The climate issue

• To represent this span of human history as a set of simple stripes may seem reductive.
• What is less obvious, but just as important, is that, because the processes that force climate change are built into the foundations of the world economy and of geopolitics, measures to check climate change have to be similarly wide-ranging and all-encompassing.
• To some—including many of the millions of young idealists who, as The Economist went to press, were preparing for a global climate strike, and many of those who will throng the streets of New York during next week’s UN General Assembly—this overhaul requires nothing less than the gelding or uprooting of capitalism.
• In fact, to conclude that climate change should mean shackling capitalism would be wrong-headed and damaging.
• Competitive markets properly incentivised, and politicians serving a genuine popular thirst for action, can do more than any other system to limit the warming that can be forestalled and cope with that which cannot.
• Whether it is in ensuring a future for the Panama Canal or weaning petrol-head presidents off their refinery habit, climate is never the whole story.
• Other things matter to Manhattan stockholders and Malawian smallholders.
• And though much may be lost, most of the wondrous life that makes Earth unique, as far as astronomers can yet tell, will persist.
• Climate change is, though, a dire threat to countless people—one that is planetary in scope if not in its absolute stakes. It will displace tens of millions, at the very least; it will disrupt farms on which billions rely; it will dry up wells and water mains; it will flood low-lying places—and, as time goes by, higher-standing ones, too.
• It is not just an environmental problem alongside all the others—and absolutely not one that can be solved by hair-shirt self-abnegation.
• It cannot be shunted off to the minister for the environment whom nobody can name.
• Its losses are already there and often mourned—on drab landscapes where the glaciers have died and on reefs bleached of their coral colours.
• Adaptation, including sea defences, desalination plants, drought-resistant crops, will cost a lot of money.
• Here the rich world is shirking its duties.
• Yet, even if it were to fulfil them, by no means all the effects of climate change can be adapted away.
• Road transport can be electrified, though long-haul shipping and air travel are harder.
• Industrial processes can be retooled; those that must emit greenhouse gases can capture them.
• But today’s efforts, which are too lax to keep the world from two or even three degrees of warming, can be vastly improved.
• If one government drastically reduces its own emissions but others do not, the gallant reducer will in general see no reduced harm.
• The obvious fix will be unpalatable to many.
• In some of those, including the United States, it is possible to imagine younger voters in liberal democracies demanding a political realignment on climate issues—and a new interest in getting others to join in.
• For a club composed of a dozen great and middling-but-mucky powers to thrash out a “minilateral” deal would leave billions excluded from questions that could shape their destiny; the participants would need new systems of trade preference and other threats and bribes to keep each other in line.
• But they might break the impasse, pushing enough of the world onto a steeper mitigation trajectory to benefit all—and be widely emulated.
• They call for new limits to the pursuit of individual prosperity and sweeping government control over investment—strictures some of them would welcome under any circumstances.
• Meanwhile, on the right, some look away from the incipient disaster in an I’m-alright-Jack way and so ignore their duties to the bulk of humanity.
• Some claim that capitalism’s love of growth inevitably pits it against a stable climate.
• This newspaper believes them wrong. But climate change could nonetheless be the death knell for economic freedom, along with much else.
• If capitalism is to hold its place, it must up its game.

The world this week Sep 19th 2019

• Bild, a German newspaper, lampooned Mario Draghi, the ECB’s soon-to-retire president, as Count Draghila, lamenting the “horror” for prudent savers who are being sucked dry.
• Adam Neumann, WeWork’s hipsterish CEO, said he was “humbled” by the experience.
• Elliott, an activist hedge fund, revealed recently that it has bought a stake in AT&T and criticised its management’s approach to acquisitions, which has saddled the company with around $160bn in net debt.
• Sandoz stopped distributing its Zantac heartburn medicine while regulators investigate the presence of an impurity called NDMA, which is classified as a probable human carcinogen.

