Global warning: The UN sounds the alarm on climate change

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Edward McBride, standing in for Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. China's leaders have been trying to force their subjects to speak a standard form of Mandarin for centuries, but almost a third of the population can't. The authorities tend to see that as a problem, but many businesses spy a commercial opportunity. Uber may seem like a wonderful convenience to some and an emblem of exploitation to others, but one thing's for sure, it's driving people to drink. An academic study finds that when Uber starts operating in a new city, people's alcohol consumption increases. First up though, Yesterday the United nations released its annual report on progress towards globally agreed climate goals. The outlook is bleak and getting bleaker. The Emissions Gap report compares where greenhouse gas emissions are headed versus where they need to be. As of today, concentrations of the gases in the atmosphere atmosphere are at record highs. Not only have they failed to decline, they aren't even slowing down. The news comes in the wake of a year of devastating hurricanes, wildfires and heat waves.

Do not let our planet die.

Climate change is not a lie.

Do not let our Millions of protesters around the world have called attention to the climate crisis, but as this report shows, its catastrophic effects are closer than ever.

Overall. If you look at emissions, including agriculture, including things like deforestation, emissions are rising by 1.5% per year. And there we saw 55.3 billion tons of greenhouse gases chucked into the atmosphere last year in 2018.

Catherine Brajique is our environment editor.

Put into context of the Paris Agreement on climate change, we are a long, long way off. Where we need to be A report of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, published last year, looking at what we need to do in order to hit the ultimate ambitious goal of limiting global warming to no more than 1.5 degrees above where they were during pre industrial times suggested that we need to hit net zero emissions by 2050. So by the middle of this century, which is coming on very quickly, we need to have eliminated all of those emissions, not have emissions rising every year, year on year. So once again, the Emissions Gap Report gives a sobering state of our efforts to try and combat climate change.

It all sounds very grim. Why are emissions rising so fast? Even though most of the big economies in the world signed up to the Paris Agreement in 2015 to cut emissions.

Countries have committed to the goals of the Paris Agreement. But those goals are incredibly ambitious. They're long term. And in the meantime, the industries that are driving emissions continue to rise. So we know that the group of 20th wealthiest countries are responsible for more than three quarters of all emissions. Within that group, the EU, the UK, Italy and France have committed to long term goals of cutting their emissions to net zero. But in the long run, what you need is a complete buy in. Across the planet, we haven't had commitments from a number of major emitters to cut their emissions in a significant way by mid century, ideally cut their emissions completely by mid century. And that list includes countries like Australia, Brazil, Canada, Japan and of course the United States, where there's the added complication of President Trump having decided that it would withdraw from the Paris Agreement at the earliest date possible, which is next year. In the long run though, this is an incredibly difficult task. The progress that we've seen over the last year of a number of countries signing up to net zero targets for mid century is really encouraging. But we needed that 10, 15 years ago, not now. And in fact the numbers we can go into this, but the numbers of the Emissions Gap report really emphasize just how much that delay is costing us.

Tell me more about those numbers. Katrine, what's the effect of these years of delay on the work we still have to do?

The Paris Agreement says that ideally we want to limit global warming to between 1.5 and 2 degrees of warming above pre industrial levels. If we are going to hit that most ambitious target, emissions need to fall by 7.6% per year every year between now and 2030. Instead, they are rising by 1.5% per year. The 2 degrees target is a little bit more achievable. If we're going to hit that, then emissions need to come down by 2.7% per year every year between now and 2030. And again instead they are rising. So with every year of inaction, with every year that passes, and governments don't Set more stringent targets for themselves. Hitting the targets becomes harder and harder. That curve of how much you need to bring emissions down every year just gets steeper the longer you leave it.

So given the lack of progress that you describe, it seems likely that neither of those targets are going to be hit. What happens if we carry on on the current trajectory?

Current estimates are that if governments do no more than what they have promised so far, but they do actually do what they've promised so far, which is important, then temperatures are set to rise by roughly 3.2 degrees by the end of the century. The consequences of that are enormous. The 1.5 degree target has been agree because beyond 1.5 small island states disappear beneath the waves as a result of sea level rise. So it's 3.2 degrees, you're well beyond that and you have significant consequences, not just for those small island states, but for low lying nations like Bangladesh, but also entire swathes of the US coastline, entire regions in Asia which are suddenly subject to a huge amount of sea level rise. And as a result of that, storm surges with devastating consequences. You're going to have a huge problem of migration, people moving out of regions that are effectively uninhabitable. Coral reefs disappear, Extreme weather events are far more severe. The economic consequences are much more severe.

