The Daily: Our Window of Climate Opportunity

To achieve a more "just and livable" future.

View in browser|nytimes.com Continue reading the main story August 13, 2021 By Lauren Jackson Welcome to Friday. In the weird time-warp that is this seemingly indefinite pandemic, we're 1) as shocked as everyone it's already mid-August and 2) sending our well-wishes to anyone with kids going back to school. If you have Covid-related questions about their return, record them in a voice memo and send them to us. We'll answer them in an upcoming episode. In this newsletter, we're giving you something to feel (at least slightly) hopeful about after today's show on the latest landmark climate report. Then, we're introducing you to one of the original members of team Daily, our all-star mix engineer. A Narrow Window of Opportunity "We lived in paradise — now it's hell," one resident on the Greek island of Evia said this week after fires destroyed 120,000 acres of forest on the island.Eirini Vourloumis for The New York Times This week, the news was bleak: The climate crisis has arrived, and it's going to get worse before it can get better. As you heard in our episode this morning, a major new United Nations scientific report has concluded that countries and corporations have delayed curbing fossil-fuel emissions for so long that we can no longer stop the climate crisis from intensifying over the next 30 years. It's an assessment both sobering and, potentially, immobilizing. Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT "We are facing this massive global systems challenge. If that doesn't make you feel small … if you're not feeling grief, rage, anxiety, or some mixture of both of those things, you're probably not paying attention," said Dr. Katharine K. Wilkinson, co-author of "All We Can Save," an anthology of climate writing and solutions we recommended in the newsletter a few weeks ago. But the report also offers a "glimmer of hope," as Henry Fountain, our guest and climate correspondent, said. "For years, thinking about climate change has left me with a sense of paralysis, but this week was clarifying," producer Diana Nguyen added. "We learned that it's not too late to stave off the worst possible outcomes of a warming world." Avoiding the worst — 2, 3 or even 4 degrees Celsius of warming — will require a coordinated effort among countries to stop adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by around 2050, which would entail a rapid shift away from fossil fuels starting immediately, as well as potentially removing vast amounts of carbon from the air — halting and leveling off warming at around 1.5 degrees Celsius, the report concludes. This necessitates transformative structural change. "So I think then the question is, how then do you participate in more systemic change still as an individual?" Katharine said. We asked Henry and Katharine to answer that question, and are sharing their recommendations for what you can do in this window of opportunity: Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT Getting educated and staying hopeful: Henry recommends subscribing to The Climate Optimist newsletter from Harvard's public health school for a monthly dose of solutions-oriented climate reading. We've also curated a playlist of our latest coverage of the climate crisis for you to better understand how we know recent extreme weather has been influenced by human activity and what the United States and European Union are (or aren't) doing about it. Opportunities for divestment — and investment: "Bill McKibben has described money as the oxygen that is fueling the fires of the climate crisis, quite literally in some cases," Katharine said. She encourages people to think about "opportunities for getting capital out of the sources of the problem and into solutions," whether they are managing their own investments, their companies' or their clients. Incorporating climate awareness into your day job: "I've described the climate crisis as the ultimate calling out of extractive capitalism, and the fossil fuel economy, but also the ultimate calling in," Dr. Wilkinson said. "What are your superpowers and how can those be contributed in some way to the work that needs doing on climate? Because we are so much more than our consumer choices, we are so much more even than our voting practices and civic participation," though those are important, she adds. "Many of us can find ways to weave climate into our professional lives." Katharine named filmmakers who have started to incorporate climate narratives into their work (like the writers of Ted Lasso) and food service managers, chefs and restaurant owners that are "migrating toward plant-based and regenerative farmed foods" in their kitchens. Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT "Anyone reading this has access to power of some kind. Comparatively speaking, you may feel small, but you hold influence and power in some way. You have capabilities that can be brought to bear," she said, on a "just and livable future." LISTEN TO THE EPISODE TO LEARN MORE: A 'Code Red for Humanity' The climate emergency is here — and it will get worse before it could get better. By Michael Barbaro, Michael Johnson, Diana Nguyen, Chelsea Daniel, Paige Cowett, Rachel Quester and Chris Wood Mixing Your Morning Meet Chris Wood: Sound Astrologer and Daily Engineer Celine Kuklowsky In the next profile in our series on the team behind the show, let us introduce Chris Wood, who engineers The Daily every morning from London before the East Coast wakes up. What is your role for The Daily? I'm the last pair of ears on each episode before it reaches the public. Essentially, I try to make it sound as good as possible — mixing and mastering it, as well making any last-minute edits. I have a parallel career in sound and installation art. As part of this practice I give tarot readings based on the positions of GPS satellites, and have taught an Amazon Alexa to speak in tongues using machine learning. OK, cool. Can you say more about this work? ​​This practice developed because I was interested in getting people to think more critically about these radical technologies that are becoming seamless and invisible in our everyday lives, what they mean and who benefits from their use. For example, GPS is a massive military technology that's been normalized within everyday use. Reframing it as a divination tool makes it visible again and asks us to reconsider its uses. What time do you usually wake up? Can you walk us through your morning routine? I've been waking up earlier than usual since my son was born earlier this year! Officially I start work at 3 a.m. E.S.T. (8 a.m. London). I usually try to be in my chair with coffee by 7.30 a.m. London time. I'll check over our session and work out what needs the most urgent attention (for example, I've been removing a lot of AC noise behind our guests' home recordings this summer). After multiple rounds of listening and edits, I finish the file just before the 6 a.m. E.S.T. deadline. I've gotten faster and the delivery process has become much smoother over the years I've been mixing the show. It's more of a jog now than an all-out daily sprint. What's one of your favorite memories working on the show? There are lots of times when we've had to turn around an extremely last-minute episode on deadline. I find this super satisfying. I also loved going into the field for an episode last year, in which we interviewed people on the streets of London as the vaccine started to roll out. The responses you get when you put a microphone in front of people can be surprising, engaging and chaotic — I love that energy! What have you been listening to lately? Can you share a podcast and/or music recommendation for our listeners? I've been really enjoying John Glacier's debut album, "SHILOH: Lost For Words." She's a talented London-based artist who worked on the project with Vegyn, a producer who has collaborated with Frank Ocean. In terms of podcasts, I always listen to "Between the Ears," the BBC's sound-rich documentary strand. A recent episode, "Listening to the Deep," follows the sound artist Jana Winderen as she uses hydrophones to present the amazing sound world beneath the sea — and to capture how oceans are under pressure from the climate emergency. On The Daily this week Monday: How mask mandate bans are affecting school reopenings. Tuesday: The Taliban has captured cities across Afghanistan. What that means for the American withdrawal — and the Afghan people. Wednesday: The resignation of Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Thursday: What the bipartisan infrastructure bill and the partisan budget plan tell us about the state of Congress. Friday: The climate calamity is here. Plus, for your weekend. A special show from our culture team asks: Why is everyone obsessed with Bennifer? LISTEN NOW: Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez are Back Together, and We Can't Look Away The internet's obsession with Bennifer may tell us more about ourselves than about the superstar couple. By Dodai Stewart, Michael Gold, Anna Martin, Hans Buetow, Theo Balcomb, Phyllis Fletcher and Corey Schreppel That's it for The Daily newsletter. See you next week. Have thoughts about the show? Tell us what you think at thedaily@nytimes.com. Were you forwarded this newsletter? Subscribe here to get it delivered to your inbox. Love podcasts? Join The New York Times Podcast Club on Facebook. Continue reading the main story Need help? Review our newsletter help page or contact us for assistance. You received this email because you signed up for The Daily from The New York Times. To stop receiving these emails, unsubscribe or manage your email preferences. 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Wonking Out: Who knew used cars and shipping containers would matter so much?

Economic notes from inside Plato's Cave. 

For Times Subscribers View in browsernytimes.com August 13, 2021 By Paul Krugman Opinion Columnist To be a good empirical economist, you must be prepared to make use of economic data without forgetting that the data is at best an imperfect guide to reality. I used to describe national income accounting — G.D.P. and all that — as a peculiarly boring form of science fiction. That's not to say that the statisticians just make things up; they try really hard, and their work is immensely valuable. It's just that any close look at how the numbers are constructed reveals that data coverage is always incomplete and the gaps are filled in with estimates and imputations. Lately, however, I've found myself drawn to another analogy: Economic measures, especially the measures we use to make sense of a rapidly changing situation, are like the shadows on the wall of Plato's cave. That is, they're imperfect images of an underlying reality that exists, but that we can't directly see. And sometimes it's important, in interpreting the shadows, to think about the Platonic ideal we're actually trying to discern. What the heck am I talking about? Inflation, of course, which has been running high the past few months — although consumer prices rose a lot less in July than they did in June. The big question about recent price increases has been: Are we looking at a transitory shock or a rise in the underlying rate of inflation? I know a fair number of people, mainly Wall Street types, who get angry at anyone who even asks this question. Inflation is inflation, they insist, and attempts to define "core inflation" are just a way for the Fed to evade its responsibility to maintain price stability. But these critics generally don't know why the concept was invented in the first place. The truth is that back in the 1970s economists noticed a sharp distinction in the behavior of some prices. The price of soybeans fluctuates a lot both up and down, whereas the prices of goods like new cars and the price of labor — that is, wages — seems to change reluctantly. The thing about these sluggishly moving prices is that once they do get moving, say, once they've been rising 6 percent or 8 percent a year several years in a row, it takes something big, like a severe recession, to stop them from just continuing to rise. Why this distinction? That's a fairly deep question, and economists are far from united in their answers. But the difference is real, and important. A spike in inflation driven by goods without price inertia is easy come, easy go; inflation driven by goods with price inertia is very hard to get rid of — and to be avoided if possible. How do we tell the difference? Back in 1975 Robert Gordon proposed that policymakers focus on an inflation measure that excluded food and energy — a rough cut at the distinction between inertial and non-inertial prices that made sense at the time. (Remember, this was the era of wild swings in oil prices caused by wars and revolutions in the Middle East, and food prices were also a lot less stable in the 1970s than they have been since.) The unstable cost of eating.FRED Gordon's suggestion proved so useful that "core inflation" — defined by excluding food and energy — became a standard measure and guide for Federal Reserve policy. And use of that measure has been a huge practical success. The Fed was able to keep its cool through several spikes in inflation driven mainly by oil prices, most recently in 2011, because its focus on the core told it that these were transitory shocks, that underlying inflation remained low — and the Fed was right. But inflation excluding food and energy was always a quick-and-dirty approximation to the underlying concept — a shadow on the wall of the cave cast by the Platonic ideal of inflation in goods with inertial prices. And while this approximation worked well in an era of oil shocks, it's not working well at all in an era of pandemics and vaccines, in which a remarkable amount of price action has been driven by used cars: Would you buy a used-car index from these people?FRED Nor are used-car prices the only price we didn't used to think about much but that is having wild swings and should, conceptually, be excluded from core. In normal times, macroeconomists don't pay much attention to shipping costs. But pandemic-related disruptions have created an incredible surge in the price of container shipping. I've been trying to estimate how much shipping costs may have contributed to recent inflation, multiplying the reported change in the cost of shipping containers to the United States by the number of TEUs — 20-foot equivalent units — unloaded at U.S. ports. There's quite a lot of uncertainty in these estimates, but as a rough guess, shipping may have added between one-quarter and one-half of 1 percent to inflation over the past year. This, too, should be excluded from the Platonic ideal of core. Why does all this matter? As best I can tell, a fair number of people are still looking at the standard measure of core inflation — which has risen almost as much as headline inflation — and concluded that we really do have a fundamental problem. They could be right, and Team Transitory — economists who believe that this is a transitory blip, a group that includes the Biden Council of Economic Advisers — could be wrong. But you can't settle that argument by looking at a number that, however well it worked in the past, is now a clearly inadequate measure of the underlying concept of inertial inflation. Feedback If you're enjoying what you're reading, please consider recommending it to friends. They can sign up here. If you want to share your thoughts on an item in this week's newsletter or on the newsletter in general, please email me at krugman-newsletter@nytimes.com. Subscribe Today New York Times Opinion curates a wide range of views, inviting rich discussion and debate that helps readers analyze the world. This work is made possible with the support of subscribers. Please consider subscribing to The Times with this special offer. Need help? Review our newsletter help page or contact us for assistance. You received this email because you signed up for Paul Krugman from The New York Times. To stop receiving these emails, unsubscribe or manage your email preferences. 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On Tech: Smartphones won. We can ignore them.

Smartphones are now normal and for everyone, which means we can ignore the hoopla around new models.

