Promises, promises: the G7’s fuzzy climate pledges

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. More than a century ago, an occupying German force in what is now Namibia carried out a genocide. The country is only now owning up to the atrocities and trying to make amends. But a freshly struck reparations deal won't end the controversy. And there's plenty of vibrant Persian music to be had online. You just won't find it on streaming services such as Spotify. We look at how artists are getting their tunes heard in a way that turns the usual streaming model on its head. But first— The weekend summit of the G7 has concluded, and on the matter of the pandemic, the bloc's pledge was clear-cut: it'll deliver 1 billion vaccine doses to poorer countries over the next year. But another priority was climate change. Naturalist Sir David Attenborough had pressed for cooperation on climate in a video message to the gathering.

The decisions we make this decade, in particular the decisions made by the most economically advanced nations, These negotiations are the most important in human history.

Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson suggested the leaders at the summit would meet the moment.

We were clear this weekend that action has to start with us.

In the end, the commitments on climate seemed straightforward: solid emissions targets, a move away from coal, a renewal of an annual $100 billion budget to the developing world to deal with climate change. But campaigners found the outcome disappointing. Oxfam called the summit a colossal failure.

Never before in the history of the G7 has there been such a big failure in contrast to what needs to be done.

The G7 summit serves as a template for what the world can expect from the enormous COP26 climate meeting later this year. And on that score, the bloc's pledges leave a little too much to the imagination.

It's encouraging that climate change was at the heart of the communiqué that came out of the G7 yesterday.

Katrine Braeck is The Economist's environment editor.

And certainly there were some very lofty words in there relating to climate targets, but what's disappointing is that they were incredibly vague on detail.

So let's take a look at some of the commitments here. One of the headline ones was the G7 committing to net-zero emissions by mid-century. How significant would you call that?

Not very significant, to be honest. All of these countries had made net-zero commitments ahead of this summit. And so really, this is just a reaffirming of these goals. They've also set out a target to collectively reduce their emissions by half by 2030. This is in line with the science for meeting the Paris target of no more than 1.5 degrees of global warming. But different countries have different level of ambition on that. And so I'd say here it's kind of more of the same.

And what do you make of the pledge of $100 billion annually in terms of climate financing, helping poorer countries get to better emission standards?

So there was a lot of pressure ahead of the summit for the leaders to basically trump up money that they promised back in 2009. So at the climate summit in Copenhagen that year, which was a resounding chaotic failure, the one thing that appeared to have emerged from that summit was a promise that the rich countries would by 2020 be funneling $100 billion a year to developing countries to help them both cope with the impacts of climate change and also build more resilient economies. To a warmer world. That money has been a huge sore point for poor nations ever since then. It has failed to materialize in the volumes that was promised. They've now floated this new date of 2025. And so I think there's a huge amount of disappointment in climate circles about what the G7 has delivered in terms of climate finance.

And another sore point here is what happened or didn't happen on coal. What's gone on there?

So again, ahead of the summit, there was a sort of pre-summit of the G7 environment ministers. And at that meeting, which was a virtual meeting, the environment ministers committed to eliminating financing for new coal by 2030. Now, there were some divergent views about this amongst the group. Japan in particular was resistant. Japan being a big funder of coal power. The final statement that came out yesterday mentions this ending of new coal generation, ending of new coal financing, but doesn't provide a date. And so again, a lot of focus is being placed on this weakening of the final declarations.

And so in this accounting, the G7 seems to have fallen short, or at least and far too vague on every count here. Why couldn't this group do better?

I mean, generally, that is the nature of these kinds of summits, right? Expectations are set high and leaders tend to deliver sort of at a middling to low level. You'd think that these are the world's most powerful people united in a room, but of course they have an entire machinery behind them. These leaders might all come to the table with roughly the same values and ambitions, but the fact is that they each have very conflicting drivers back at home, just in terms of their economies, their priorities, the other challenges that each nation is having to deal with, the lobbies at home. And that makes ultimately for the very vague kind of statements that we're seeing here. I think we're fairly used to seeing these vague statements.

And we spoke on the show last week about the G7 essentially representing a declining share of world GDP. It represents not so much of global emissions. I mean, what can the G7 by itself accomplish anyway?

So I think the G7 is actually an important player here. The G7 on its own represents a portion, I think it's less than a quarter of global emissions. And then let's not forget that these countries are also largely responsible for the amount of warming that we're seeing. Seeing today, their burden of historical responsibility in terms of cumulative historical emissions since the beginning of the 20th century is enormous. So they have the responsibility in terms of their emissions, the power in terms of their money, and the power in terms of their political might to really push this debate. And what happens at things like the G7, it's sort of a political dance that's going on right now where everybody is trying to get on the same playing field, align their intentions so that they can arrive at the end of the year at the COP26 summit with a sort of intention and hopefully a package that sets that summit on a path to success.

[Speaker:GHION_AI] But as you say, a lot of this is just signaling and there are a lot of competing incentives for various leaders, domestic politics and so on. What does all of this and the disappointment surrounding all of this tell you about what we should expect from that big climate meeting at the end of the year, COP26?

