COP out: the UN climate talks

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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. In China, vegetarianism is pretty rare and most often tied up with religion. Meat is seen as a relatively newly affordable luxury and often as a necessary part of a healthy diet. Chinese health officials are starting to think otherwise. And every year there are fatalities when a small aircraft's pilot becomes incapacitated and no one aboard can land the plane. We talk to an engineer who's developed a panic button that can do the job entirely automatically. First up, though, The logo for this year's UN Climate talks held in Madrid was a clock. The tagline Tiempo de time for action. But the Summit known as COP25 failed to live up to its own slogan. The decisive action that was hoped for wasn't taken. The outcome disappointed many, not least some of the NGOs in attendance.

COP25 has not delivered, but we will return stronger in 2020. We will rise and unleash unprecedented movements if governments keep failing the people and the planet.

There were two main points that were going to be addressed at these annual climate talks.

Katrine Brake is our environment editor and was at the conference.

The first was what's known as the question of ambition. And there a large group of Countries were looking for reassurance that individual governments are going to up the ante on their promises to tackle climate change. And that means bigger and better and faster policies to drastically cut their greenhouse gas emissions. The second key point at COP25 was the question of the final rules for the Paris Agreement that need to be ironed out. In particular this idea that there can be global carbon markets, so a global system to trade, the right to pollute, that would in fact help to serve the first point, which is to accelerate cuts to greenhouse gas emissions.

So if those were the two ambitions, what actually emerged?

Disappointing results on both fronts. At the end of these conferences you get official UN text. The official text on ambition was frankly weak. And the discussion of carbon markets is once again kicked down to next year.

So essentially people were looking for stronger commitments signed in blood and a mechanism for a carbon market.

Yes, there's a third point which often gets swept under the carpet and that's known as loss and damage. And this is the request from some of the poorest countries that the richer countries that have really created the problem through their historical emissions, help them pay for the consequences of climate change that they are feeling now. But historically that represents a real red line for the richer nations who claim that there are other mechanisms for paying for that kind of damage through the UN for instance, but also who don't ever want to see the situation become one of liability.

So let's go back to the two principal points then, and the first one of ambition. If the big emitting countries who keep going to these conferences every year, start to see the effects of climate change, perhaps in these small island states and the like, why is it so hard to get them to commit to greater ambition?

I think the problem here is that within the UN you need consensus on behalf of nearly 200 nations. And there is a real resistance for a top down system where the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which is the umbrella body here, would dictate national policy.

But I mean, this is the story that we've been hearing out of climate talks for absolutely years, that the consensus, the sort of there are those who want to play and those who do not. I mean, if the UN can't do it, how can a group of countries this big, this disparate, ever come to a consensus agreement? I mean, how will we ever get past this kind of repeated impasse?

So interestingly, I think the best news on climate change to come out of the last two weeks didn't come from Madrid at all. It came from Brussels, where the European Commission came out with its Green deal, which is an incredibly ambitious and comprehensive work plan for the next five years that potentially could transform the EU economy into this sort of ideal, ideal situation of a prosperous and yet carbon neutral group. And relatedly, at the EU summit on Friday, last week, at this very same time, as nearly 200 nations were failing to agree on ambition in Madrid, you had the leaders of the European Union coming together and after many fraught discussions, finally agreeing that they will make the entire EU carbon neutral by 2050. So this is possible. You can get large groups of nations on board and the hope is really that the EU will become a leader and it will snowball to the rest of the world.

And the second big aim of the talks was around these carbon markets. How did that go wrong?

It went horribly wrong, frankly. So this is a conversation that was meant to be resolved last year, failed to arrive at a consensus, was kicked down the line to this year, and yet again has been kicked down to next year. The idea is that countries should be able to trade the right to pollute across borders. And we already have some carbon markets, right? We've got the European Union trading scheme, for instance. The UN wants to see some of those markets link up, but in an efficient way that really means something for the atmosphere. And also they want to create possibilities for a new carbon market that would be more global.

And so why does that fall down?

If done properly in a way that has environmental integrity, markets have the potential to accelerate cuts to emissions, and they have the potential to reduce the cost of those emissions cuts by basically allowing people to cut emissions in places where they are cheapest, not just within their national borders, but outside. So you can find the cheapest solution you can apply that first, and it means that you can spread this globally. Many people see this as a way of allowing countries to cooperate in emissions cuts across borders. The difficulty is in the technicalities of this. Some countries would like to see a system that was created under the Kyoto Protocol roll over into these new carbon markets. And the problem is that those systems under the Kyoto Protocol, particularly a mechanism known as the Clean Development Mechanism that allowed rich countries to offset their emotions in poor countries, were full of what's known as hot air. They didn't actually result in real emissions cuts or potentially they could result in hot air in future. Because some countries, namely Brazil, China and India, would like to use credits that they generated under the Kyoda Protocol in the new Paris mechanism. Now those credits correspond to emissions reductions that have already happened.

It's double counting.

It's double counting.

So those countries wanting to do that made it impossible to pass a substantive carbon market. Bit of legislation now completely impossible. You're a real veteran of these kinds of conferences, and as an outsider, I always hear what sounds like the same story. People go in with great ambitions, they come out with long faces having, you know, run out to the 11th, 12th, 13th. What's your take here? Is the trend line towards the good or the bad? Because it doesn't sound good.

So I think there's one thing that often gets lost in the media coverage of these events, and that is the real genuine determination of the people who are involved to tackle this problem and the incredibly impressive technical expertise that is actually on board. The politicians and the ministers who arrive have national priorities that they need to take care of, and that's understandable, but they are advised by people who really have their heart in the right place and who have a huge amount of knowledge in how you can solve this problem. Not only that, but the politicians, despite all appearances to the contrary, are actually hearing the demonstrators on the street. That is having an impact within the halls of the UN Climate Summit. It's important to know it, because those demonstrations need to continue. And the other thing is that the very NGOs and think tanks who are justifiably drumming up the anger and frustration on the streets are also advising many of these governments. And so that frustration, determination and expertise is in fact feeding into the governments.

The question still, though, is, is it all fast enough?

It is not fast enough. We have 10 years before the level of CO2 in the atmosphere is enough to warm the planet by 1.5. And ultimately, that's what the politicians have committed themselves to.

Katrine, thanks very much for your time.

Thank you, Jason.

One large part of addressing climate change is encouraging the world to eat less meat. Production of particularly the red kind requires tremendous amounts of arable land and water. And the animals themselves burp up their own greenhouse gas emissions. Yet the appetite for meat in China seems only to be growing. Beef imports increased 40 fold between 2010 and 2018. Even though it has deep historical roots, vegetarianism remains exceedingly rare.

There's a long tradition of vegetarianism particularly linked to temples and religions.

David Rennie writes Cha Guan, our column about China.

So people will talk about it, but actually people who are strictly vegetarian, that's really rare. The food industry thinks it's less than 2% of Chinese people are completely vegetarian. You know a place with a very similar culture, Taiwan, the island of Taiwan, that's. It's Very different. They have 10% vegetarian.

So why do you think that percentage is so low? Why isn't there more interest in vegetarianism?

You don't have to be very old at all, I mean, in your 50s, to remember when there just wasn't meat. But not because people chose that, because it was rationed, because the country was really poor. And so people now think of it as a sign of if you want to lead a prosperous, happy, healthy life, meat is part of that. It should be said that the Chinese still eat half as much meat as the average American. So even though the world worries about China's meat eating, we're asking them to be far more restrained than most Westerners. But any good party, a wedding, inviting friends over meat and fish and seafood is part of the experience. I went to number eight market in the coastal city of Xiamen, and that's a kind of covered market with lots of alleyways of stalls. And if you are squeamish about meat, it is not the place for you. It's a historic market, and these butchers stalls basically have every bit of an animal laid out from kind of nose to tail. And people are prodding bits of meat and seeing that it's fresh. And people particularly like warm meat because it means it's just been freshly killed. I spoke to a seafood vendor, Ah Fung. She's in her 50s, so she remembers when they were young and poor that eating meat was very rare. I asked her how often she thought people ate meat, and she thought that two or three days out of a week was a good amount. And of course, you have to have fish every day for your health. That was her view.

And so when you talk to people about attitudes towards vegetarianism, what do they say?

Well, they tend to say that only their most religious friends are vegetarian. And if you ask them about whether they think it's a good idea, people very quickly start talking about having energy, being healthy. Certainly the idea that children need to eat some meat even if they don't particularly want to. So I spoke to one man in the covered market who said that he acknowledged that some children might say they don't eat meat, so you have to sneak it into them with soup was his view. And I spoke even to a tofu seller called Mrs. Lin, and she had a whole array of different tofu, including one, it should be said, made with duck blood. But she said that going fully vegetarian, she did have religious customers and friends who on the 1st and 15th day of the lunar calendar, might try and go meatless for a Couple of days. But she then said that she noticed that they complain they have no energy. And she says that tofu, which is, after all what she sells, is packed with nutrition, but your body can't handle too much of it. And going completely vegetarian is just not good for your body, she thought. But she herself could see the downsides of only eating her products.

And what about other concerns that vegetarians elsewhere might raise, for instance, about animal health or the effects of meat on the environment?

There's a couple of issues there. One is that China is a recently rural society and people are pretty used still to the idea of animals being killed around them and kind of big chunks of meat. They don't necessarily think that you go to the supermarket to get an anonymous plastic wrapped kind of processed bit of meat that isn't telling you that it's part of an animal. It's also a country that, you know, it's a big dictatorship run by a Communist Party. And the idea of kind of proudly flaunting an alternative lifestyle just is not particularly part of Chinese culture. And so the idea of kind of showy self denial, that seems a bit odd in a country that was poor very recently. And so people who are vegetarians generally don't like to be labelled. And even if they have religious reasons, they don't want to have to explain themselves to everyone all the time. That's a very kind of Chinese way to put it.

