What just happened
- India rejected the idea of net zero and said the path to lower emissions was more important than the target.
- The UK summoned France’s ambassador to talks after a British trawler was impounded by French authorities in an escalating dispute over fishing rights.
- Police in St Petersburg said they would investigate the case of Kirill Smorodin, who hung a portrait of himself in 19th century military garb in the Hermitage last week.
Democrats do the darndest things. They’ve levered Trump out of the White House, secured control of both houses of Congress and won the chance to retool US climate policy and show the world American democracy and leadership are back. It’s not working out like that.
Joe Biden embarked last night on the most important foreign trip of his presidency so far with one hand tied behind his back by liberals in the House of Representatives and the other by two senators from his own party who’ve done more to delay his domestic agenda than 50 Republicans.
What Biden’s got. As of Thursday evening US time, as Marine One lifted off from the South Lawn to take the first couple to Joint Base Andrews en route to Rome, the Vatican and Glasgow, Biden had his party’s provisional agreement on a $1.75 trillion “safety net” spending plan that would:
- channel $555 billion to clean energy investments and climate-friendly tax credits in the biggest federally-funded shift away from fossil fuels in US history;
- extend health insurance cover to seven million Americans who can’t currently afford it;
- earmark $400 billion in all for childcare and pre-school to halve a typical family’s childcare outlay.
What he’s not. The $1.75 trillion package is a radically pared-down version of the administration’s $3.5 trillion opening bid. Specifically it lacks:
- final sign-off from Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who’ve praised Biden’s “good faith” negotiating but dug in their heels against spending (in Manchin’s case especially on clean energy) that they fear will hurt them in their states, even though neither is up for re-election until 2025;
- final sign-off from the lower House’s liberal caucus, which wants simultaneous votes on this and a separate $1.2 trillion infrastructure package;
- any federal funding for paid family leave to help new parents and those struggling with illness;
- funding for free two-year community college, which now feels like a promise from a far-off time when liberal Democrats still thought Trump’s departure was a brave new dawn.
What it means. Biden arrives in Europe looking weak, not strong. His approval ratings have slid to 42 per cent from 57 at the start of his presidency. He has neither the political capital nor the financial wherewithal to pull any rabbits from his hat at Cop, and US Republicans aren’t the only ones delighted that his once-fabled skills as a Senate wrangler seem to have deserted him. Russia and China are looking at American democracy in the round, and smiling.
Look ahead – to next Tuesday, when the Virginia governor’s race between Democrat stalwart and close Biden ally Terry McAuliffe and the Republican Glenn Youngkin is being seen as a curtain-raiser for next year’s midterms. It has narrowed in a recent poll of polls to a two-point lead for McAuliffe. Biden won Virginia last year by 10 points.
But Facebook is still Facebook
As forecast, Facebook has renamed itself. It is now called “Meta”. Its founder confirmed it at a conference yesterday at which he said the company’s new focus would be “to bring the metaverse to life and help people connect, find communities and grow businesses”. You can see this as a gutsy bid by Mark Zuckerberg to distract attention from Facebook’s role as a platform for hate speech and attacks on democracy; or as Nick Clegg’s first big rebrand since he tried the same thing with the Lib Dems in the UK (the former deputy PM is Facebook’s vice president for global comms); or as an earnest attempt to expand people’s digital lives. The first is by far the most plausible.
Brushed by Amazon
More than a million UK households may have received items from Amazon that they didn’t order. They’re being sent by (mainly Chinese) firms trying to boost their numbers and thus their rankings in Amazon’s listings, and the unsolicited gifts tend to be things like iPhone cases and magnetic eyelashes, Which? and others report. Doing this is against Amazon’s rules for third-party sellers, and the company says it thinks fewer than 0.001 per cent of orders it processes are fakes of this sort. The practice is called brushing, and for many Chinese businesses it’s seen as a standard cost of business. One retired teacher from Swindon received more than 50 unwanted items via Amazon and took them all to a charity shop.
End Covid for $23 billion
Three times as many booster jabs against Covid are being administered in rich countries every day as first jabs are being administered in poor ones, the WHO says. Tortoise’s research on this suggests that in fact there are plenty of doses to go round, including for booster shots, if only they can be sensibly distributed. The former PM Gordon Brown and a panoply of global figures coordinated by Tortoise have written a letter published in today’s FT outlining how that can happen. In any case, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO’s director-general, has issued a fresh appeal to the G20 as it meets in Rome today to fund a $23.4 billion plan to “end” Covid within a year not just with vaccines but with better drugs and proper testing regimens worldwide. “End Covid” has a certain ring to it, a bit like “net zero”. Why not? Ghebreyesus says it could save five million lives.
Pope’s message
Pope Francis called for concrete action at Cop and “a renewed sense of shared responsibility for our world” this morning in his debut as a contributor to BBC Radio 4’s Thought for the Day slot. It was quite a scoop for the Today programme, and timely given the Rome G20 is the big prelude to Cop for 20 delegations that could actually make Cop a success. Francis did not mention the Cop host nation’s climatologically extraordinary budget, which ditched fuel duty on domestic flights and froze fuel duty for petrol cars for the 12th year in a row. The Pope, like the Queen, was going to be at Cop in person but cancelled without giving a reason.
Shell breakup?
Imagine if Shell were broken up into its component parts – oil and gas, chemicals trading, renewables. Daniel Loeb has forced it to do more than imagine by buying up a $750 million stake and formally requesting the company’s disassembly on the grounds that shareholders would be better served. He says Shell has burdened itself with an “incoherent” set of strategies pulling in different directions and undermining its ability to profit from decarbonisation. The company has been cordial but vague so far in its response. Loeb’s Third Point hedge fund’s stake is small compared with Shell’s $190 billion market cap, but big compared with the $40 million stake taken in Exxon by Engine No. 1 earlier this year, which proved enough to force two of its nominees onto the Exxon board. And markets liked Loeb’s intervention. Shell’s American Depositary Receipts rose 2.5 per cent on the news.
Thanks for reading, and do share this around.
Giles Whittell
@GWhittell
Produced and edited by Xavier Greenwood.
Photographs Getty Images
