The Economist. Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm your host, Jameson Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.
On some level, every tourist on a long haul flight knows they're contributing to emissions. But the flight is just the start of it. Bad news for the Carbon Conscious, we've got a fuller picture of just how much tourism is costing the climate. And from March of this year, keen watchers of the night sky will note there's something missing. The next of our series, The World Ahead, pays tribute to the Disappearing Act performed by the Rings of Saturn.
But first... In Donald Trump's first term, the economic policy principles were pretty blunt. America first good. Regulation bad. Corporate taxes bad. China bad. We have been ripped off by China. An evacuation of wealth like no country has ever seen before.
On the 2024 campaign trail, Mr. Trump picked up where he left off, with one threat repeated particularly often. The word tariff to me is the most beautiful word in the entire dictionary. