Can't deal with it: Brexit

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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. Today, students from scores of countries will take to the streets protesting against inaction on climate change. That inaction took another form in Nairobi this week where there's a UN environment meeting happening. We examine a proposal on huge efforts to reverse the effects of climate change that was retracted at the last minute. And just about everywhere you travel, you can count on being able to find an Irish pub. It seems like you can open one anywhere, but here's the strange it's really difficult to open one in Ireland. First up, though, the chaos of Brexit has deepened.

Good morning, Mrs. Fay.

Every day that Parliament sits, an anti Brexit protester starts early, his meter long megaphone trained on the House of Commons.

Stop Brexit not going. Where is it?

And pro Brexit supporters show up every day with their placards.

It says clean Brexit rules, okay? We've got 300 years of democracy behind us and they cannot take it away.

Inside Parliament, it's been a week of high drama.

The House must calm itself.

Long time to go today.

Subsequent days keep calm.

On Tuesday, MPs voted for a second time to reject the deal with the EU that Theresa May, the Prime Minister, has spent two years negotiating. On Wednesday, they rejected her backup plan of walking away without a deal.

The House needs to face up to.

The consequences of the decisions it has taken. And last night, MPs voted to apply to the EU to extend the Brexit deadline beyond March 29th.

The Ayes to the right, 412.

The Noes to the left, 202. So the Ayes have it. The ayes have it unlocked.

But before Mrs. May asks to extend the deadline, she will resolutely, some might say stubbornly, ask MPs to vote on a deal they have overwhelmingly rejected twice.

The problem that we're in is that it's quite clear what MPs do not like. They do not like the current Brexit deal. They do not want to leave the European Union with no deal, but it is much less clear what they do like.

John Pete is our Brexit editor and.

There is sort of signs of different groups emerging in Parliament who want to be follow a different approach to Brexit or possibly want to reverse Brexit altogether. But there's no sign of a majority for anything at the moment. And I think that that make the situation pretty much chaotic.

Amidst all this chaos, then what happens next?

What happens next is that Theresa May has made it clear she's determined to keep trying, batting away and pushing. Her Brexit deal that she negotiated with the European Union last year, she wants to get that approved by Parliament. She's had it rejected by huge majorities twice, but she continues to insist there is no other deal on the table. Time is short and, you know, she wants to peel off more and more MPs until eventually she gets a majority for it. And meanwhile, because the deadline is looming, she's going to go back to Brussels next week and say she needs more time and can the European Union agree to give her more time?

I wonder why she thinks she can get her deal through, why she is still sticking with this plan if she's got these, you know, thumping defeats behind her. What's changed now?

I think part of what's going on is she's very obstinate. She genuinely believes that she's interpreting the result of the 2016 referendum in the only way possible, that she thinks the British voters want to stop free movement of people, that they want to be related to the European Union, but not too related. They don't want to just be rule takers, they want to have more independence from Brussels. And given those sort of constraints and her red lines, as she calls them, she thinks her deal is the only possible option on the table and anybody else who negotiates would end up with something similar. So she believes that she can just bang the drum and persuade MPs gradually that there is no alternative and this is the only way forward. I'm not sure she's right about that, but that seems to be what she's doing.

And now she'll go to the EU and try to get an extension. How likely is that and how long might it be?

I think the EU will give her an extension because they don't want this process to end with a no deal Brexit on March 29 any more than she does There will be a considerable debate about how long to make it. Some people will say just, you know, we only want to give you two or three months. But I think there is a growing mood in Brussels for saying, actually this is such a chaotic situation that there's no sign of progress in London, that we may need to give her as long as a year to resolve what happens.

So if the EU offers an extension, in particular a long one, it looks less likely that Mrs. May's deal is the only one possible, I suppose. And then that brings us yet again to this question about the possibility of a second referendum. What do you think about that?

