Die Bahn kommt – in China wirklich

In Rekordzeit hat China sein Schnellzugnetz ausgebaut, heute verfügt das Land über mehr Gleiskilometer als der Rest der Welt zusammen. Viele Menschen steigen vom Flugzeug um. Noch ist die CO2-Ersparnis gering, doch das soll sich ändern.

Von Georg Fahrion, Peking, Spiegel.de

An einem Dezembertag schließen sich auf dem Shanghaier Bahnhof um 11.59 Uhr die Zugtüren, um Punkt zwölf rollt der G12 nach Peking los. In nur viereinhalb Stunden wird der Zug 1318 Kilometer zurücklegen, eine Distanz wie von der Ostsee zum Mittelmeer. Während der Fahrt reißt das WLAN kein einziges Mal ab.

Bequeme Sitze, großzügige Beinfreiheit, und acht Minuten nach Abfahrt beginnt der Bordservice: Eine Stewardess überreicht jedem Fahrgast ein Getränk, Cracker und Wasabi-Erbsen. Wenig später feudelt eine Frau in schwarzer Dienstmädchenuniform den tadellos sauberen Boden im Großraumwaggon. Um 12.22 Uhr zeigt ein Display an, dass die Höchstgeschwindigkeit erreicht ist: 339 km/h.

Transparent solar cells could be used to glaze office blocks

Date: 12‑12‑2019

Source: The Economist

The absorb about the same amount of light as tinted windows

Over the past few decades, photovoltaic cells have gone from being exotic and expensive power‑packs for satellites and similar high‑end applications to quotidian generating equipment for grid‑scale power stations. One area where they have not yet fulfilled their potential, though, is as local sources of electricity to keep office buildings and the like supplied with energy. The main reason is that no one has a good answer to the question: where do you put them? Roof‑top cells can power a one‑ or two‑storey house. They will not power an office block. You could array them on the walls. But office blocks tend to have high window‑to‑wall ratios and to be governed, for fire‑safety reasons, by strict rules on wall cladding.

What is left is to replace the windows themselves with solar cells. Unfortunately, commercially available solar cells are opaque to the point of blackness. But Seo Kwanyong of the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology, in South Korea, plans to do something about that. As he and his colleagues report this week in Joule, they have created solar cells that are as transparent as tinted glass.

Is Tech a New Frontier for Sustainability?

DaDate: 12 12 2019
Source: Project Syndicate by BERTRAND BADRÉ , PHILIPPE HEIM

Bertrand Badré, a former Managing Director of the World Bank, is CEO of Blue like an Orange Sustainable Capital and the author of Can Finance Save the World?

Philippe Heim is Deputy CEO of Société Générale.

Financial institutions must address the issue of technological sustainability, especially with regard to data, robotics, and artificial intelligence. Although these new technologies have vast potential, businesses also need to understand their risks, social impact, and ethical implications.

PARIS – Discussions about “sustainability” usually center on a company’s environmental and social commitments, and for understandable reasons. But the financial sector in particular should consider two other, less obvious, dimensions of sustainability. Regulatory sustainability is essential for addressing the systemic risk that the financial sector poses to our societies. In addition, the emerging new frontier of technological sustainability is having an increasing impact on business models and strategies.

Economic Growth Is the Answer

Date: 12‑12‑2019

Source: Project Syndicate by Michael J. Boskin

Michael J. Boskin is Professor of Economics at Stanford University and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He was Chairman of George H. W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers from 1989 to 1993, and headed the so‑called Boskin Commission, a congressional advisory body that highlighted errors in official US inflation estimates. 

While rising inequality – a problem that the data suggest is real but overstated – has moved to the center of public debate, the key issue is that living standards are not improving fast enough among those who are falling behind. It is this fact that is fueling much of the political tension across advanced economies today.

Central Bank Digital Currencies: 4 Questions and Answers

By Tobias Adrian and Tommaso Mancini-Griffoli, IMF Blog

Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC) is a complex and multidisciplinary topic requiring active analysis and debate. It raises questions related to monetary policy, central banking operations, and payment systems—as well as financial stability and legal foundations and regulation.

Below are some of the most pressing questions and answers on the topic.

What is the IMF’s role around CBDCs now and in the future?

The IMF can help in three ways: by informing the policy debate, by convening relevant parties to discuss policy options, and by helping countries develop policies. Because CBDC is a novel topic, the IMF has mostly been active in the first two areas, but it is gradually moving into the third area as member countries consider CBDC options and seek advice.

First, the IMF can help inform the policy debate. The IMF is currently investigating implications of CBDC available across borders. Other institutions, such as the Bank for International Settlements and the Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructure, among others, have also contributed to the topic. The IMF is well-placed to study CBDC, because it can draw on its in-house experts. Moreover, a potential world with multiple CBDCs could raise important questions about cross-border payments and the international monetary system, which are at the core of the IMF’s mandate.

Is Growth Passé?

Dec 9, 2019 Joseph E. Stiglitz, Project

Joseph E. Stiglitz, University Professor at Columbia University, is the co-winner of the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize, former chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, and former Chief Economist of the World Bank. His most recent book is People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent.

Some suggest that the Paris climate agreement’s target for limiting global warming can be achieved only by stopping economic expansion. But there is ample room to change the quality of growth and significantly reduce its environmental impact without condemning billions of people to lives of deprivation.

