BREAKING: China allows some firms to resume work at virus epicentre

Issued on: 11/03/2020 - 10:04Modified: 11/03/2020 - 11:58  GMT/ZULU

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Beijing 

by Xian Wan and Biodun Iginla, France24

China announced Wednesday that key companies can resume work in coronavirus-hit Wuhan, in another sign authorities are confident the quarantined city is winning its battle against the epidemic.

The decision came a day after President Xi Jinping paid his first visit to the capital of Hubei province since it was placed under lockdown in late January after the outbreak became a national emergency.

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The number of daily new cases has fallen steadily in Wuhan in recent weeks, while all other cities in Hubei have reported zero fresh infections for several days in a row -- prompting Xi to declare that the spread of the virus has been "basically curbed" in the province.

The Hubei provincial government said Wednesday that Wuhan businesses involved in providing daily necessities, prevention and control of the epidemic, or in the operations of public utilities, are among those that can resume work and production immediately.

Wuhan firms that are key to "global industrial chains" may do so as well, after getting approval, the government added.

Other companies are expected to resume production only after March 20.

Japanese carmarker Honda said on Wednesday that some of its staff have started going to work in its Wuhan plant.

Honda has also begun production of a "small number of vehicles" while checking on its production equipment starting Wednesday.

Similar rules apply to areas outside Wuhan that are considered high-risk, where companies involved in epidemic prevention, public utilities and providing necessities are among those that may resume work.

In areas considered medium or low risk, there is a broader range of companies allowed to return to work.

Passenger flights, trains, cars, ships and city buses in middle and low-risk areas -- moving within the province and excluding Wuhan -- will "gradually resume operations" as well, although no timeframe was given.

But authorities said they will continue strict control measures on channels out of Wuhan and Hubei.

- Health codes -

The announcement came a day after Hubei authorities loosened travel restrictions, allowing people from medium and low risk areas to move within the province if their health code is labelled "green".

A mobile app will be used to give residents a coloured health code. Green indicates holders have no contact with virus cases, while those with yellow codes are close contacts.

Confirmed or suspected cases will get a red code, and must be quarantined.

Authorities added in the latest statement on Wednesday that outside of Wuhan, a "point-to-point" system will be adopted to send employees back to work, and help those stranded in Hubei to return home.

Schools will continue to be suspended in Hubei.

Wuhan city has been on lockdown since January 23 as China scrambled to contain the spread of the deadly coronavirus, which has now killed over 3,100 and infected nearly 81,000 in the country.

Other cities in Hubei soon followed suit, placing a total of around 56 million people under quarantine.

Most of China's cases and deaths came from Hubei, with the majority in Wuhan.

But with cases falling dramatically in the province, residents have been clamouring for restrictions to be eased.

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ANALYSIS: Greta Thunberg accuses rich countries of “creative carbon accounting”

Not so green

by Suzanne Gould and Biodun Iginla, The Economist Intelligence Unit News Analysts

When it comes to measuring national emissions, she has a point

Finance and economics

---

Oct 16th 2019

IT IS 5AM, and New Covent Garden Market is in full swing. On its swarming 57-acre site in Battersea wholesalers are flogging fruit, vegetables and flowers to London’s greengrocers and restaurateurs. Costa Rican pineapples are stacked next to Kenyan passion fruits and Peruvian asparagus. Rows of Danish conifers sit by buckets of Dutch roses. Fresh produce shipped from all around the world is for sale.

But what is a boon to chefs—and apologetic spouses—has become a mind-bending problem for politicians and regulators. Under mounting public pressure they are busy setting targets to limit their carbon emissions. At least 60 countries and over 100 cities have promised to get to “net zero”. The trouble is that few account fully for the emissions created by products that are consumed within their borders but produced outside them.