So given that cultural and historical narrative in China, I mean, does this look like a trend that is just set to continue? Will China swiftly reach the levels of meat eating, for instance, seen in America?

China's kind of at a fork in the road, maybe, because on the one hand, it's getting richer and richer. And so if it goes down the same path as a country like America, that will mean more and more meat eating. But it's also getting richer. In 2019, when governments all over the world know more about the climate change implications of meat raising, they know more about the health implications of eating meat. And so you do see, you know, everyone from Chinese health officials to kind of trendy elite restaurants in places like Beijing or Shanghai, starting to promote a kind of ultra modern urban lifestyle that involves going with either less meat or no meat.

But we see a lot in the developing worlds that, you know, people having the opportunity to, well, essentially to be gluttonous in the way that the developed world has for a very long time. People just want to do that. How to fight that desire of newly rich Chinese to enjoy the spoils, I.

Think Some of the early evidence is that in China, if you make it a kind of head on confrontation and you tell people that they should not eat any meat, you know you're onto a loser. Remember that number that only 2% of mainland Chinese call themselves completely vegetarian. But you do see some interesting examples of people saying, okay, you're living in a country that's got rich and can start exploring different elite lifestyles and thinking about your health and your spirituality and enjoying life a bit. Maybe sometimes a vegetarian diet is part of that. So, for example, in big cities like Beijing and Shanghai, you will see some very, very high end vegetarian restaurants where it's all part of an experience. You know, maybe it's in a beautiful courtyard restaurant near a temple and they make a big pitch about how it's all about kind of film stars come here and eat our food and they know that most of their customers aren't actually vegetarian. It's just tonight they've chosen to be vegetarian and maybe tomorrow night they'll go and eat a wagyu beef burger made into five star hotel. But at least that's a way towards making vegetarianism part of a kind of modern, urban, healthy lifestyle.

David, thank you very much for joining us.

Thank you.

It's a nightmare scenario. Flying in a small aircraft and then the pilot passes out. But imagine if there were a panic button that once pushed by a passenger would trigger the plane to land itself. Such a solution may soon exist, significantly reducing the number of such incidents.

You hear about several a year. The main thing with them is that they normally have really bad outcomes, they normally have fatalities involved. And for such a tight knit community like aviation, just hearing about those is really impactful and it's just really heartbreaking that they happen.

Bailey Schiel is the head of a team at Garmin that's created the technology known as Autoland.

I think one of the really famous ones is Payne Stewart.

The golf world is mourning the death.

Of US Open champion Payne Stewart and five others.

Now comes the investigation.

His aircraft had a. I think it's a depressurization event where the aircraft didn't have enough oxygen for the pilots and they ended up flying hundreds of miles the wrong direction and crash into a field in South Dakota instead of heading, I think to Texas where they were supposed to go. So everyone on board obviously perished.

You've tried to develop something that avoids those kinds of outcomes. I mean, how does it work?

Yeah, so Autoland was developed by Garmin and a huge team of engineers, flight test pilots and all sorts of people for the activation means, we can identify if the pilot hasn't interacted with the the avionics system for a significant amount of time. And we can post alerts to them asking if they're there. If they don't respond to those, we can assume that the pilot is no longer flying the aircraft. So we can activate on that. We can also activate if the aircraft is in an unusual attitude. So if one wing is low or if it's heading towards the ground too fast, or if it's losing airspeed, that sort of thing. Once we activate, we look at our navigation database to find nearby airports, determine, you know, Runway lengths, widths, gradients, all sorts of things that we just already know about those airports. Using the fuel on the aircraft, we understand how far that aircraft can fly. So from that we can determine which of the airports nearby is the airplane can make it to. And then we have different parameters for the aircraft itself of which crosswinds it would prefer. If it can handle a shorter Runway, a longer Runway, pick which airport is best based on those parameters and then execute that flight plan to that airport, managing aircraft speed, aircraft power, and even the flaps and landing gear on the aircraft to get it ready for that landing and then fly the approach and land the aircraft at the destination airport.

Considering all of the sort of safety features and redundancy and just the general engineering that goes into jetliners, if this can be done, why are we not seeing it done in those first, in.

Jetliners and things, the aircraft have already have two or three pilots, depending on the flight. Single engine, turbo prop and smaller business jet. It's kind of the market where hypoxia events happen more often and they're more difficult to help with since in those bigger aircraft they already have two pilots, they have twice as many chances of having a successful outcome if one of them gets woozy first, basically.

And so do you see this as a step towards full autonomy in the way that a car can be self driving, a plane might one day be self flying?

I think it's a step in that direction. But at this point, this is a safety system that helps pilots have another option and has the airplane have another option to have a safe outcome. You can make examples of if we can land the airplane, if we can create routes, if we can follow those routes, then maybe that makes sense that we don't need that pilot in there. But that's not where the technology is right now. But yeah, maybe one day we can get there.

Bailey, thank you very much for joining us.

Well, thank you for having me.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. If you like us, give us a rating on Apple podcasts and you can subscribe to the economist@exterator.com radio. Offer 12 issues for $12 or 12 pounds. See you back here tomorrow.