• A fire at a boarding school near Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, killed at least 27 people.
• Mr Trump said that his administration would abrogate California’s laws on car emissions, which set higher standards than federal rules, “in order to produce far less expensive cars for the consumer”.
• Regulators have often griped that the state dictates rules for the country as a whole. California vowed to fight the administration all the way to the Supreme Court.
• The Solomon Islands switched its diplomatic allegiance from Taiwan to China, leaving Taiwan with diplomatic relations with just 16 countries.
• Taiwan’s president, Tsai Ing-wen, who is running for re-election, described the move as an attempt by China to intimidate Taiwanese voters.
• While Britain’s Supreme Court reviewed the legality of his suspension of Parliament, Boris Johnson met European leaders in Luxembourg, where he found little respite from the turmoil at home.
• The British prime minister’s Luxembourger counterpart mocked him for skipping a press conference because anti-Brexit protesters were too rowdy.
• Matteo Renzi, a former prime minister of Italy, caused consternation when he said he was splitting from the Democratic Party (PD) he used to lead.

The art of tipping

• Plus we serve up some useful vocabulary.
• Well, I wouldn’t put it quite like that.
• I never know who to tip, how to tip, by cash or by card, how much to tip – is it 10, 12.5, 20 per cent or even if I should tip at all because in some places a service charge is automatically added to the bill.
• I’m going to go for $250,000.
• Now as we hear him, listen out for this information: in how many cities does he say he currently has restaurants?

Coffee cups: Do you use your own?

• Yes, there is a big problem with disposable cups in that many of them can’t be recycled, so there is a lot of waste for something we only use for a short time.
• I’m surprised the USA isn’t on the list but I’m going to go with Finland.
• Just because.
• So we're doing a lot of work outside of our store environment to ensure that paper cups can be recycled on the go.
• Well she said that was something they are rolling out to all stores.
• If you think you’re having to pay extra for something, as we saw with the plastic bags, we think a similar psychological measure is needed, a nudge measure, to encourage people to remember to bring their reusable cup with them and of course this is something that the coffee shops have been fighting tooth and nail.
• The Finns on average get through an amazing 12kg of coffee a year, each.
• Oh, no, I’m all for it.

How the world will change as computers spread into everyday objects

• As computers and connectivity become cheaper, it makes sense to bake them into more and more things that are not, in themselves, computers—from nappies and coffee machines to cows and factory robots—creating an “internet of things”, or IoT.
• Businesses will get efficiency, as information about the physical world that used to be ephemeral and uncertain becomes concrete and analysable.
• In the long term, though, the most conspicuous effects of the IoT will be in how the world works.
• That has already blurred traditional ideas of ownership.
• John Deere, an American maker of high-tech tractors, has been embroiled in a row over software restrictions that prevent its customers from repairing their tractors themselves.
• Virtual business models will jar in the physical world.
• Data will be another flashpoint.
• Flows of data from IoT gadgets are just as valuable as those gleaned from Facebook posts or a Google search history.
• The advent of the consumer internet, 25 years ago, was met with starry-eyed optimism.

The world this week Sep 12th 2019

• The Chinese maker of telecoms equipment has in effect been locked out of the American roll-out of 5G because of national-security concerns. 
• Portending a possible legal challenge, Uber suggested the law would not apply to its drivers. 
• Mr Mnuchin wants to begin recapitalisation soon, and has urged Congress to agree to more far-reaching reforms.
• MIT appointed a committee to oversee its Media Lab after Joichi Ito resigned as director following press reports that the lab had accepted donations from Jeffrey Epstein, the late disgraced financier, and tried to conceal them.
• The Media Lab is at the forefront of bringing together disparate research in technology, notably artificial intelligence.
• An oilman who undertook a number of audacious takeover bids, Mr Pickens came to define American tooth-and-claw capitalism in the 1980s.

• On the fringes, some demonstrators set fires and engaged in other vandalism.
• The government in Beijing closed the city’s central thoroughfare to allow the army to practise a parade that will be staged on October 1st, the 70th anniversary of Communist rule.
• Sceptics called it a political stunt to woo hawkish voters.
• In Britain opposition MPs demanded to return to work after Scotland’s highest court ruled that Parliament’s prorogation by the British government was unlawful.
• Vladimir Putin’s ruling United Russia party suffered a stinging rebuke at the hands of voters in Moscow, losing 15 of the 40 seats on the city council it had controlled.
• This was despite the fact that many opposition candidates had been barred from contending.