Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good Seeing this newsletter as a forward? Subscribe here. August 10, 2021 A Troubling Observation About the Climate Report The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's latest report, released this week, contains dire news. "The scale of recent changes across the climate system as a whole and the present state of many aspects ... are unprecedented over many centuries to many thousands of years," the IPCC wrote, along with other findings.
But at the MIT Technology Review, James Temple adds an even more troubling observation: To achieve the best-case scenario, reducing emissions won't be enough. We'll need to actively pull carbon out of the atmosphere—and "the necessary technologies barely exist."
The IPCC's most-optimistic projection, which estimates 1.5˚ C warming, "assumes the world will figure out ways to remove about 5 billion tons of carbon dioxide a year by midcentury and 17 billion by 2100," Temple writes. That means pulling "as much CO2 out of the atmosphere every year as the US economy emitted in 2020." As Temple tells it, the assumed way of getting there is dubious: In its projections, the IPCC includes among the main methods of achieving all that carbon sequestration a method called "bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, or BECCS," Temple writes. "Basically, it requires growing crops that consume CO2 and then using the harvested biomass to produce heat, electricity, or fuels, while capturing and storing any resulting emissions. But despite the billions and billions of tons of carbon removal that climate models are banking on through BECCS, it's only been done in small-scale projects to date." With the ascent to power of new, hardline Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, analysts have wondered if talks to revive the 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and world powers will stall indefinitely. Wall Street Journal columnist Walter Russell Mead makes a convincing case that yes, for the foreseeable future, the Iran deal is dead.
"Given that the nuclear deal or anything like it has zero chance of attracting the two-thirds majority of [US] senators necessary for treaty ratification, the most Tehran can get out of the negotiating process is a Biden pinky-swear," Mead notes. "For hard-nosed Iranian mullahs and Revolutionary Guards raised on tales of U.S. perfidy, the idea of trusting the Great Satan's word—after he's already fooled you once—is laughable. … On the American side, too, the deal is looking less attractive within and without the administration," Mead writes, as Iran has accelerated enrichment and as sunset provisions in the original 2015 agreement are already approaching. Why Chinese Women Can't Have It All China faces a demographic decline, as an aging population threatens to shrink the country's supply of working-age adults and thus national economic prospects. In light of that, authorities have pivoted from the infamous "one-child" policy, which limited how many children Chinese families were permitted to have, to so-called "two-" and now "three-child" policies, announced in 2015 and 2021. At Foreign Affairs, Ye Liu writes that Chinese women are less than enthused about overt encouragement to have more children.
"The simple truth is that far too few Chinese women of childbearing age want to have more than one child," Ye writes. "The trouble is that although China needs more babies, the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] also needs women to continue to participate in the labor force and, more broadly, in the economy. In American terms, the CCP wants Chinese women to 'have it all.' To put it mildly, however, the party has not figured out how to help them do that. … When my interviewees"—which included 82 women between the ages of 30 and 37—"talked about trying to find affordable and reliable childcare, they often used the word jiaolv, which has no clear English equivalent and refers to a dark psychological state of constant anxiety and worry." For the CCP's efforts to succeed, Ye writes, the party must avoid a perception that it is "allowing sexist and patriarchal attitudes to stand in the way of prosperity." Amid the Pandemic's Economic Crash, Entrepreneurialism Has Thrived So writes The Atlantic's Annie Lowrey, who chronicles the creative spirit of entrepreneurs who cooked up ideas and recruited remote workforces from their homes, while cooped up during the pandemic.
Covid-19 "decimated an unprecedented number of small businesses—200,000 more closed than would be expected during a normal year—but also enabled the launch of an unprecedented number of new ones," Lowrey writes. "Entrepreneurs launched 500,000 more new businesses considered likely to hire employees from mid-2020 to mid-2021 than from mid-2018 to mid-2019, and today Americans are starting companies at the fastest-ever recorded pace." Policymakers might learn some lessons for the future, Lowrey suggests: "Flooding the economy with money, such that millions of Americans do not suffer the financial losses commonly associated with recessions, might help keep existing businesses afloat while allowing new ones to launch. Entrepreneurship need not be a victim of future downturns." George W. Bush Is Liked Again. Should His Policies Be? Donald Trump's time in the White House prompted a broad reconfiguration of attitudes toward the least-approved-of US president in recent decades: George W. Bush. At Responsible Statecraft, W. James Antle III reflects on the trend, noting that temperamentally, Bush "is undoubtedly a nicer, well-intentioned man, certainly in comparison to the braggadocio and narcissism so frequently displayed by" the 45th president.
But Antle argues that this newly warm feeling should not extend to Bush's policies. "Across the political spectrum," Antle warns, one now finds a "veneration of the national security state, especially any intelligence agency or general seen as outspoken against Trump," along with "progressive celebrations of Bush, [former US Sen. John] McCain or the younger Cheney [i.e., Rep. Liz (R-WY)] … on one issue, at least Trump was right and Bush was wrong: Great countries do not fight endless wars. We can't let nostalgia for pre-Trump politics to turn back the clock in other ways." |
