 billion to investors and had announced plans to return even more. In fact,

before the crisis, companies in the S&P 500 were expected to give more money than ever

this year to shareholders through dividends. But now, during the crisis, that's sparking

anger among politicians. Some companies are paying shareholders at the same time as asking

for government help.

Any corporation that takes taxpayer dollars must protect their workers' wages and benefits,

not CEO pay, stock buybacks or layoffs.

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