NEW YORK – It’s clear: we are living beyond our planet’s limits. Unless we change something, the consequences will be dire. Should that something be our focus on economic growth?

How to Survive and Thrive in a World of Disruption

Date: 11‑12‑2019

Source: The Wall Street Journal By Irving Wladawsky‑Berger

Looking back upon my long career, it’s frankly sobering how many once powerful IT companies are no longer around or are shadows of their former selves: Digital Equipment Corp., Wang Laboratories, Sun Microsystems…the list goes on. 

The forces of disruption might have been more powerful in the fast‑changing IT industry, but no industry has been immune. In less than two decades, the global recorded‑music industry has lost over half its revenues, while the drop in newspaper advertising revenue in the U.S. has been even steeper. Retail has undergone major changes with the rise of e‑commerce, as has the telecommunications sector with the transition to mobile phones.

Why have so many companies been done in by disruptive technological and market changes? Is it that in spite of all their efforts in strategy formulation, their leaders failed to anticipate these changes and were caught by surprise?  Or is it that, as if actors in a Greek tragedy, they saw the changes coming and understood what needed to be done, but were somehow unable to make the needed strategic and cultural transformations?

Die nächste Dekade stellt die Weltwirtschaft auf den Kopf

Date: 09‑12‑2019

Source: Die Welt Von Frank Stocker

Asia, China, Hong Kong, A man wearing a back pack, stands on a high elevated rocky viewpoint on Victoria Peak, overlooking the Hong Kong skyline at dawn, looking out over the illuminated city as the night transforms into early in the morning.

In der nächsten Dekade wird sich die Rangliste der wichtigsten Volkswirtschaften fundamental verändern. Die Bundesrepublik riskiert, zwischen zwei Fronten zu geraten. Zwar gäbe es einen Ausweg, doch Experten zweifeln an Deutschlands Fähigkeiten.

Nur noch wenige Wochen, dann beginnt ein neues Jahrzehnt. Die Zwanziger des letzten Jahrzehnts waren eine Zeit des Aufschwungs und wurden daher später als „die Goldenen Zwanziger“ bezeichnet. Zugleich begann damals aber auch der Übergang des globalen wirtschaftlichen Machtzentrums vom britischen Empire auf die USA.

New York etablierte sich als zweiter wichtiger Finanzplatz, von dem dann am Ende des Jahrzehnts die Schockwellen des großen Börsencrashs mit all seinen Folgen ausgingen. Ob die Zwanziger auch diesmal golden werden, ist ungewiss. Sicher ist jedoch, dass sich in der kommenden Dekade erneut ein Führungswechsel in der Weltwirtschaft vollziehen wird.

China wird die USA überholen, und die Konkurrenz der beiden Mächte wird die Welt vor eine Zerreißprobe stellen. Deutschland wird darunter besonders leiden. Zugleich werden weitere Machtzentren in Ländern entstehen, die bisher kaum jemand im Auge hat.

Seit Jahrzehnten sind die USA die größte Volkswirtschaft der Erde, im vergangenen Jahr betrug die Wirtschaftsleistung rund 20,5 Billionen Dollar, Chinas Bruttoinlandsprodukt lag bei rund zwei Dritteln davon. Allerdings: Vor zehn Jahren umfasste Chinas Wirtschaftskraft weniger als ein Drittel jener der USA, das Reich der Mitte wächst wesentlich schneller.

The necessity of pulling carbon dioxide out of the air

Date: 05‑12‑2019

Source: The Economist

But it is difficult to do at the scale you need

Of the wisdom taught in kindergartens, few commandments combine moral balance and practical propriety better than the instruction to clear up your own mess. As with messy toddlers, so with planet‑spanning civilisations. The industrial nations which are adding alarming amounts of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere—43.1bn tonnes this year, according to a report released this week—will at some point need to go beyond today’s insufficient efforts to stop. They will need to put the world machine into reverse, and start taking carbon dioxide out. They are nowhere near ready to meet this challenge.

Once such efforts might have been unnecessary. In 1992, at the Rio Earth summit, countries committed themselves to avoiding harmful climate change by reducing greenhouse‑gas emissions, with rich countries helping poorer ones develop without exacerbating the problem. Yet almost every year since Rio has seen higher carbon‑dioxide emissions than the year before. A staggering 50% of all the carbon dioxide humankind has put into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution was added after 1990. And it is this total stock of carbon that matters. The more there is in the atmosphere, the more the climate will shift—though climate lags behind the carbon‑dioxide level, just as water in a pan takes time to warm up when you put it on a fire.

A British Test for the Populist Revolution

Date: 07‑12‑2019

Source: The Wall Street Journal By Gerard Baker

If Boris Johnson’s pro‑Brexit Tories capture a large portion of former Labour voters in next week’s election, it will transform British politics and galvanize conservatives across the West

A country that likes to consider itself the most stable of democracies, a model of government typified by steady, pragmatic, get‑things‑done‑with‑no‑drama progress, has descended in a few years into southern European‑style political chaos.

Next Thursday, the British go to the polls in a nationwide vote for the fourth time in less than five years. The result could produce the U.K.’s fourth prime minister in a little over three years. If the opposition to Boris Johnson’s incumbent Conservatives can beat the odds and win on Thursday, the Battle of Brexit, which has paralyzed politics for 3½ years, is likely to be prolonged for a while yet, with the prospect of at least one more national vote in 2020. It’s possible that one outcome could be the eventual breakup of the kingdom itself.