But so even as we're confronted with the grim headlines like the ones you're describing, we also often see encouraging sounding headlines about the growth of renewables, about how clean energy is making great strides. How come none of that is having an offsetting effect?

I don't think we should be dismissive. The growth in the renewable energy sector is remarkable and to some extent was unexpected. But the fact is that renewable energy still only accounts for something like 10% of global electricity production worldwide. So it's great, but it's just not enough. And until we turn around, not just where we get our energy from, but also things like how our food is produced and the emissions from deforestation. Until the whole package starts turning around, then we're not going to see the numbers that we need to see.

So Katrine, can you give us any hope at all? Are there any encouraging stories of parts of the world or industries that have managed to move much faster than expected that could be a model for the kind of change we urgently need.

Yeah, I mean, I think the change in the renewable industry sector is really the example that everybody cites and with good reason. And so that gives us hope that other things can change in the same way. I think there's also hope in the fact that we have seen these remarkable political commitments over the last year towards net zero from some major emitters. There's also hope in, frankly, the popular movements that we've seen extinction, rebellion, the school strikes, all of that shows that there's an awareness and a willingness to put pressure on governments. That matters. But the task ahead is to make sure that that pressure doesn't let up, that people don't get fatigued by the whole story, because we have had these moments in the past of renewed hope. And given how late in the century it's getting, it's really critical that that pressure keeps up over the next years.

Catherine, thank you very much.

Thank you, Ed.

For more than a century, China's rulers have been promoting standardized Mandarin as a tool of nation building. But almost a third of the population isn't fluent in it. During the Cultural Revolution, the Maoist period between 1966 and 1976, that aimed to purge traditional elements from Chinese society, speaking these regional dialects could even be dangerous. But as China grows more prosperous and companies look to smaller cities and rural areas for new customers, regional dialects are gaining value.

So we call it Mandarin because that's our translation of the speech of high officials, Mandarins. That comes from Imperial China, when the emperor wanted to be able to understand officials from all corners of the country, and so there was an effort to teach them a standardized form of Chinese.

David Renney is the economist, Beijing Bureau chief.

Actually, in Communist China, the exact same thing is called Putonghua, which is. Which is ordinary speech, common speech, the more commonest way of saying the same thing. But for more than a century, there's been this real push to try and knit together this very diverse country with one common standard language of the educated Chinese.

But that obviously didn't entirely succeed because these dialects still persist.

They do. About 400 million Chinese actually are more comfortable in their own native language or dialect form of Chinese than they are in Mandarin. To be fair, Mandarin itself is a dialect. It's just the dialect of Beijing, which, because it is the capital, became the national language. But it's certainly because education policy is built around schools and around things like TV and radio, things the state controls. Basically, people who've had less schooling and who've watched less TV over the lives. So particularly rural people or much older people, they're less likely to speak good quality Mandarin.

So how different are all these dialects?

They're really different, and it's actually a bit political as to whether they're dialects or different languages. Nationalists tend to say they're dialects of one thing, Chinese, because that promotes national unity. But actually, linguists would say, you know, these are often as different as, say, Dutch and English or French and Italian. They're really different. So, for example, I asked a bit of help from the economist, chief researcher in our Beijing bureau, Chen Jieha. She speaks Mandarin, but she also speaks Hokkien, which is the language of her hometown in southern China. So I asked Jieha to say the formal name of the economist first in Mandarin and then I asked her to say the Economist in Hokkien.

Okay, those do seem very different. These dialects clearly have remarkable staying power. Do you think that will last?