I think the signaling that happens now is very important. Don't forget that at COP26, you're looking at more than 190 governments coming together and everybody trying to agree on a final document. So you need a lot of pushing ahead of time to get to that kind of consensus. In terms of what needs to happen before then, These countries need to deliver a lot more on the specifics. If they can deliver all of that, then there will be a lot more buy-in from the smaller emitters, the developing countries who need to be brought on board as well. And the climate finance is a really important part of that. You can't emphasize how much bitterness there is amongst developing countries that this money that was promised more than a decade ago has failed to materialize. That really, really hurts for countries that have not historically emitted that much, that are suffering the consequences of climate change more than the large emitters, and yet just don't have the means to cope with it. So getting that climate finance on the table is really important.

Katrine, thank you very much for joining us.

Thank you, Jason.

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Many Western European countries have had to grapple with their imperial pasts, and Germany is no exception. The streets of Berlin are dotted with war memorials, but there's only one plaque commemorating the victims of German colonial rule in what is now Namibia. It wasn't until 2015 that officials first used the term "genocide" to describe the slaughter of the Herero and Nama people. Last month, Germany's foreign minister made a formal acknowledgement of the atrocities, saying the time had come to ask for forgiveness.

Im Lichte dieser historischen und auch moralischen Verantwortung Deutschlands werden wir Namibia und die Nachkommen der Opfer um Vergebung bitten.

The lingering question has been about reparations. For 5 years now, the talks have dragged on. A deal has now been struck, but Herero and Nama leaders are not happy with it.

On May 28th, the German and Namibian governments announced that they had reached a deal that acknowledges German responsibility for the genocide of 1904 to 1908 in Namibia. As part of this deal, Germany accepts that it committed genocide. It would accept the G-word that it had previously been reluctant to use.

Tom Nottel is The Economist's Berlin bureau chief.

The president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, will travel to Namibia later this year to issue an apology. Over the next 30 years, Germany will spend roughly €1.1 billion on various projects of healthcare, infrastructure, various sorts of development spending. But crucially, this will not count as reparations, but really just an extension of development aid.

And let's wind back a bit. What exactly is it that happened in Namibia?

Germany was a colonial occupying force from 1884 to 1915 in what was then called German Southwest Africa, which more or less corresponds to the country now known as Namibia. There was an uprising by the Herero people in 1904 that German troops responded to viciously. There was a so-called extermination order issued by a German commander. A second group, the Nama, later became involved. And over 4 years, you had deaths in battle, you had people from these groups who were driven into the desert and cut off from water and food supplies. Thousands of them died from starvation or thirst. And later, thousands of them were put into labor camps, concentration camps in effect, where many of them were worked to death. A rough estimate is that around 75,000 people were killed in total, and of the Herero people, that was around 80%. Of the Herero at the time. And this is why the Germans are acknowledging that this was a genocide.

But you mentioned that the government was reluctant to call it that in the first place, and indeed to make reparations proper.

The Germans have danced around this for years. Back in 2015, there was an official statement from the Foreign Ministry that used the term, although it was a very sort of complicated application of it. It's now much more straightforward. There's been this very sort of legalistic argument that the Genocide Convention was only agreed in 1948, and I think ratified in what was then West Germany a few years later. And it cannot be applied retroactively to events that took place several decades earlier. And that's why you have this formulation from the Germans that their culpability for these actions is moral and political rather than legal. And I think there's a specific reason for this, which is that the German government, and actually probably other European governments that colonized parts of Africa, are extremely wary about opening the door, inviting further claims from other colonized countries. So in the German case, you're looking at places like Tanzania, Burundi, and there's a great fear that if you were to accept sort of a legal culpability for genocide, then you might be opening the door to other claims from other colonized countries, whether it was to Germany or to other European countries. So that, I think, is why the text of this agreement is very, very tightly constrained.

And the funds that have been agreed, they're not reparations. What are they? What will they be used for?

Germany has been spending a lot on development aid in Namibia ever since it achieved its own independence a few decades ago. And I think this spending is really going to be more or less an extension of that, probably targeted more closely on the descendants of the victims of the genocide, the Herero and the Nama peoples. So we're looking at things like education, healthcare, infrastructure, some cultural projects. There's then the question of land, which is crucial in Namibia. You have around about 70% of commercial arable farmland in Namibia is owned by whites, not all descendants of Germans, but lots of them are, of course. And like some other countries in Southern Africa, land reform is a very contentious political issue. Some of the money may be used to fund buybacks by the state of some of that commercial land from those white farmers, although it wouldn't be expropriated. This would be on the so-called willing buyer, willing seller principle. I expect that to be a contentious issue inside Namibia itself. But crucially, this is not going to be what you saw Germany do with some of the victims of Nazi atrocities in the second half of the 20th century, where essentially it agreed to hand over reparations to a government that essentially the government was able to do with what it will. This is going to be targeted money on specific projects inside Namibia.

And are the Herero and the Nama peoples happy with that outcome?

