Bear backed: Xi heads to Moscow

Hey, Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. You know, one of the perks about having four kids that you know about is actually getting a direct line to the big man up north. And this year he wants you to know the best gift that you can give someone is the gift of Mint Mobile's unlimited wireless for $15 a month. Now you don't even need to wrap it. Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment of $45 for a three month plan equivalent to $15 per month. Required new customer offer for first three months only. Speed slow after 35 gigabytes if network's busy, taxes and fees extra. See mintmobile.com. Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. Today from London, I'm your host Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. Among lots of rich countries, young people are just falling out of love with cars. A growing minority doesn't drive, doesn't even have licenses. In the long run, that could have big political implications. And colonizing the moon would be an enormous undertaking, not least because the conditions on the lunar surface are so dangerous. We look at some new research that gets around all that by going underground. First up, though, Russia's President Vladimir Putin made a surprise visit this weekend to the occupied Ukrainian city of Mariupol, Just a day after the International Criminal Court issued a warrant for Mr. Putin's arrests for alleged war crimes. There he was, driving himself around the city's streets. This Kremlin approved footage shows how Mr. Putin sees the war he started, reclaiming Russian lands and Slavic peoples, rebuilding and reviving long gone empire. There'll be more echoes of history starting today. Mr. Putin is back home to host a state visit for China's President Xi Jinping, who arrived this morning. Geopolitics has been shaped for decades by the shifting alliances between China, Russia and America and the cold and hot wars in which they played out from Vietnam to Afghanistan. Now war in Ukraine is changing the dynamic again. This time, though, it's not among great power equals. Mr. Xi claims to be the voice of reason there as a pal to help calm tensions. But there's more than international goodwill on his agenda.

So Chinese officials are very much trying to frame this as a peacemaking trip. But there is no doubt it is an emphatic display of solidarity with Vladimir Putin.

Jeremy Page is the Economist's Asia diplomatic editor.

One big thing hanging over the trip, of course, is this American allegation, which China denies, that Xi Jinping is considering Russia's request to supply it with lethal weapons, including artillery shells and attack drones.

And so if you say this is an emphatic display of solidarity with Mr. Putin, is that to say then that China is willing to be more clear where it stands on this war than it has been so far?

Well, yes and no. China's certainly showing more clearly than ever that it's not going to abandon Russia. I mean, won't accept a total Russian defeat in Ukraine. Chinese officials are also being very clear in echoing Mr. Putin by blaming the war on American led efforts to expand NATO. And they're being increasingly explicit in drawing a connection between that and American attempts to strengthen its alliances in Asia and how that could increase the chances of a war over Taiwan. At the same time, China's also stepping up its efforts to present itself as kind of a neutral party and to say things that help to portray it internationally as a responsible world power and a peacemaker. So Xi Jinping will probably echo recent Chinese statements urging respect for all countries territorial integrity and opposing the use of when he threats to use nuclear weapons. And he's very likely to repeat his recent calls for an end to the fighting and to promote this 12 point peace plan that China proposed in February.

And what exactly was in that peace plan and how did it go down?

So China calls this a position paper for a political solution, but really from the moment it was published, it was clear that it's a non starter for Ukraine and its Western backers, mainly because it calls for an end to Western sanctions without suggesting that Russia withdraw from any Ukrainian territory at all. It also sticks very closely to Kremlin talking points about so called indivisible security. This idea that one country's security shouldn't be pursued at the expense of another's. And it also echoes very closely Xi Jinping's own global security initiative, which is something he proposed last year as a kind of an alternative to the American led rules based international order. So rather than being a serious blueprint for peace, it seems to be more about China presenting an image as a peacemaker in contrast to America and positioning itself for whatever emerges from the war.

So is there any reason to believe that there is a peacemaking mission here, that China's being an honest broker?

Well, there is of course this recent agreement that China brokered for Saudi Arabia and Iran to re establish diplomatic ties. And that's a genuinely big deal. It also looks like Xi Jinping is going to have virtual talks with Ukraine's President Zelensky soon after his Moscow visit. So that will help to counter Western Criticism and to bolster the idea that he's playing some kind of mediating role. But I think the reality is that China realizes neither Ukraine or Russia are really interested in peace talks at the moment because they both think they can still make advances on the battlefield. This peace talk is more about improving China's international image and providing a fig leaf for its escalating support for Russia.

But if you say these talks are more about China improving its international image, it's now cozying up to someone who's been issued an arrest warrant by the ICC. Is that good for its image?

