Let the games be thin: Tokyo’s Olympic tussles

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Required new customer offer for first three months only. Speed slow. 135 gigabytes of network busy taxes and fees extra. Cmintmobile.com. 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. Britain has made big promises about decarbonizing its economy, reaching Net Zero by 2050. It's well ahead of many other countries on getting there, but that is largely down to a historical quirk. We look at what lies ahead for the country to finish the job. And with so much homeworking these days, noisy neighbors are an even greater nuisance than they were before. But in South Korea, complaints about them are a national obsession. There's even a government agency dedicated to handling them. First up, though, today the executive board of the International Olympic Committee, or ioc, will meet remotely to discuss the future of the Summer Olympics. The Tokyo Games are scheduled to begin on July 23, having been delayed by a year because of the pandemic. Officially, the festivities start even earlier with the traditional torch relay next month. But if most Japanese people had their way, the torch wouldn't be lit at all. With COVID 19 still rampant, polls show the majority of the population would prefer to delay or cancel the Games altogether. Some have even staged protests. And if that wasn't enough, the Tokyo Olympics organizing committee has had its own internal drama to contend with. While leading an Olympic Committee board meeting.

Earlier this month, the former Japanese Prime Minister had said that women talk too much.

That's raised fresh questions about the leadership tasked with staging what has become both a politically sensitive and potentially perilous event.

The Tokyo Olympic Organizing Committee faced a big scandal this month. In fact, the president, Mori Yoshiro, was forced to resign.

Noah Snyder is our Tokyo bureau chief.

What led to his resignation was a sexist remark he made during an online meeting of the organizing committee's board of trustees. This was one of many similarly offensive statements Mori has made in his long career in politics. What surprised people here in Japan was the backlash from both the public and key sponsors of the Olympic Games was fierce enough to push him out. His replacement is Hashimoto Seiko, a politician and Olympic champion, and crucially, a woman.

And so what does that change in leadership mean, do you think, for the future of the Olympics in Tokyo?

It really just added to the sense of malaise or uncertainty surrounding the Games themselves. The ioc, the International Olympic Committee, has at least so far ruled out another postponement. So this is really do or die for the Tokyo Games. Canceling them altogether would look bad for the Japanese government, which has presented the Games over the course of the past year as a potential sort of symbol of humanity's victory over the coronavirus. A light at the end of the tunnel. And so there's some concern that failing to hold them would instead become a symbol of the Japanese government's failure. At the same time, of course, holding the Games poses its own big risks. An Olympic outbreak that would be an even bigger crisis potentially, and one that Japan's Prime Minister Suguyoshihide can hardly afford.

Given the scope of the Olympics. It's not just the government's reputation that's at risk here. It's the Japanese people themselves. What do they make of this at the moment?

Right now, the Japanese public is pretty sour on the idea of hosting tens of thousands of people from all over the world, each of whom is potentially a ve the virus. Before COVID hit, polls showed that nearly 90% of Japanese public were looking forward to the Olympics. Now the latest polls show that some 80% actually oppose holding the Games this year. Japan itself is only now coming out of sort of stubborn third wave that forced the government to extend the state of emergency until early March. And then there's the additional question of the spiraling costs. The Olympic tab had already ballooned from a projected set 7.3 billion to an official estimate of 12.6 billion. And that perhaps may not capture the full extent of the cost. Postponing and virus proofing the Games have already added another nearly 3 billion to the tab. So people are getting frustrated and people are understandably worried about what holding the Olympics would mean for public health.

And so, as it stands now, what is the government's plan?

For the moment, the official policy is full steam ahead. Japan's top leadership has said they remain committed to holding the games. Mr. Suga told an online gathering of the World Economic Forum that Japan wants to deliver hope and courage to the world. And they're not the only ones, not the only major stakeholders who have signaled that they'd like to see the Games go ahead. The IOC is also very much, at least publicly committed to holding the Games. Thomas Bach, the IOC's president, has said there is no Plan B to holding the Olympics in Tokyo this year. We are not speculating of whether the Games are taking place.

We are working on how the Games will take place.

There's also, for the Olympic Committee itself, the television audience, which makes up a big portion of the IOC's revenues. And the prospect of holding the game safely is perhaps not entirely unfounded. We have seen major international sporting events take place elsewhere. For example, the Australian Open, an international tennis tournament, went ahead recently. Despite a series of COVID 19 scares. It went off without any major hitches.

So with all of that political will then, and some good examples from elsewhere, do you think holding the Olympics is feasible?

The difference is the scale. Just to put it in perspective, the Australian Open saw about 1200 players, staff and officials come to Australia for the tournament, for the Olympics. We're talking about 11,000 athletes from some 200 countries, each with very different COVID 19 prospects. Then there are the officials, coaches and media who normally tag along to an event like this. So you're talking about an enormous number of people and also about sports that sometimes are close contact. You know, there's a question about how you keep athletes healthy and protect both their personal safety and also the integrity of the competition. And finally, there's the question of whether anyone will be allowed to in the stands. It seems unlikely that foreign spectators will be welcomed, but they might find a way to fill the stands with local fans. The organizing committee, in fact, offered a hint of what pandemic era Olympics might look like. They released a series of plans earlier this month with some guidelines for various potential attendees. Amongst the rules are constant COVID 19 testing and obviously some restrictions on visitors movements and a pretty harsh ban on singing, chanting, hugging and handshaking.