Well, I think the chances of a second referendum are increasing because it seems clear that MPs have said what they don't want. But there is no sign of a majority around what they do want in terms of Brexit. And that is leading quite a lot of people to say, look, if you can't sort this out, maybe we should ask voters whether they really want to go down this road. We had a vote on whether to have a referendum yesterday in Parliament and it was rejected by quite a large majority. But that's partly because the Labour Party said they're not ready yet to support the proposal, but they're thinking about it as a possibility at some point. And I think that the longer this goes on and the longer the delay, the greater the chances that those calling for a second referendum will persuade people that it is probably time to consult the people again.

What do you think the rest of the world makes of all this as all this chaos mounts? Do you think Britain should be embarrassed?

I think the rest of the world is quite surprised by the instability in British politics and in the country. I think they were surprised that the British voters decided to leave the world's biggest trade bloc back in 2016, and they thought that probably it would be sorted out by an efficient government. And the fact that it hasn't been, I think, is puzzling. Many think that chaos is not something you normally see in a country like Britain. So, yes, I think the government should feel quite embarrassed by its inability to make progress towards any version of Brexit that seems possible to get through the House of Commons.

And as this has played out over all of this time, and we keep having these chats about what's going to happen next. If you take it sort of, in sum, all of the votes that happened this week, are we any closer to understanding what's most likely to happen in the long run?

I think no. I think we're not making much progress on Brexit because we haven't really started the detailed negotiation on the future relationship at all. So probably Brexit is still going to happen at some point, but the longer it goes on, the more questions will be raised about what kind of Brexit we really want, or whether we should form a different relationship with the European Union, or whether we should actually stay in the European Union after all. So I don't think we're much closer to resolving this situation in any way at all.

John, thank you very much for your time.

Thanks.

As extreme weather events multiply and warmer temperatures become the norm, a youth movement has been gathering momentum.

Justice. What do we want it now?

It's being led by Greta Thunberg, a Swedish teenager who's just been nominated by three Norwegian lawmakers for the Nobel Peace Prize. She inspired the movement Fridays for the Future by cutting class on Fridays and staging protests.

You are not mature enough to tell it like it is. Even that burden you leave to us children. But I don't care about being popular. I care about climate justice and a living planet.

Today, students from more than 100 countries are expected to skip school and take to the streets. They'll be demanding drastic, urgent action on climate change.

Carbon. Let's ban it to protect our planet.

Today's protest is mainly all about children walking out of schools, telling adults that they need to wake up and start taking climate change seriously.

Fred Harter is a journalist who writes for the Economist.

And some politicians have criticized it as bringing politics into the classroom, but I think the size and the scope of it makes it quite significant. I think you're seeing a shift in green activism, where children are starting to make their voices heard. And I think children speak with a certain moral authority that sometimes adults lack. It's very hard to criticise them for having vested interests. It's also very hard to argue with them without coming across as patronising.

And how do the sort of various demands differ internationally? Is everybody kind of on the same page here?

So the specific demands vary from place to place. In the us, the kids are striking in favour of the new green deal, amongst other things. In the uk, one of the demands is to lower the voting age to 16. In Australia, one of the main demands is to prevent a new big coal mine being dug up. So there is some variation from country to country, but globally, more broadly, the aims are the same, which is to get adults to take action, because they see that inertia over climate change as imperiling their future.

And I guess the Important question is, will this do anything? I mean, it is big, but it is, you know, quite loosely organized, quite informal. Do you think this is going to make politicians wake up, make people take action more urgently?

I think it's very easy to dismiss it, but at the same time, I do think it has a possibility to drive change, not necessarily by itself, but part of a broader groundswell of momentum. For instance, Greta Thunberg, the Swedish student who has helped spark this movement, shared a podium with Jean Claude Juncker, I think, last month, where he pledged that a quarter of the European Commission's budget will be spent on efforts to combat climate change. So I do think it has the opportunity to contribute to a very big change.

Meanwhile, this week, the UN is holding its biennial environment assembly in Nairob.

This session, Innovative Solutions for Environmental Challenges and Sustainable.

It's billed as the world's most influential environmental summit. And some controversial climate change responses have been on the agenda.

So over the last few days, over 170 nations have been meeting, and part of the conversation has centered around this proposal for a review of geoengineering technologies.