Certainly not. The ICC's arrest warrant is definitely awkward for China, as are many other things about Mr. Putin's record in Ukraine and indeed in Russia. But for Xi Jinping, I think any such concerns are outweighed by his utter conviction that China's in this long term global confrontation with America and that there is a very real risk that tensions between them in Asia could flare into a war over Taiwan. So in that context, Russia still represents an indispensable source of energy, supplies, of military technology and diplomatic support. And what Xi Jinping worries about most of all is that a Russian defeat in Ukraine would embolden America and its allies. It could destabilize China's huge northern border with Russia, and worst of all, it could bring into the Kremlin a pro Western leader who might join American efforts against China. That's China's worst nightmare.

And what about the optics from the Russian side? The Kremlin would clearly like to see this as a meeting of equals. What's your take on that?

I think Xi Jinping certainly doesn't see it that way. And whichever way you look at it, I think the relationship is increasingly shifting in China's favor. It was already moving in that direction before the war in Ukraine, but that trend's really accelerated in the last year. If you turn the clock back to February 2022, just before Russia invaded Ukraine, you'll recall that Putin visited Xi Jinping in Beijing for the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics, and the two sides declared that their partnership had no limits. Now, we don't know what Xi Jinputin discussed in that meeting, but it does seem that Chinese officials were caught off guard by the scale of the Russian invasion. They had no prepared talking points or plans to evacuate Chinese citizens. So I think that was damaging to the relationship. And then Chinese perceptions of Russian military prowess have certainly changed since the war began. I think Chinese officials are also pretty clear eyed about how unstable Russia's politics are. And how it has really dismal economic prospects. So while China is willing to continue supporting Russia for strategic reasons, I think it now considers itself very much as the senior partner and sees an opportunity to tilt the balance further in its own favor as Russia becomes increasingly dependent on China.

So how is this self serving stance then being seen within China?

There's no doubt that it's controversial within the broader Chinese foreign policy, the business community. I think a lot of people within China realize that it kind of makes a mark of China's claim to have a foreign policy rooted in respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity. It makes it a lot harder to try and drive a wedge between Europe and America, which is a long running Chinese diplomatic goal. And if Xi Jinping did decide to arm Russia with lethal weapons, that would almost certainly expose China to severe economic sanctions from America and the European Union. It's too biggest trading partners and that would really undermine efforts to revive the Chinese economy after Covid.

So there had been a sense a while back that China was trying to distance itself somewhat from Russia. This seems to be a complete repudiation of that idea that China and Russia that no limits friendship that was promised a year ago is only getting tighter.

Right.

There was a period at the end of last year when it looked like Xi Jinping was trying to balance his support for Russia with an attempt to repair relations with American Europe. And Western hopes was certainly lifted when Putin suggested in September that Xi had some concerns about the war in Ukraine. And then Xi Jinping voiced opposition to any use of nuclear weapons. You had Xi Jinping meeting President Joe Biden in Bali in November when both of them said that they wanted to find areas of potential cooperation. But that attempt at detente I think really ground to a halt in February of this year after America shot down a high altitude Chinese balloon that it said was part of a global surveillance operation. And now of course we've got these American allegations that China is considering selling lethal weapons to Russia. Now American officials don't think China's crossed that line yet. And Xi Jinping's final decision will probably depend to a large extent on how things play out on the battlefield in Ukraine. But I think Xi Jinping's bottom line is that he does not want Putin to suffer the kind of humiliating defeat that might then jeopardize China's own strategic interests.

Jeremy, thank you very much for your time.

Thank you.

Every week it seems like there's a new electric car hitting the market.

Hyundai Ioniq 5, the all electric SUV.

With the all new ID4 100% SUV, 100% electric.

When you get in the new Subaru.

Solterra EV SUV, it's a good feeling.

Knowing that you're part of.

Carmakers are throwing mountains of cash at transitioning from internal combustion engines and consumers seem ready for them. EV sales have been steadily growing year on year. But the next generation of would be drivers seems less convinced than their parents were by all the glitzy advertising and the call of the open road.

On the face of it, the car is as popular as ever.

Daniel Knowles is the Economist's Midwest correspondent.

There are more miles being driven on the roads. It's come back up since the pandemic when obviously a lot of people stopped driving as much. But if you kind of look under the surface, there's reasons to think that we are hitting peak car, particularly young people are beginning to drive less. There's a growing minority of younger people who don't drive at all, don't have driving licenses, you know, and overall the mild distance driven in lots of countries is either kind of plateauing or beginning to fall, even though the number of cars is going up.

So tell us about the growing minority then of non drivers or less drivers.

So this kind of applies almost every country I could buy a statistic for, certainly in the rich world. But if you look just at America, which is obviously an incredibly automotive country, you know, 25 years ago, 43% of 16 year olds in America had a driving license already. By 2020, that had fallen to just 25%. And it's probably still falling. And it's not just teenagers driving less. If you look at Americans age 20, 24, now a fifth, don't have a license, which is way up from 20 odd years ago. And basically every age group under the age of 40 is less likely to, to drive, to have a license than a generation ago. And even the ones who do have licenses are driving less far. The distance they're going is shorter and basically all of the extra traffic on the road is accounted for by older drivers.

So looking at the younger demographic then what is it that's driving the change there?

Well, there's lots of things I talk to a whole bunch of young people, including one 16 year old activist who's been pushing against cars for worries about climate change reasons, about kind of air pollution. For some people it's a lifestyle, it's a cultural thing, they don't want to be polluting. There's all things like it's become a lot more expensive to drive in car. Particularly for younger drivers. Insurance has got more expensive for younger drivers. And of course younger people are spending a lot more time in education than previous generations. And you don't often need a car. So of course, you know, there's the rise of taxi apps, which means that those kind of short trips are a lot easier to do without your own car. So I think there's kind of a lot of overlapping trends, all of which basically add up to a growing proportion of people who just don't use car at all.

So it's sort of demographic trends and just the way of the world in a bunch of ways. Rather than being anti car as a sort of philosophical stance, you reckon?

Well, I think it kind of overlaps actually with something that's growing quite a lot now for the last 20 years, maybe a bit more in some places, less elsewhere. There's been kind of city planners and new urbanist architects. Lots of big thinkers have been thinking about how trying to make it so that everybody can drive to work really doesn't work very well in dense cities. You know, you just get congestion. There isn't space for people to get around. And have been trying to find ways to coax people out of their vehicles and get them into places where they can walk or cycle or take public transport to get around. And I think what's happening now is you have this kind of younger people, particularly in big cities, who perhaps never learned to drive and do get around on foot and on foot on their bicycles, on public transport and are kind of annoyed at how much cars affect them, dominate their lives. The traffic jams then affect them while they're riding a bus. So there's this growing constituency for the sorts of policies that were quite technocratic perhaps a generation ago.

What kinds of policies are we talking about here?

So things like congestion charges, which obviously in around in London for almost 20 years now, and Milan and Stockholm. New York City is finally beginning to introduce oil. In the last few years, Paris and France has kind of taken away an extraordinary amount of road space from cars. So suddenly there's this cycle where as people are driving less, particularly younger people in bigger cities, that's creating the space for the leaders of those cities to go, well, hang on a minute, we can take back some of this road space and get it over to people, which in turn makes driving harder and other forms of transport a lot nicer and easier. Even here in the United States, where I am, which obviously has some of the most car centric cities in the world, are beginning to see this happen.

And those arguments, those stances make A lot of sense for urban centers and so on. But there are plenty of places, for example, in America where you are. Where having a car is just a necessity, though.

Yeah. You do have a lot of people, particularly older people who live outskirts of cities in places that have grown up to be completely car dependent, who are very worried that the kind of city centers that they're trying to get into, suddenly it's going to be much costlier or difficult for them to drive into those cities. And they, you know, and they're often very politically engaged people, perhaps more so than the kind of young people who are in favor of these changes. So it's getting very fraught in many places. These ideas, you know, in the uk, here in the US Almost everywhere, suddenly there's more and more kind of fights over where cars should or shouldn't be able to go.

But the statistics that you lay out suggest that the plateauing or the arrival of peak car is kind of here. Do you see these trends continuing, even if it's just a sort of vocal minority at the moment? It's just a matter of generational change.

Yeah. So I'm not a totally disinterested observer on this. I have a book coming out at the end of March called Carmageddon, which basically argues that this is a good thing and that we need to reduce the number of cars in our cities. And having written that, I do kind of think that this trend is going to continue. But there's a few things that I wonder about. Obviously, cars are turning electric, and that does reduce some of the worries about pollution. Also, they're a lot cheaper to drive. So if electric cars get really cheap, people might start driving them everywhere. And then you have autonomous cars, which I'm not completely convinced will ever arrive. But if they do, that's going to make driving so easy that it could absolutely reverse this. And everybody will be getting in their autonomous car straight into a traffic jam if everybody else's autonomous cars. So I think those are the things that might change it, but I think it's going to keep going.

Daniel. Thanks very much for your time, Jason.

It's always a pleasure.

Ever since time began, man has been fascinated by the mystery of the Moon. The idea of living on the moon far predates humans ability to even get there. But over 60 years ago, writer H.G. wells anticipated the shape of things to come with his fascinating adventure, First Men in the Moon. The First Men in the Moon. You will encounter another world of eerie.

Beauty and infinite mystery.

Wells book had astronauts descend beneath the Lunar surface. And that that was a good idea. Because of its lack of a protective magnetic field, the Moon's surface is deadly, not to mention all the micrometeorites and the extreme changes in temperature. So an alternative, not unlike Wells imaginings, looks increasingly plausible.

So when it comes to living on the Moon, we're probably going to have to go underground.

David Adam writes about science for the Economist.

