Carbon date: Biden’s climate summit

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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. A working life spent bouncing from one video call to the next is frankly exhausting. And researchers are starting to understand why. But the world's forced shift to zoom and teams isn't all bad. After all, no one knows you're wearing pajama bottoms. And speaking of staring at a screen, it's the Academy Awards on Sunday. Viewership has long been slipping in a disaggregated, algorithm driven pile of what's now just called content. How influential can old school awards like the Oscars? But first, President Joe Biden announced an ambitious new climate target for America yesterday. To cut its emissions in half by 2030 relative to 2005 levels.

No nation can solve this crisis on our own.

As I know you all fully understand.

All of us, all of us, and.

Particularly those of us who represent the world's largest economies. We have to step up.

The announcement came on the first day of a two day global climate summit convened by Mr. Biden. It was warmly received by those in attendance.

You have started this summit by walking the talk. I would like to thank President Biden for taking this initiative. I'm really thrilled by the game changing announcement that Joe Biden has just made. And I'm very proud that the UK is doing the same.

Yeah.

Mr. President, dear Joe Biden, dear colleagues, I'm delighted to see that the United States is back.

Today the focus will turn to private industry and the role played by business. With contributions from Mike Bloomberg in his role as UN Climate Envoy and Microsoft founder Bill Gates. But announcements are one thing. Implementing the large structural changes necessary to get to those targets is another. And America has a long way to go to convince the world that it's once more serious about combating the threat of a rapidly warming Planet.

President Biden is very eager to try to assert America's role in the global fight against climate change.

Charlotte Howard is the Economist's energy and commodities editor.

On the first day of his presidency, he said he would rejoin the Paris Climate Agreement. There's no time to start like today, so. And then he scheduled this meeting in which he invited 40 world leaders to discuss how to galvanize action on climate.

And aside from organizing the summit, what can we read from what he's done in terms of that climate leadership?

I think it's important to remember Joe Biden in the context of his predecessors. So most recently, of course, President Donald Trump withdrew from the Paris Agreement. But you have to go back to the 90s. Bill Clinton's administration pushed for the Kyoto Protocol, then the Senate declined to ratify it. Obama pushed for the Paris Agreement, then Donald Trump withdrew. America promised billions of dollars in aid to poorer countries to help them deal with climate. Most of that aid is still yet to materialize. So America has a huge credibility deficit. And Joe Biden is trying to make up for lost time. So he's unveiled this big infrastructure bill that if passed as proposed, would really amount to the most important piece of climate legislation ever in America. And then he's had a series of executive actions to try deal with emissions from cars, from oil and gas operations, from power plants. And then he's really trying to show that America is willing to be a partner in the global effort by working with other countries around the world to push forward commitments to limit emissions.

And several other countries have made new climate commitments. What's your read on those?

Well, Europe and Britain have been way ahead of America on this in that they've been largely consistent in, in steadily advancing their goals for reducing emissions. The Paris Agreement of 2015 had countries set out what are called nationally determined contributions. So you'll hear this term a lot over the next year NDCs, and that's the target for reducing emissions over a certain period of time. And Europe and the UK have recently upped their commitments because the targets that they set the last time around, they weren't sufficient to keep the world on track for well below 2 degree warming, above pre industrial temperatures, which is the goal of the Paris Agreement. And the reason why all these countries are doing this now is because in November, Britain will host a huge climate meeting, the next big UN Climate conference. But that's really the end date, it's not the beginning. So countries need to make their commitments in the run up to that big climate meeting in November. And Biden's meeting this week in Washington is a milestone before that deadline in November.

And what about the geopolitical end of this? I mean, this summit includes foreign leaders who are otherwise at odds with America. For instance, from China, from Russia. Do you think climate change cooperation can stand apart from these otherwise tetchy geopolitical relationships?

You would think that this is an issue on which the world has a very clear common interest. But the truth of the matter is that it is very hard to to separate climate from all kinds of other issues. Russia, of course, is a giant oil and gas producer, so it has interests in protecting those markets. China and America, their relationship has really deteriorated since 2014 when Obama and Xi Jinping made a joint statement on climate.

As the world's two largest economies, energy consumers and emitters of greenhouse gases, we have a special responsibility to lead the global effort against climate change.

Now they're battling over human rights issues. Clearly, the economic competition with China has ramped up. John Kerry, the former Secretary of State who Biden appointed as his special climate envoy, he's tried to frame climate as a standalone issue.

Obviously we have serious differences with China.

And some very, very important issues, but.

Climate is a critical standalone issue that.

We have to deal on even within the Biden administration. It's pretty clear that China can't be removed from some of these other very important issues. And I think that you heard that from Secretary Blinken, the Secretary of State this week who talked about climate change as a matter of competition with China. It's difficult to imagine the United States winning the long term strategic competition with China if we cannot lead. The renewable energy revolution. Right now were falling behind, and I think that that will be a key tension. Whether this is an issue on which America and China can cooperate or whether it really is a new arena of competition, both in terms of aid delivered to poorer and middle income countries as they try to build up their energy systems, and also an area of economic competition as America becomes more serious about supporting clean energy industries. That's a space in which China has a very long head start.

And what about developing countries who are always part of these international cooperation talks, how to bring them into line without depriving them of the opportunity for growth?

Developing countries have reason to view the commitments of the rich world with skepticism. Rich countries haven't made good on their commitments to deliver aid, and rich countries haven't particularly the United States has not imposed curbs on emissions. So it's pretty hard for the world's worst wealthiest country and biggest historic emitter. To say you guys curb your emissions when it's not willing to do so itself. America will need to match talk with action and actually have a serious climate plan at home. And then you need to have wealthy countries working together to think about how to better assist both the deployment of clean energy in poorer countries where energy demand is really growing quickly as opposed to the rich world where energy demand is flat. So I think you see the Biden administration trying to think more creatively about how to push this transition along beyond its borders.

And you've gone much more in depth on this subject this week on our sister show Babbage, right?

Yes. I speak with Jason Bordoff, who's the co dean of Columbia University's Climate School, about what Biden can reasonably achieve and what's to come before the big climate meeting in Glasgow in November. So the Biden administration, broadly speaking, has three tools at its disposal. What it can do by itself without Congress with executive action regulations to limit emissions from cars and power plants through the Environmental Protection Agency. Even there, there may be some limits because of what courts will decide they are allowed to do then. The second big category is what they can do with Congress. And then state level action is also very important. You should be able to find it wherever you get your podcasts.

Thanks very much for your time, Charlotte.

Thank you.

Oh, you again. For me, working from home has meant working from a closet. The sound is just better in here. But unlike the real studio back at the office, they sometimes get visitors in here. This past year, many of us have had to adjust to remote work. Face to face meetings have been replaced. The shift has been good for the planet. Virtual meetings use a fraction of the energy required for the in person kind. What's less clear though, is whether it's benefited workers.

A year into the pandemic, now lots and lots of people are complaining they've got zoom fatigue.

Avantika Chilcotti is one of our international correspondents.

Relatively recently some researchers at Stanford published new research that lays out the science behind zoom fatigue. The reason why our brains get so tired when we're having all of our meetings doing all of our work online.

And what's the science? What did they measure?

The Stanford researchers did a little experiment. They put a laptop on a desk and use the normal zoom default settings to have a conversation with just one other person. And if you measure how big someone's face looks on a screen when you do that, it's about the same as standing 50 centimeters apart. And our brains are accustomed to assuming that that kind of proximity is reserved either for intimacy or for conflict. And it's exhausting for our brain to be looking at our bosses and our colleagues that close up. Added to that is the fact that we're all making eye contact for an awfully long time. In a video call, everybody's staring at their screen. And on the receiving end, that feels like everybody's staring at you.

And in addition to being, frankly, weird and exhausting, it's not very efficient communication either.

Yes, people nod very dramatically in a Zoom meeting because they're trying to make up for the fact that all the ways in which we used to gesture to make ourselves understood are now missing. Added to that fact, some research shows that people speak 15% louder on video calls than they do in person. That is also pretty exhausting. And there was a really interesting paper I read which showed that if you have a gap in the transmission, a lag of just 1.2 seconds, participants in a video meeting see each other as less attentive, less friendly, less conscientious. The last thing as well about virtual meetings is that you spend a lot of time having to look at yourself.

You mean the image of oneself on these meetings is adding to the problem?

Yeah, and it's not just that. It's distracting. So in June last year, a researcher at Washington University surveyed women, and she chose women because it's quite well reported that women, women have more severe issues around self image than men. And she found that respondents spent an average 40% of their time on video calls looking at their own face now, endlessly scrutinizing your own wrinkles, your puffy eyes. It's not great for self esteem, but.

There have to be some advantages to working remotely. It's not all downsides.

Yes. What the pandemic has shown us is just that virtual work works. There was one study of 3 million workers published by Harvard Business School in September, and they found that when the pandemic struck and work first went online, people actually worked longer hours, they were sending more emails, and they were attending more meetings than pre pandemic. I interviewed Jared Spetaro, who's head of modern work at Microsoft, and he said that wasn't what they expected either.

Initially, one of the big questions back in March and April was, would people essentially watch Netflix all day or would they do their work? And the question's been answered. People do their work.

There are, of course, some obvious advantages to virtual meetings as well. Harry Moseley, who's the chief information officer at Zoom, told me that there's a Certain democracy to video calls where everybody appears as an equally sized, randomly arranged tile on a screen.

There's inequality in the meeting.

There's no positioning who's at the head of the table.

There's no hierarchy in the room. And so back to a question that's come up a hundred times since the start of the pandemic is whether this is simply a pandemic effect or something that is just now the way of the world. What do you reckon to that?

Yep. So, as far as I can tell, we're headed into a hybrid world of some online and some in person meetings. There was a survey by PwC at the end of 2020 which found over 80% of employers reckon that remote work has been a success. The thing in the next few months will be working out how to avoid the worst bits of telework and keep the good bits. Mr. Mosley At Zoom, like many of us, has changed how he thinks about the workday.

My daily commute is take the dog for a walk and then I come.

Home and I go into my office.

And I do my work. So people really now understand that work.

Is something we do, it is not a place.

And he's got some tips for the rest of us trying to minimize zoom fatigue. He, for example, opts for audio only calls when he's quickly speaking to someone he knows well. He also arranges his meetings to be 25 minutes or 55 minutes, ensuring that both he and his colleagues have sort of a buffer between meetings.

And as you say, in one way or another, it is here to stay. I mean, any other tips or solutions along those same lines?

The makers of virtual collaboration products are also doing their bit to try to improve them. And that's One thing that Mr. Spitaro at Microsoft described to me.

I think that what has happened is.

Technology is now digitizing time and space in the same way that it digitized paperwork previously. That's a very powerful concept.

To try to add some structure to what they call a shapeless workday, Microsoft Teams is introducing what it calls a virtual commute. It's basically a way of easing users into the day by getting them to think about things like what they need to get done in that day or what they need to prioritize the next day. It's the kind of thing people often did think about when they were standing on the tube.

And what about for you, having thought about this a lot and having had many shapeless work days yourself? I mean, how does a, a future of these inevitable zoom screens look to you?

Just going about doing this research has made me maybe unhealthily reflective about how I do virtual work. So for example, I now carry around a little post it. You can hide your own self view window in a lot of these video conferencing apps, but for when I can't figure it out, I just cover my own face. The other thing I try to do is just be optimistic and realistic about this. I mean, it's not normal to spend that much of your time communicating online, but when the rest of the world goes offline, it might be a bit more bearable to work online.

Thanks very much for joining us, Avantika.

Thanks for having me, Jason.

It's the Academy Awards this weekend, an annual event that's had some lively moments over the years.

This is not a joke.

Moonlight has won Best Picture.

You guys are just standing up because you feel bad that I fell and that's really embarrassing, but thank you. Probably the only laugh that man will.