So, as you say, it seems full steam ahead here. The game plan seems to be set. I mean, would you bet at this stage that the Games are going to go ahead?

I think it depends, like so many things these days, on the course of the pandemic. There are folks I've talked to close to the Japanese government and to the organizing committee, who in private will say that holding them will probably prove impossible. Some are even talking about the next unclaimed Summer Olympic slot, which would be in 2032. Other folks think that the obstacles may start to seem less daunting once the latest wave of the outbreak begins to ebb, vaccines start flowing, public opinion might turn around. I think there's going to be an attempt to avoid making a decision until the last possible moment, though time is certainly running out. If you put a gun to my head, I'd bet on the Games going ahead, but in a limited form. They won't be the Olympics we're all used to, but there might be an Olympics yet.

Noah, thanks very much for joining us.

Thank you very much for having me.

Britain is well ahead of its peers on tackling climate change. For 30 years, its carbon emissions have been steadily falling. They're now 40% lower than they were in 1990. Britain also has some of the world's most ambitious climate legislation. It was the first major economy to enshrine in law the a commitment to reaching net zero emissions. Doing so by 2050 will by no means be easy, but getting this far in the emissions race was comparatively painless. And that goes back to a political tussle from the 1980s.

Britain starts decarbonising almost 20 years before climate change starts being a political issue.

Hal Hodson is a tech correspondent for the Economist.

And it starts because Margaret Thatcher has the mother of all fights with the British coal mining industry.

What we have seen in the past few weeks is not picketing at all. It is an attempt by force to prevent others from doing what they have a right to do.

Britain, at one point in the middle of the 20th century, employed about a million people in the coal mining industry. It was a very powerful lobby in British politics. And by breaking the coal unions during the miner strikes in the mid-80s, what Thatcher did was basically remove power from the coal sector in the UK. And so that 18, 20 years later, when it came time for Britain to start to decarbonise because of climate change, it was much, much easier for Britain to get rid of its coal power stations than it has been, for instance, for Germany to do so.

And so, almost by accident, this gave Britain a head start in reducing its emissions, because coal was such A big sector back then.

Yeah. If you look at the graph of carbon dioxide emission in the UK, it starts going down beginning in 1990. So, you know, at this point 30 years ago, Britain's emissions have been coming down ever since then. And that was driven by what the Brits call the dash for gas. Great boom in pulling gas out of the North Sea and installing the sort of infrastructure that you need across homes and businesses to heat them using gas. And for every unit of energy that you get from gas instead of coal, you're saving carbon dioxide emissions.

And so when did the sort of unintentional effects on carbon reduction become very deliberate ones?

This kind of accidental reduction in carbon emissions starts to become deliberate around 2008, when the UK passes the climate Change Act. It is the first country in the world to pass a piece of climate legislation like this. When it was proposed, this piece of legislation by Friends of the Earth, it was grabbed by David Cameron and the Conservative Party as a kind of convenient vehicle to detoxify their image at the.

Time in Britain, it's actually the Conservative Party under my leadership that has made a lot of the arguments about the need to deal with global warming and climate change.

And so for the last 12 years, there has been very little political disagreement about combating climate change in the United Kingdom, especially when you compare it to somewhere like America or Germany, where these issues are still very, very hot political ones.

So what then happens after the Climate Change act that gets us to where Britain is today?

So Britain's emissions start to go down much faster after the Climate Change act has been passed. We start to do lots of things like installing wind farms. And wind in particular starts to replace even gas on the grid. At the same time, in around 2013, the government introduces a top up carbon price only for the utility sector, so only for people generating power. And this effectively kills the coal industry in the uk. And generating power using wind is now effectively as cheap as generating power using gas, or even cheaper in many instances. And a huge proportion of the British grid is now generated entirely using renewables. On some days, there's no fossil fuels at all when the wind is blowing strongly. And what this has meant is that by 2019, Theresa May, who was the Prime Minister at the time, felt, I guess, confident enough to legislate that Britain was going to reach net zero emissions by 2050.

This puts us on the path to become the first major economy to set a net zero emissions target in law.

So how to get there then, if coal is dead and even gas is starting to be overshadowed by renewables. What's left to get Britain to that net zero?

There's a surprisingly large amount left because all that we've been talking about so far is energy supply. So power stations and the like have reduced their emissions by 66% between 1990 and today, which is huge. Massive transport, completely different story. Emissions have only gone down by 5% since 1990, so they've barely moved at all. And transport emissions are now the biggest bit of emissions in Britain. Another huge chunk is heating. Buildings, both business and residential, and both transport and heating present huge challenges to the uk. And the picture for it does not look as rosy as it has been for the last 20 years.

Why is that, though? Why are those the sticking points?