Take, for example, a bunch of those Dutch roses. Britain’s “net-zero” target for its carbon impact includes only domestic emissions—the lorry trip carrying them on British soil, and so on. These carbon emissions are trivial in comparison to the 30kg or so from heating greenhouses in the Netherlands and flying the roses to Britain. Through a production lens, Britain looks relatively virtuous. Through a consumption lens, it does not.

Flowers are just one tiny part of the equation. Across the rich world the overall measurement gap is huge, particularly for service-oriented economies. Britain consumes about 40% more carbon emissions than it produces; the European Union as a whole, 19%. In America the difference comes in at 8%, according to the Global Carbon Project (GCP), a network of scientists. As for big cities, the gap between the two gauges of their carbon trail is bigger still, at about three-fifths, using the average figure for 79 cities reviewed by an international group of researchers. The problem even extends to individual buildings, which owners sometimes declare to be “carbon-neutral” while ignoring the concrete and steel used to build them.

Inevitably, since production-based measures make rich countries look good (they also flatter small states that do little manufacturing), most have picked this methodology for their carbon targets. None of the 19 countries in the Carbon Neutrality Coalition have net-zero targets that explicitly aim to reduce consumption (carbon footprints are considered in another part of France’s legislation). Likewise New York’s net-zero target is production-based—helpful, since it is a state without much heavy industry. It is for this reason, among others, that Greta Thunberg, a teenage climate activist, told Britain’s Parliament in April that its climate goals amounted to little more than “creative carbon accounting”.

The gap between national consumption and production measures comes from the emissions that are embedded in cross-border trade. Such emissions make up a quarter of the global total. Scientists began to pay more attention to them as China became a manufacturing powerhouse following its entry into the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in 2001. Its factories were powered by coal, the fossil fuel that emits the most carbon per unit of energy.

By 2009 China had become the world’s largest carbon emitter. Its exports alone now account for about 5% of the world’s fossil-fuel emissions (see chart). Most of this relates to goods that are ultimately consumed in the developed world: two-thirds of China’s emissions exports go to the members of the OECD, a rich-country club. India and Russia are sizeable carbon exporters, too. (Saudi Arabia is not a big emissions exporter because both production and consumption statistics book the emissions from oil in the country where it is burned rather than extracted.)

Cutting trade-related emissions is a daunting task. Cross-border supply chains are often complex, and making goods closer to home may not actually improve matters. The problem can be split into three parts: what is imported, where it comes from and how it travels.

The imports that embed the highest carbon emissions are mostly industrial materials (iron, steel and chemicals) and consumer goods (cars, electronics and textiles). According to the Global Trade Analysis Project, a database maintained by Purdue University, these six products account for about 30% of trade-related emissions. But the CO2 released by the same item produced in two different countries can differ hugely, depending on how energy-efficient production is and how the countries make their electricity.

Purdue’s data show that cars and car parts exported by China are responsible for nine times more CO2 per dollar than those exported by Germany. Mathieu Poitrat Rachmaninoff, an analyst at Newton Investment Management, notes that on average about half of the lifetime emissions from an electric vehicle come from making the battery. A medium-sized battery made in renewables-rich Sweden emits around 350kg of CO2. For coal-reliant Poland, that figure is over eight tonnes.

To cut emissions, it is therefore necessary to look closely at products’ provenance. Sometimes the conclusions are counter-intuitive, as the tomatoes in New Covent Garden Market demonstrate. British tomatoes are grown in heated glasshouses and thus require three times more electricity than sun-blessed Spanish ones. Even accounting for transport, local tomatoes are responsible for more emissions. Mike Berners-Lee of Lancaster University points out that a British apple bought in June has typically been in chilled storage for nine months. Keeping it cool for that long emits about as much carbon as shipping an apple from New Zealand.