Katrine Braigh is our science correspondent.

It was a notable conversation because it's the first time, really that these technologies have been discussed at such a high level and importantly in a form that the United States is present at.

Geoengineering methods, what are they?

Geoengineering technologies are a quite controversial suite of options for cooling the planet. In addition to having to cut carbon emissions, they generally fall into two categories. You can either suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and then put it somewhere where it can't warm the planet, or you can block the sun's rays so that they don't warm the planet.

I mean, why aren't there already solutions of this sort? Why isn't this already put in practice if the climate crisis is as grave as we believe it to be?

There's a few different reasons for that. On the one hand, there's been a reluctance to explore these technologies because it's seen as a slippery slope towards completely geoengineering the climate, ignoring the root cause of the problem, which is greenhouse gas emissions.

But in a broad sense, how effective does it look like these kinds of approaches would be? And do they come with any risks?

They have the potential to be very effective. If you suck CO2 out of the atmosphere, you can reverse the effects of the emissions. In terms of the sun shades, these tend to be modeled on large volcanic eruptions, such as the Pinatubo eruption in the early 1990s, which chucked a whole load of particles into the stratosphere and cooled global average temperatures by up to 0.5 of a degree Celsius for several years. So there is potential there. That's not to say that they're risk free. The studies are ongoing on this. But climate modeling studies, for instance, have suggested that while you can cool temperatures, you might not be able to rebalance the water cycle. So you could get rain extremes or drought extremes. The other thing is that the effects won't be necessarily globally distributed. So you might have more of an effect in one place and less of an effect in another place. And that could create regional and international tensions.

And I suppose it's because of those international tensions that the UN was actually meeting about this or having a review of a proposal. What exactly is going on in Kenya?

Yeah, so in Kenya this week, one of the things on the agenda was a proposal that was tabled by the Swiss delegation to have an international expert review of these technologies, the science, how it's done, what the risks are, but also how you would govern them. How would they be regulated if a group of nations decided to go it alone and deploy their regional sunshade with consequences for their neighbors? Who's going to arbitrate that kind of a problem?

And so how did it go with the proposal?

Not very well. And I think the way that the discussions proceeded in Nairobi is illustrative of the kinds of issues that we're going to encounter here. So the Swiss had, I believe, a majority, from what I've heard of governments backing their proposal. Word on the ground is that nations, the United States and Saudi Arabia, were not in favor of the proposal. And eventually conversations went on for longer than they were intended to and the Swiss had to retract the proposal.

Why do you suppose that America and Saudi Arabia are so against it?

That's an interesting question. We can only speculate. They declined to comment. The echoes that I was hearing was that what they seem to object to is that anybody is going to tell them how it should be regulated. We do know that the Americans submitted some alternative text which would have effectively pushed the review over to another body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. They were trying to say this conversation needs to happen outside of the UN Environment Program in a place where really we're only talking about the science. And everybody else was saying we need more than just the science. We need a conversation about governance.

And do you agree with that? I mean, it does seem that if there are going to be these cross border effects that we do need a conversation that goes just beyond will it work?

Yeah, I mean, I would agree with that. All of the different methods might not require the same kind of regulation. And it's possible that some things don't require regulation at all. So for instance, if you plant a forest that sucks CO2 out of the atmosphere, do you need an international governing body to tell you whether or not you can plant a forest and how to do it? I'm not convinced, but I think when we're talking about blocking the sun's rays and really doing some kind of reverse sci fi action on climate change, that is something that governments need to talk about and need to agree on, particularly because of the potential risks. I don't think this issue is going to go away. We have researchers that are carrying out studies on this. We have proposals for some field trials later this year. We have governments that are looking at it. So it's unfortunate that the Swiss proposal didn't go through, but it's not the end of the day because really, really what they wanted was a high level discussion where governments are getting together and to get it on the global agenda.

Katrine, thanks very much.

Thank you.

Are there any taboos left in comedy? In this week's episode of the Economist asks, Ricky Gervais, the creator of the Office, Talked to Anne McElvoy about being funny in a sensitive age.