For Times Subscribers View in browsernytimes.com August 12, 2021 Smartphones won. We can ignore them. Smartphones are now normal and for everyone, which means we can ignore the hoopla around new models. Ruru Kuo By Shira Ovide It's that time of year when companies including Apple and Samsung try to get us VERY EXCITED about their new smartphone models. I give you permission to tune them out entirely. Some people get a thrill from the latest phone camera improvements and remodeled designs. It's fun! Or maybe you have been waiting eagerly to ditch your busted old phone. In either case, go forth and fawn. But a lot of hoopla around new smartphones is an anachronism of the years when the devices were precious pieces of magic pitched hardest at tech enthusiasts. They're not anymore. Smartphones are normal and for everyone. And that makes it natural for them to become less noteworthy. It's a sign of how miraculous smartphones are that we don't have to think about them very much. Like other consumer products including cars, TVs and refrigerators, most people in relatively affluent countries buy a new smartphone when an old one wears out or they want a change. Largely because of this healthy evolution from novel to normal, new smartphone sales had been declining for several years, although they're climbing this year. Somehow it feels like there's more pressure on us to have opinions and feelings about our phones than about our refrigerators. (Although I will not argue if you want to hug your fridge. Do it now. I'll wait.) I know that cars in particular can be emotionally resonant. But for many of us, getting a new phone, car, TV or fridge is neat for a little while and then we get used to it and it feels fine. That is fine. That said, we should be glad that smartphone makers keep improving their devices in small and large ways. It has been good that personal computers — which like smartphones shifted to less noteworthy essentials from novelties — took the opportunity to reimagine what else people might want from computers. We got clever new products like Chromebooks, the bare-bones laptops that took off in many U.S. schools because they were relatively inexpensive and easy for educators to customize for students. We also got more variety in computers that combine elements of tablets, souped-up PCs for people who love video games and computers with the zippy brains of smartphones. When computers became too normal for people to care very much, it sparked invention. It's possible that the same thing may happen in the not-magical phase of smartphones. I am cautiously curious about smartphones that fold or unfurl to offer more screen real estate in a relatively small package. So far, folding smartphones — Samsung showed off its latest models on Wednesday — have been mostly expensive and awful. I still think there's a promising idea in there. (Or, maybe not.) Smartphones also remain a test bed for useful inventions, particularly for photography and for software features such as voice recognition. So hooray for the smartphone companies that keep perfecting their products. That doesn't mean that we need to care a jot about Google's odd looking new Pixel phones — they really do look weird, though — or Apple's coming iPhone … 13? 12S? Whatever. The latest phones will be lighter, faster, better and maybe more expensive than the old ones. The cool new features will be there when you're ready. You don't have to care until then. If you don't already get this newsletter in your inbox, please sign up here. TIP OF THE WEEK Don't give up if a tech company won't fix your phone Not ready yet for a new smartphone? Brian X. Chen, a consumer tech columnist for The New York Times, has a tale of dogged determination to keep an old device alive and kicking: A few weeks ago, a reader named Marianne sent me this email: Last year I tried to get a new battery for my Samsung Galaxy S7 phone. I took it to Verizon, where I had purchased it. They told me they couldn't open the phone to replace the battery and suggested I take it to a repair shop. I called Samsung, and it took so many tries to actually speak to a human. The person I finally spoke to said I would have to send $75 for Samsung to even agree to look at the phone, and if they could install a battery, they'd contact me. I authorized my credit card for $75 and waited for the required mail authorization only to receive an email the following day saying Samsung wanted to cancel the entire transaction. At that point, I gave up. I would be perfectly happy with my S7 if it could hold a charge. I responded to Marianne, encouraging her to try again — but this time, contact a few local independent repair shops to ask if they could do the job. Days later, she replied that she had found someone and her phone was restored to its former glory! The moral of the story: Don't give up if a brand like Apple or Samsung says it can't help you fix a phone. There is an industry of independent fixers whose business is to keep your phone running, not sell you a new one. More often than not, the indie technicians are capable of doing repairs that the manufacturers are not willing to do, like replacing a defective charging port on an iPhone. Do a web search on Yelp or Google and call around to find a good, honest fixer. Stories like Marianne's highlight the importance of the right to repair movement, which I wrote about in a recent column. In general, manufacturers have been making it increasingly difficult for independent fixers to gain access to the tools, parts and instructions to fix your electronics. The Federal Trade Commission last month voted to ramp up law enforcement against illegal restrictions on repairs, so hopefully people will continue to have positive experiences with indie fixers like Marianne did. Subscribe Today We hope you've enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times with this special offer. Before we go … Changing a toxic culture is difficult: A rape allegation against a manager at the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba shows again the ingrained problems of sexual harassment and violence in the country's technology industry, my colleague Li Yuan writes. Alibaba has said it fired the employee accused of rape. If you're not highly visible in Google searches, do you even exist? Small local companies that deliver food for restaurants told Fast Company that they're getting squeezed out by big delivery apps such as DoorDash and Uber Eats. They say that part of the problem is Google search results that point people hunting for food delivery to the big apps, and Google doesn't have the manpower to add links to many of the smaller companies. Chinese Bitcoin companies in the Lone Star state: Rest of World talked to local authorities and power companies in Texas that were scrambling to generate enough affordable electricity for cryptocurrency "mining" companies fleeing a crackdown on the practice in China. (Creating virtual money needs a lot of real electricity.) Hugs to this Here are 23 seconds of a rabbit lapping water. We want to hear from you. Tell us what you think of this newsletter and what else you'd like us to explore. You can reach us at ontech@nytimes.com. If you don't already get this newsletter in your inbox, please sign up here. You can also read past On Tech columns. Need help? Review our newsletter help page or contact us for assistance. You received this email because you signed up for On Tech With Shira Ovide from The New York Times. To stop receiving these emails, unsubscribe or manage your email preferences. Subscribe to The TimesGet The New York Times app Connect with us on: Change Your EmailPrivacy PolicyContact UsCalifornia Notices The New York Times Company. 620 Eighth Avenue New York, NY 10018