The reason that heating and transport are so hard is because there's no way to decarbonise them without getting very intimately involved with the energy consumer's life. So if you take heating, the vast majority of heating in the UK happens through combi boilers that burn gas. And if you want to kill the carbon emissions, you'd have to replace 29 million combi boilers. And that is not just a challenge logistically, it's a challenge politically, because the Government is basically going to have to walk into those people's homes and say, you have to use this kind of technology or that kind of technology. Transport is maybe a little bit easier in some ways, but because of just the way that Britain is, its cities are quite old, quite higgledy piggledy. The challenges of installing what's needed, which is lots and lots of electric vehicle charging points are higher here. Now, Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, has just announced a sort of 10 point green plan, which does talk about spending lots of money on various things energy production, transport, carbon capture. But his plan doesn't have quite so much detail for these very serious, difficult problems of decarbonising heat and transport.

And so, with that in mind, do you think that the goal of NET 0 by 2050 remains in reach?

I think it remains in reach. One of the things to remember is that in 30 years time, new technologies can come along that can help you with this. But it's a huge challenge, particularly for heat, because we're so reliant on gas and getting away from that reliance is going to be very, very difficult. And I don't think anyone would say that the path to 2050 net zero emissions is clear. There are still significant unknowns. There are many places where it's not obvious how it's going to be done.

Hal, thanks very much for your Time.

Thanks for having me, Jason.

Another tactic in reaching net zero emissions is to harness market forces. Carbon markets put a cap and a price on pollution by issuing tradable emissions permits. In this week's episode of Money Talks, our show on finance and economics, my colleagues discuss Europe's enormous mature carbon market, where emissions prices are hitting record highs. Look out for Money Talks wherever fine podcasts are sold and traded. It's been almost a year since we started producing this show remotely, and Working From Home still has its frustrations and its oh, and its surprises. Hello. Go on. There we go. This isn't so bad. It could be far worse. Yoo Seung Ju lives in a block of flats in Seoul. He says that at least once a week, his neighbor's vigorous sexual congress wakes him up. And it seems like he's not the only one with noise complaints.

Noisy neighbors are driving people mad in blocks of flats in South Korea.

Lena Shipper is our sole bureau chief.

People have been complaining about noises from children running around on the floors above late night music. And this is all made worse by the pandemic because although there's no lockdown in South Korea, working from home has been recommended. So for a year, a lot of people have just been stuck at home.

So why is this such a widespread problem?

I think it's just the nature of these high rise apartment blocks. The way they're built, they just carry sound. The earliest ones went up in the 70s. Most of the ones where people live in now went up in the 80s and 90s. And they're all pretty cheap, cheaply constructed, and there's kind of two or three different models that companies follow and they don't use particularly good insulation in any of them. So noise between floors. It's such a well established problem that there's a national centre dedicated to dealing with just that. The centre registers complaints, offers mediation through a range of committees, and the point is to prevent lawsuits and perhaps even patch up neighbourly relations after people have complained about each other.

And so how does the centre deal with these issues?

So it's not easy to resolve these things, partly because people seem to be driven mad by the mere existence of their neighbors. Nearly two thirds of the complaints that go to the centre are related to things like children running or adults simply walking in the flat upstairs. So, you know, people existing on top of your head. And mediation often ends with people just being told they have to put up with the noise because it's inevitable that people make some kind of noise, which a lawyer representing people who wanted to take their complaints to court, told us. And even if you win, compensation is very small.

So usually the answer is just deal with it, just work it out for yourself.

Yeah, that's usually what happens. You can try and talk to your neighbours, you can try to go through the building management, but actually it seems to be that a lot of people take matters into their own hands in rather more extreme ways. So there are a lot of websites that recommend effective ways to take revenge on noisy neighbours. For instance, by blasting bass heavy music towards the ceiling or by banging rubber mallets against the wall, which apparently creates noises that can shake the skull, according to one advertiser. And there are a lot of cases where it gets worse than that. Even so, last year one man was sent to prison for assaulting his neighbour with one of those rubber mallets rather than dispatching it against the wall. I spoke to one person who suspects that her neighbors practice basketball and golf in their apartment and she says that bashing the Hoover against the ceiling has worked on occasion. And Mr. Yu, who we heard from right at the beginning, says he's tried to play Buddhist chants and the national anthem through the ceiling at full volume. That's effective at shutting up the neighbors. But he says the approach has its drawbacks. He told me that it's basically unbearable to listen to for any length of time.

But you say that the problem has clearly been exacerbated by the pandemic. Do you get the feeling that things will be a little less noisy when that passes?

It's likely that the number of complaints will go down as the pandemic passes. But there is a wider issue of thin floors and apartment blocks. The government mandated that they be thicker in new built apartment blocks in 2013, and they're currently thinking about making them thicker still. But that's not going to help residents who live in older flats. So the problem is very likely to persist. And that means that there'll probably be a market for thick carpets, fluffy slippers and noise cancelling headphones in South Korea for quite some time to come.

Thanks very much for joining us, Lena.

Thank you very much for having me, Jason.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. If you like us, leave us a rating and a review and you can subscribe to the economist@examiner.com intelligenceoffer the link is in the show Notes. See you back here tomorrow.