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Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good

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October 27, 2021

Steps to Save the Planet

As COP26, the latest UN climate conference, approaches in Glasgow at month's end, many have warned that lip service won't save the planet.
 
It may feel good to pledge net-zero emissions by a future date, Martin Wolf writes for the Financial Times, but such promises forestall accountability. Some say calls for boldness have occluded more practical steps.
 
"The preference among activists, journalists, and many politicians for dramatic posturing over incremental action has had significant consequences," Alex Trembath and Ted Nordhaus write for Persuasion. "Last week, a group of major emerging economies including China and India called demands by western leaders for all nations to achieve net-zero commitments by 2050 'anti-equity and against climate justice.' On the eve of the COP meeting, the proceedings appear on the verge of descending into disorder and recriminations." Better to pursue a "slow but steady ratcheting of ambition," through which "nations can learn from each other's achievements" and benefit from "falling technological costs," Trembath and Nordhaus write.
 
As Fareed has argued, incrementalism and ambition aren't mutually exclusive: Switching from coal to natural gas, for instance, would slash emissions in the near term while a green conversion proceeds. If such a conversion is indeed to happen, the world needs to start financing it now, Wolf points out in the FT.

A Better Way to Fight Covid-19?

Are Americans countering Covid-19 in wrongheaded ways? At The Atlantic, Yascha Mounk writes that since returning to Germany a month ago, he's been struck by how stereotypically "rational, efficient, and pragmatic" Germany's culture of caution is, compared to America's. 
 
"A few months earlier, in Jacksonville, I had been stunned by the cavalier attitude of so many people," Mounk writes. Later, "in Philadelphia, I was taken aback by the extreme precautions people were taking." To move past our divided approach, Mounk suggests the US should mimic Germany by taking four steps: placing more focus on preventing large events from becoming super-spreaders; making testing "cheap and easy"; ditching cloth masks in favor of KN95s, and dropping masks altogether when one is outdoors and distanced; and getting a better handle on contact tracing.

Afghanistan's Economy Teeters

As Afghan women's-rights activist Mahbouba Seraj told Fareed on Sunday's GPS, the Afghan economy is a major cause for concern: When poverty arrives, Seraj warned, desperation and extremism can follow.

Afghanistan's economy is indeed teetering, Christoph Reuter writes for Der Spiegel: "The number of beggars, particularly women, has exploded, and the streets of Kabul are lined with used washing machines, cabinets and pots that have been put up for sale—and which nobody is buying." Taliban officials have taken control of banks and relevant government ministries, Reuter writes, but it's not clear that they know what they're doing. Bank withdrawals have been limited, and central-bank foreign reserves remain frozen in the US.

Chinese investment could save the day, some say—but as Beijing weighs how to proceed, Reuter notes skepticism that China will want to take on enough projects, in a country as risky as Afghanistan is seen as being, to turn around its entire economy.

Can 'Macronism' Resurge?

In 2017, then-candidate Emmanuel Macron ran for president on the idea of liberalism, promising to free the French economy from bureaucratic fetters while guarding personal freedoms, Michaël Fœssel writes for the French magazine Esprit (republished in English by Eurozine). Today, Macron's movement seems to have waned, overtaken by the gilets-jaunes protests and Covid-19, which has seen "the indefinite perpetuation of states of emergency and the organization of daily life around QR codes."
 
Can "Macronism" recapture the moment before next year's presidential election? Fœssel thinks so, particularly as the gilets jaunes' cries for freedom seem to jibe with parts of Macron's original ethos.