Well, it's really interesting. So you could imagine they might die out because younger people are much more likely to speak Mandarin. But actually, the Chinese economy is changing in ways that's giving dialects and regional languages a new lease of life. That's because as the service sector, as consumer spending becomes much more important, if you want to sell to people, you have to do it in the language that they use at home, not just the office language. They use Mandarin. That means that tech companies are building things like smart speakers that can do voice recognition with dialects. You're also seeing brand new industries, things like old people's homes, which used to be quite rare in China. But old people, they may not speak a word of Mandarin. If you want people to trust you with their parents and grandparents, you have to have staff who can talk to them in the right dialect. So I took myself to an old people's home in a town in eastern China near Wencheng, and the manager there, Yu Yan, her life story really tells the arc of this, that when she was a little girl growing up at the height of kind of Maoist zealotry, she was punished for speaking her rural dialect in the playground. Now, as a manager of an old people's home, she has to go out and hire staff who can speak the four or five dialects used in her old people's home. She had an assistant there who was explaining that for day to day communication, you know, they can probably understand most of what their old folks are saying, but there are some things that they really need that dialect, particularly residents with dementia who are already quite frightened and confused by the world and who need a lot of guidance. If you don't have dialect, you just can't deal with them. It's even the social side. When I was there, there was a very intense game of mahjong going on in the day room and I asked an 89 year old resident called Mr. Zhao about how easy it is to make friends with someone who speaks a different dialect from you. And he was pretty emphatic. You just can't. And I said, what, even like playing cards or something? No.

So how is the Communist Party dealing with this, these dialects that it wanted to eradicate altogether but that not only have survived but seem to be on the rise?

Well, the Communist Party is always a combination of bossy, brutal, and surprisingly pragmatic. It really depends where you are in China. So there are kind of unhappily restive areas like Tibet or Xinjiang in the far west, where some listeners will have heard stories which are very heartbreaking about the suppression of local culture and real, very harsh measures to sort of stamp out local languages there. But Wencheng, where I was, that's in the Chinese heartland. And these are all dialects of Chinese. And there the government is actually amazingly pragmatic to the point that the local government has opened an office which issues things like identity cards or other official paperwork. And they've actually now got a dialect speaking officer always on duty, so they can sort of reach out to their customers.

So the government's okay to let it happen because it's good for business even if it's bad for ideology.

It's always a tension in modern China. It's a communist dictatorship, but it's also capitalist and they want growth. And so basically central planning. The old days there was no tolerance for individual difference, but now, if you're trying to build a consumer economy, individual difference can make you money. So as long as that's the idea, the Communist Party's happy to go along.

David, and thank you very much for your time. Uber has hit a few potholes recently. Since it went public in May, its share price has fallen by a third. Yesterday, Uber lost its license to operate in London due to safety failures. The company is appealing the decision, but it's easy to forget just how much it's changed. The towns and cities it operates in now numbering more than 700 around the world.

One study published in 2017 found that Uber's arrival in Portland, Oregon decreased alcohol related crashes by 60%.

Elliot Morris is a journalist on the Economist Data team.

Well, it's likely that people are getting in less car crashes now because they're in an Uber. When they go out to the bar and Uber's in their city, they can simply take an Uber home. But there's a negative effect as well, and that is that people stay out at the bar longer and they have more drinks.

How were the researchers able to work this out.

The researchers, who come from the University of Louisville and Georgia State University, matched data on Uber's availability with health surveys from the US Centers for Disease Control, in which they ask people, basically, how much do you drink? And they found that when Uber entered a market that average alcohol consumption daily drinks rose by 3%, that binge drinking increased by 8%. That's having excess drinks in two hours, four to five drinks in two hours. And they found that heavy drinking went up by 9% within a couple years. And they've defined heavy drinking as simply binge drinking three times in one month. So essentially, they find, based off of people's reports of alcohol consumption, that when Uber gets to their city, they drink more.

Wow. So that's a huge increase in drinking.

It is. And the increase is even higher in places without public transportation. They find that the presence of Uber in cities with weak public transit led average drinking to increase by 5%, and binge drinking went up a whopping 20%.

Okay, and we're sure we can attribute all of this to Uber?

It's true that correlation is not equal to causation. But excessive drinking was actually declining in lots of these areas before Uber's appearance. And it would be hard just the way that the study is set up to find a factor that correlated with increases in drinking behavior in all of these different cities across different years, precisely the same time that Uber showed up overall.

Does this mean that Uber is a benefit to public health or harms public health?

Well, that's a hard balance to strike. On the one hand, people are getting in less drunk driving accidents nowadays, but on the other, people are drinking more alcohol, which is bad for their health. But there's a third thing as well, which most people likely don't consider. This new study finds that in bars and restaurants in cities where Uber expanded, employment increased by 2% relative to what it was before Uber. So the effects have clearly been good for at least one group, and that's bartenders.

Elliot, thank you very much.

Thanks for having me.

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