The simple answer is no. The slightly more complicated answer is it's complicated because the Herero and the Nama themselves are divided on this. One of the problems is that the talks, which took 6 years, quite a long time, were not held transparently. They were held behind closed doors. Some representatives of Herero and Nama groups in Namibia felt excluded from these talks. They felt that their concerns were not taken into consideration, that they were not well represented by their government in the talks. You've had several representatives of Herero groups come out and say that, you know, this is an insult, it's an affront to their existence, there ought to be far more money, Germany ought to be paying proper reparations rather than just this development spending. So there's now a lot of pressure on the Namibian government, having agreed this deal, to reopen talks with the Germans. It's not something I think the Germans will be prepared to do. Inside Germany, I think this issue is now considered settled. Inside Namibia, I think it's a lot more complicated than that.

You say it's settled in Germany. That is to say, the people more widely are coming to terms with that colonial past, you'd think?

To an extent, but I think if you were to go out into the street and ask a collection of random Germans how much they know about their country's colonial past in Africa, you'd encounter a lot of blank faces. I think there's some signs though that that is beginning to change. The deal with Namibia has been widely reported in the media, of course. There's the opening of a big new museum in central Berlin, the Humboldt Forum, that's awakened a debate about the restitution of colonial-era goods, similar to what you've seen in countries like France and Britain. You're beginning to see a sort of a modest acknowledgement in the German public more broadly about their country's colonial past in Africa. But I wouldn't want to exaggerate that. I think we're probably probably at the beginning of this process rather than at the end of it.

Tom, thank you very much for joining us.

Thanks, Jason.

Mim Rasouli is an Iranian musician based near Tehran. Many of his tunes like this one named "Fostaljah," are a unique fusion of Western and Persian influences and samples. But if you wanted to listen to one of his tracks, you wouldn't be able to just jump onto any streaming service and add it to a playlist. And the reason for that has more to do with politics than with music.

Fostaljah is one of Mem Rasouli's most popular songs, but it's not available on Spotify.

Leo Marani is The Economist's Asia editor.

In fact, none of his music is available on Spotify, and most Iranian musicians living and working in Iran today cannot find their way onto Spotify or any mainstream streaming service of the sort.

And why is that?

Well, it's pretty simple. Sanctions prevent Western companies from engaging in commercial relationships with Iranian entities or individuals, and since Spotify pays artists, I mean, teeny tiny amounts, but still, it would be a sanctions violation. So in an abundance of caution, most platforms don't have anything to do with Iranians.

So how do Iranian artists get their music out there then?

Well, they do what lots of artists everywhere do, which is they put it on their own websites, they put it on YouTube, they put it on SoundCloud. But there are other ways to find the listeners who are looking specifically for Persian music. So there's at least a couple that I know of. One is called Navahang, which is a Persian music streaming service. The other one, which is much older actually and better known and bigger, is called Radio Javan. So for example, Mr. Rasooli, who put his music on SoundCloud and YouTube, he discovered that his songs were on Navahang and the company hadn't asked him. You might expect that an artist who finds his music on a streaming service would say, "Hey guys, why are you putting my music on your streaming service without permission?" On the contrary, what Mr. Rasouli did was send them a whole bunch more music and said, "This is great.

Please have more of it." But why would he send them more? Are they paying him for it?

No, on the contrary, they don't pay the artists that appear on their service. In fact, some of the artists paid them to appear on the service. The people who paid tend to be from the Iranian diaspora, so we don't have to worry about sanctions violations. They're also the ones, for obvious reasons, who are able to afford it more easily. Now, Rasouli doesn't receive any money and he doesn't give any money to Navahang, he tells me. But the way it works, think of it like targeted advertising, okay? You want your product or your music to appear in front of the people who may already be interested in it. Now, you can put your music on YouTube, billions of people who could find it, or you could also put it on a Persian streaming service, and you know that the people on that service are already interested in this sort of stuff, so you're reaching the audience that you're interested in. Which is why some people who want the exposure, either because they're hoping to get gigs or be signed by a label, or just for personal satisfaction, Some people pay for the promotion on these services.

So in a sense, all of this just turns the streaming idea on its head.

That's right. Navahang is free. It doesn't require registration or an email address or phone number. It's really easy to use that way, and it's really cool. But they do other things as well for revenue. Navahang, for instance, has pretty generic advertising. Doesn't make a lot of money through that because most of its users are in a place where they can't see that advertising or where they're not monetizable. Radio Javan and Navahang both have production arms, mostly producing artists from the diaspora. And in terms of charging for promotion, they kind of blazed the trail. I read recently that even Spotify is toying with the idea of charging artists for promotion.

In a sense, tapping into the idea that for the artists, the only real important thing is building an audience, even at some cost.

Precisely. I mean, this is a conversation we've been having about streaming for a long time, right? You build your audience there and you make your money elsewhere. But for Iranian artists, there's more to it than that. There's also this sense of engaging with the outside world, as Mr. Rasouli told me. And for any artist, just like for a journalist, Jason, it's nice to have your work seen or heard, right? So Mr. Rasouli told me a very nice thing. He said, for me, these— the benefits of putting my music on these things, it's not material, it's spiritual.

Leo, thank you very much for joining us.

Thanks 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 at economist.com/intelligence.

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