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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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November 4, 2021

Can Banks and Funds Save the Planet?

The financial sector has made lots of news in recent years with pledges to go green. From coal-eschewing investment giant BlackRock to the potential role of public pension funds, large investors' planetary impact has drawn curiosity.  
 
At the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow this week, that trend has continued.
 
The Glasgow Finance Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), led by former Bank of England Governor Mark Carney, has managed to enlist major western banks, insurance companies, and other asset owners. In the last month, big holdouts including JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and Goldman Sachs have joined in pledging to make their investment portfolios climate friendly. GFANZ now boasts $130 trillion in assets under its umbrella.
 
Questions have swirled. One is whether GFANZ is doing things right: Some have criticized the alliance as "toothless" for lacking clearer standards. Others note that banks lack consensus on what "net zero" means. At The Guardian, economist Mariana Mazzucato writes that GFANZ members still finance fossil fuels—and calls for governments to step in by expanding "state-owned green investment banks" to transform the financial sector and by setting standards on private banks' greenness.
 
Consensus seems to be that GFANZ is a positive step, but as others have, The Economist casts doubt on whether voluntary action can do much on its own. "Pledges like GFANZ are good as far as they go," the magazine writes, "but the world needs a widespread price on carbon if finance is to be transformational. That would target all firms, not just those controlled by some institutional investors. ... The job of the financial system would then be to amplify the signal sent by carbon prices. That combination would be a powerful engine for changing how economies work."

The Mandemic, Revisited

As Covid-19 first began to spread, it was noted that men suffered from it at higher rates than women, and speculation quickly turned to men's higher smoking rates in China. But nearly two years in, renowned physician and bioethicist Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel writes for The New York Times that men are still seeing the worst of it: Men account for 54.4% of US deaths to Covid-19, compared to 45.6% among women, per the CDC; the disparity is more pronounced among older people; and evidence suggests higher rates of myocarditis as a Covid-19 complication and faster immunity-waning among men.

Some have offered that mask-wearing tendencies or other factors could be to blame, but Emanuel writes that biological differences warrant more study.

Ethiopia's Brutal Civil War Intensifies

"When Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019, he was lauded as a regional peacemaker," CNN's Eliza Mackintosh writes, tracing the country's recent trajectory. "Now, he is presiding over a protracted civil war that by many accounts bears the hallmarks of genocide and has the potential to destabilize the wider Horn of Africa region." 
 
Momentum in that conflict has been changing of late, The Economist writes, as forces from the Tigray region have gained ground and allies. It's conceivable they could eventually reach the capital, the magazine suggests, while Abiy has called citizens to arms and has blamed foreigners. 
 
In a recent Der Spiegel essay, Fritz Schaap detailed Abiy's worrisome arc—from "the darling of the West," hailed as a "putative reformer" and market capitalist, to a seeming zealot who portrays Ethiopia as suffering under "an imagined neo-colonialism." Some see Abiy as having taken his Nobel award as "carte blanche" to consolidate power and wage an ethnic war rife with atrocities, Schaap writes.

As Billionaires Blast Off, Is It Time to Agree on Space?

"Space debris is currently growing rapidly, because of the expanding number of satellites circulating in Low Earth Orbit (LEO), designed to increase global Internet coverage and provide earth observation data," Susmita Mohanty warns in an essay in the current issue of the journal Soundings (and republished recently by Eurozine). 
 
Pointing to SpaceX's intended "mega-constellation" Starlink, designed to provide broadband access around the world—and to space-tourism plans by billionaires Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos—Mohanty writes that near orbits will soon get clogged as space, "humanity's shared resource, is fast turning into the next Wild West." It's time to update treaties and reach consensus through UN space summits before lawlessness is ensconced as the norm, Mohanty writes.