Ever get in his life is by stripping off and showing his shortcomings. The ceremony to hand out the Oscars is a celebration of all the glitz and glamour of mostly Hollywood. But there hasn't been that much to celebrate this year. That has fed growing questions about just how relevant the awards are these days. And the journalist tasked with telling me all about this is Tom Wainwright, the Economist's media editor.

The Oscars are going to look rather strange this year. All the attendees, for one thing, have been designated essential workers to allow them to get around any travel restrictions. They're all going to be tested at least three times each for Covid. If anything, though, the even bigger problem for the organisers could be persuading people to tune in at home. People have been watching the Oscars and other awards ceremonies in ever declining numbers for years now.

How so? How are these numbers falling off?

Look, last month, for example, we had the Grammy Awards, the big music awards, and they got 9.3 million viewers in America, and that was less than half the number who watched last year. Before that, last September, we had the Emmys, which is the big TV awards. They got 6.4 million, which again was a record low. And it's possible that people are watching these programmes other ways. You know, increasingly people just watch clips on social media, but if you look at online searches as well, those also are declining for all of these awards. So it does seem that people for years now have just been getting less and less interested in award ceremonies in general.

But any dip recently must surely be down to the pandemic, at least a Bit, Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, 2020 was a freak year in all kinds of ways. So thinking about the Oscars, for example, nearly all the big films of last year were postponed. So for example, there was supposed to be a new James Bond adventure that's been delayed. But these declines have been in progress now for some time. This isn't just a one off thing that this has been happening now for a decade or more. And it seems to me that the bigger issue here is that the sort of shared popular culture that these awards celebrate has been eroded really. There's ever more choice. People are being steered towards new things by algorithms. And so the idea of a kind of single cultural experience which is celebrated by the Oscars and other shows like this, that experience doesn't really exist in the way that it used to.

And I suppose the preponderance of Stuff to Watch is helped also by all of the streaming services that are now so big.

Yeah, hugely. I mean, look back to say, the 1980s, MTV really set the agenda. And in TV, lots of countries, people only had, you know, a handful of channels to watch. Compare that with now you've got not only cable tv, you've got hundreds of streaming services on Spotify, you've got 70 million tracks, 60,000 new songs are uploaded to Spotify every single day. I mean, there's just oceans of content out there. And it's not just that to navigate all this content, increasingly we have algorithms telling us what to watch. So you load up Netflix and it says, so, you know, you enjoyed this thing, maybe you should try that thing. And the upshot of that again is that people are watching and listening to and experiencing all different cultures. And so the very idea of an awards show which somehow picks the best of culture of the past year just doesn't really make sense in the way that it used to.

And all of this adds to the problems that you describe about awards organizers. I mean, what can they do to bring people back into the fold?

I think it's very difficult for them. There's one interesting example though, of an area where awards have managed to maintain perhaps a bit more relevance. And that actually comes from the book industry. The book world has never really had quite the same monoculture that say, Hollywood has, because there's always been tons of choice in books. And as a result, book awards still have a bit more impact and a bit more clout. And there's some evidence that the Oscars actually is going that way a little bit as well. If you look Back to the 1980s, the winner of the best picture was nearly always something that had been quite successful at the box office. So more often than not, it had made the top 10 in the United States. These days, that's much less common. It seems that the Oscars judges are going for more niche kind of films when they choose the best picture. So a couple of recent examples, Parasite, which was Korean language black comedy, before that, we had Green Book. Both of those were films which weren't anywhere near the top 10. I mean, they were actually only just in the top 100 at the box office. And in a way, this gives the awards a bit more relevance because it means that they're picking up on things that people might otherwise have missed, and it helps people to discover things that perhaps the algorithm would have skated over.

Tom, thanks very much for your time. Thank you. That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. The show's editors are Marguerite Howell and Kim Gittleson. Our senior producers are Chris Impey, Hannah Mourinho and Sam Colbert. Our producers are Stevie Hertz and William Warren and assistant producer Jason Hoskin, with extra help this week from Emily Elias and Pete Naughton. Our sound engineer is Daniel Lloyd Evans and our trainee is Abesoye Oshundairo. We'll all see you back here on Monday.