Modes of transport also matter. Around 87% of the world’s freight, measured in tonne-kilometres (a tonne transported one kilometre), goes by sea. Shipping accounts for about 2% of fossil-fuel emissions. But as a means of transport it is carbon-efficient. Producing a tonne of steel in China takes about two tonnes of CO2. Shipping that steel to New York adds only 322kg. Planes account for just 0.1% of the world’s tonne-kilometres of international freight, but an outsize share of all emissions. According to figures from the British government, the carbon emissions caused by transporting a given weight by air are about 70 times greater than if it had been shipped. That means sectors reliant on timely delivery, such as fast fashion, are particularly environmentally unfriendly.

Just as governments and scientists are grappling with how to assess trade-related emissions, the world’s network of cross-border commerce has been disrupted by America’s trade war with China. In the first half of 2019, global trade volumes rose by 1% compared with the prior year, the slowest rate since 2012. But even if trade flows were to fall, it does not follow that global emissions would drop, points out Glen Peters of the Centre for International Climate Research in Norway. Moreover, China produces lots of carbon-saving technology. It is home to eight of the world’s ten biggest manufacturers of solar panels, and is pumping money into batteries and electric vehicles. An intensifying economic conflict between America and China could mean the flow of Chinese technology and know-how across borders dries up, hampering mitigation efforts elsewhere.

The trade war could cause multinational firms to shift production away from China. But that might not reduce emissions much, if activity is relocated to other countries that are keen to fuel their export-led growth with coal. Already emissions exports are growing fastest in Bangladesh, India, Indonesia and Vietnam, says Dabo Guan of the University of East Anglia. None of these countries is emitting as much carbon per person as China did when its exports took off, mainly because they burn less coal. But all are attracting labour- and resource-intensive industries such as plastics and electronics, which are leaving China in search of lower wages and less stringent environmental standards.

In the long run the only answer is for all economies, including manufacturing-heavy ones, to shift towards cleaner sources of energy. Trade deals could be used to encourage exporting countries to cut emissions, says Sam Lowe of the Centre for European Reform, a think-tank in London. The EU is considering a “carbon border adjustment”—higher tariffs on goods from countries that do not meet the EU’s environmental standards. America’s trade deals already allow for penalties on countries that fail to meet their commitments under the Paris climate agreement of 2015—though President Donald Trump shows little interest in using them. The trade deal struck in June between the EU and Mercosur, a South American trade bloc, could be blocked by EU member countries, or MEPs, unless Brazil does more to protect the Amazon rainforest.

As decarbonisation gets under way in rich countries, emissions embedded in imports will loom larger. Finding ways to curb them will be tricky. But they will become harder to ignore.

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ANALYSIS: Computers: Chips with everything

by Tamara Kachelmeier and Biodun Iginla, Technological News Analysts, The Economist Intelligence Unit
How the world will change as computers spread into everyday objects

The “Internet of Things” will fundamentally change the relationship between consumers and producers

Print edition | Leaders

Sep 13th 2019

On august 29th, as Hurricane Dorian tracked towards America’s east coast, Elon Musk, the boss of Tesla, an electric-car maker, announced that some of his customers in the storm’s path would find that their cars had suddenly developed the ability to drive farther on a single battery charge. Like many modern vehicles, Mr Musk’s products are best thought of as internet-connected computers on wheels. The cheaper models in Tesla’s line-up have parts of their batteries disabled by the car’s software in order to limit their range. At the tap of a keyboard in Palo Alto, the firm was able to remove those restrictions and give drivers temporary access to the full power of their batteries.
Mr Musk’s computerised cars are just one example of a much broader trend. As computers and connectivity become cheaper, it makes sense to bake them into more and more things that are not, in themselves, computers—from nappies and coffee machines to cows and factory robots—creating an “internet of things”, or iot (see Technology Quarterly). It is a slow revolution that has been gathering pace for years, as computers have found their way into cars, telephones and televisions. But the transformation is about to go into overdrive. One forecast is that by 2035 the world will have a trillion connected computers, built into everything from food packaging to bridges and clothes.