I think people sometimes think that comedian goes out and tries to say what they want and hurt people's feelings. It's ridiculous. Those routines are honed by the time someone sees a routine that I've done on Netflix. I've tested that to about 800,000 people. I've looked at it from every angle. I've made it bulletproof. I can justify any joke I've ever made and I can tell them what the target is as opposed to what just the subject is.

The first of the 800,000 is probably your girlfriend, isn't it? Because you often run stuff past her and I think you once said, I run it past her for a joke and if she says please don't say that in public, I know it's good.

Well, when she says please don't say, she's worried about the backlash. So she's worried about how I'll be perceived and the stick I get. And then we discuss it and we just make sure that the joke is justified, whatever people think. Because if everyone in the world thought the joke was offensive or didn't get it, then there's something wrong with the joke. But that's just not true. It shows the subjective nature of jokes and morality. So what I meant was, just because you're offended, it doesn't mean you're right. Some people are offended by equality. What are we to do about that? Well, we're to ignore them.

To hear the full episode download the Economist asks Available wherever you listen. Leo Maroni, our news editor, has brought me a gift. Leo, I'm not complaining, but why have you brought me a beer?

Because today we're going to be talking about Irish pubs. So I thought, why not bring the pub to us?

Okay, sounds fun so far. But why are we talking about pubs?

Alright, so you're familiar with an Irish pub?

Boy, am I.

As you know, they can sometimes be cheesy, often have leprechauns and all sorts of road signs and things like that. Now. Now, it's quite easy to open an Irish pub anywhere in the world. There's about 7,000 of them worldwide outside the island of Ireland. But in Ireland itself, it's actually surprisingly difficult to open a pub.

Why is that?

So acquiring a licence in Ireland is.

Very expensive, more so than in other places.

Let's take the case of England and Wales. Relatively easy. You get a personal license, which gives you the right to serve alcohol or sell alcohol. You get a premises license, which means that the property is licensed. To be a place where people can consume costs a few hundred pounds. It takes a few weeks. It's no big deal. In Ireland, to get the premises license can cost €50,000 in Northern Ireland, €53,000 in the Republic, and it can take several months.

Why so much more?

So it's pretty basic economics. There's a limited supply of licenses. They don't create new ones. So if you want to get one, you have to go to somebody who already has a license and then, you know, they can charge you whatever the market can bear.

So why is the number limited?

I mean, there's a historical reason for this. So let me take you back to the Irish Potato Famine. First year 1845, there were about 8.4 million people in Ireland and about 15,000 pubs to refresh them. Lots of people died, several million more emigrated. And cut to 40 years later, you have about just over half the population remaining, but you have 17,000 pubs, which the Royal Commission on Liquor Licensing sent from London decided is beyond all question, excessive and utterly out of proportion to the necessities of the inhabitants.

End quote. Right. So London demands that Ireland have no more pubs. Sets that number.

Not exactly. So what they did was they established a principle that should be familiar to anyone who's ever queued to get into a nightclub. One in, one out. So if you want to open a pub, fine, but somebody else has to close a pub, right?

And so because of this scarcity, then the licenses are incredibly valuable. I mean, are the people happy with this? The licensees, the pub goers? This is a working, happy system.

Everyone's happy with this. As happy as you appear? Right. Now, the licensees are happy for two reasons. One, this thing is worth quite a bit of money, right? So they see it as something of a retirement kitty. The other reason is that it restricts competition. If I cannot easily open a pub right next to yours in a very popular port of town, too bad for me and good for you, as an existing license holder. Public is reasonably happy. I mean, there's enough pubs, the quality of the pubs is quite high. The Guinness is fresh and tasty.

Quality of pub as measured. How?

Well, Jason, you and I have both been to good pubs, and you and I have both been to, let's say, less good pubs. And I think you know a good pub when you see one.

I think that I do, actually. Leo, thanks very much and cheers.

Pleasure.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. You can subscribe to the economist@exterator.com radio, offer 12 issues for $12 or 12 pounds. See you back here on. It.