Probably the easiest way to go underground Is to use these geological structures that are already there. They're called lava tubes. They're these giant geological tunnels. They're found all over the Moon. Because they're tubes, they could feasibly be sealed to create a breathable atmosphere inside.

But.

And they have these very thick roofs now, a new study says, together, that makes them probably the perfect place for lunar colonists to live because they would be safe from all the dangers on the lunar surface.

And yet, something called a lava tube doesn't sound like the safest place to hang out.

There's no lava there anymore. Now, millions of years ago, when this magma did make its way to the surface of the Moon, it would have flowed across the surface of the Moon as these giant rivers. The top surface of that would start to get a bit colder, and over time, would solidify. The larvae would all drain away. And what's left behind are these tubes. On earth, they're about 10 meters wide, maybe, and they stretch for a good mile or so. But on the Moon, because of the lower gravity, they could be hundreds of meters wide. And they form these enormous networks that can run for hundreds of kilometers, Hundreds of miles across the Moon's surface. They create this colossal cave system, which is very accessible just below the surface of the Moon. And in theory, there would be enough space in there for us to create a settlement.

A settlement, though, that would have to be underground, I guess. Go all that way and can't even see the sky.

I know it does sound like a tragedy, but unfortunately, the alternative is not much better. Because of the very harsh conditions on the surface of the Moon, because of the radiation, because of the micrometeorites. The first thing you'd have to do is probably cover it with moon rock. You'd have to pile up all the geological rubble that's lying around. And so even though you were on the surface, essentially, you would be living underground in the sense that there would be meters of this stuff above your head. Now, both of those options would protect you from radiation, but you could argue that lava tubes will be a lot better because you have a much bigger space underneath for that Protection to live in. Rather than trying to live in a sort of a cramped quarters between the surface of the moon and the roof that you've had to put on it.

We were trying to think of different ways that we could sort of start marching towards, like, the viability of whether humans could live in these large subterranean caverns on the Moon.

Raymond Martin is an engineer at the rocket company Blue Origin. He and Heim Benner Royer, an aerospace engineer at Rutgers University, have crunched some numbers on what might be possible.

Once you seal off a large chunk of that lava tube and pressurize it with breathable air, then whatever you build inside structurally can be built with much simpler concepts.

A pressurized lava tube could very much feel like a home from home. You could wear your regular clothes, you could do regular things. Imagine being able to reach out your hand without a glove and to touch the inside of the moon.

But this whole idea hinges on being pressurized, right? You have to fill that space with air.

I mean, it does. And you'd want to make sure that it worked, wouldn't you? So these two scientists, they built a computer model to try and simulate the integrity of a relatively small lava tube in the Moon's ocean of storms.

And one of the first big hurdles there is proving that they're structurally sound. So that was what our project was.

This is Mr. Martin.

And then I started running some simulations to look into the structural viability, as I mentioned, of actually pressurizing a lava tube with breathable air. And what that would do is give us a subterranean habitat for humans on the Moon.

The study that they ran suggested that a lava tube with a roof thickness of about 10 meters could be safely pressurized to roughly the same conditions that you would get on Earth at sea level, where the air pressure is the highest. And what that meant, of course, was that once you had this system pressurized, that people living on the moon could go about their everyday lives and their work in a far more natural way than if they were living in surface.

Structures on the Moon.

Here's Haim Benaroya again.

The only difference, of course, would be the gravity. It would still be 1.6G, but other than that, the idea would be that they could actually just come in and out of structures, walk around, and do what they would do as they would do it on Earth.

And once you have these enormous pressurized caverns, it creates opportunities for all sorts of things. Think of a running track, for example, in that low gravity. I mean, how much fun would that be?

It does sound fun. How plausible does it sound?

Even in the best case scenario, this is something that is decades away, there would be a series of stages. I think this is a plan for if we seriously wanted to spend a lot of time on the Moon with a lot of people. Now, I think knowing that the case for pressurization is structurally sound, that the model suggests that it could be done, then you could work out how to make it happen. And what are the next steps? I think the benefits of living in a lava tube seem pretty clear compared to having to live on the surface. And of course, one of the driving forces for this is if they do manage to do this on the Moon, then it really is then a stepping stone to exploring other planets and moons in the solar system. I think as hard as it is to do this on the Moon, it's much easier to do it on the Moon than it is to do it somewhere else.

If we're going to be a space faring civilization, certainly the Moon is first and Mars is second. But the technologies that we develop on the Moon really will affect everything we do in the solar system in the next hundred years.

In the great tradition of lunar exploration, this study has taken an important first step.

David, thanks very much for your time.

Thank you for having me.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. Let us know what you think of the show. Drop us a line at podcastseconomist.com.com or leave us a rating wherever you listen. We'll see you back here tomorrow.