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Such a world will bring many benefits. Consumers will get convenience, and products that can do things non-computerised versions cannot. Amazon’s Ring smart doorbells, for instance, come equipped with motion sensors and video cameras. Working together, they can also form what is, in effect, a private cctv network, allowing the firm to offer its customers a “digital neighbourhood-watch” scheme and pass any interesting video along to the police.
Businesses will get efficiency, as information about the physical world that used to be ephemeral and uncertain becomes concrete and analysable. Smart lighting in buildings saves energy. Computerised machinery can predict its own breakdowns and schedule preventive maintenance. Connected cows can have their eating habits and vital signs tracked in real time, which means they produce more milk and require less medicine when they fall ill. Such gains are individually small but, compounded again and again across an economy, they are the raw material of growth—potentially a great deal of it.
In the long term, though, the most conspicuous effects of the iot will be in how the world works. One way to think of it is as the second phase of the internet. This will carry with it the business models that have come to dominate the first phase—all-conquering “platform” monopolies, for instance, or the data-driven approach that critics call “surveillance capitalism”. Ever more companies will become tech companies; the internet will become all-pervasive. As a result, a series of unresolved arguments about ownership, data, surveillance, competition and security will spill over from the virtual world into the real one.
Start with ownership. As Mr Musk showed, the internet gives firms the ability to stay connected to their products even after they have been sold, transforming them into something closer to services than goods. That has already blurred traditional ideas of ownership. When Microsoft closed its ebook store in July, for instance, its customers lost the ability to read titles they had bought (the firm offered refunds). Some early adopters of “smart home” gadgets have found that they ceased to work after the firms that made them lost interest.
That tilts the balance of power from the customer to the seller. John Deere, an American maker of high-tech tractors, has been embroiled in a row over software restrictions that prevent its customers from repairing their tractors themselves. And since software is not sold but licensed, the firm has even argued that, in some circumstances, a tractor-buyer may not be buying a product at all, instead receiving only a licence to operate it.
Virtual business models will jar in the physical world. Tech firms are generally happy to move fast and break things. But you cannot release the beta version of a fridge. Apple, a smartphone-maker, provides updates for its phones for only five years or so after their release; users of Android smartphones are lucky to get two. But goods such as washing machines or industrial machinery can have lifespans of a decade or more. Firms will need to work out how to support complicated computerised devices long after their original programmers have moved on.
Data will be another flashpoint. For much of the internet the business model is to offer “free” services that are paid for with valuable and intimate user data, collected with consent that is half-informed at best. That is true of the iot as well. Smart mattresses track sleep. Medical implants observe and modify heartbeats and insulin levels, with varying degrees of transparency. The insurance industry is experimenting with using data from cars or fitness trackers to adjust customers’ premiums. In the virtual world, arguments about what should be tracked, and who owns the resulting data, can seem airy and theoretical. In the real one, they will feel more urgent.
Then there is competition. Flows of data from iot gadgets are just as valuable as those gleaned from Facebook posts or a Google search history. The logic of data-driven businesses, which do ever better as they collect and process more information, will replicate the market dynamics that have seen the rise of giant platform companies on the internet. The need for standards, and for iot devices to talk to each other, will add to the leaders’ advantages—as will consumer fears, some of them justified, over the vulnerability of internet-connected cars, medical implants and other devices to hacking.
Predicting the consequences of any technology is hard—especially one as universal as computing. The advent of the consumer internet, 25 years ago, was met with starry-eyed optimism. These days it is the internet’s defects, from monopoly power to corporate snooping and online radicalisation, that dominate the headlines. The trick with the iot, as with anything, will be to maximise the benefits while minimising the harms. That will not be easy. But the people thinking about how to do it have the advantage of having lived through the first internet revolution—which should give them some idea of what to expect. ■

This article appeared in the Leaders section of the print edition under the headline "Chips with everything"

Print edition | Leaders

Sep 12th 2019

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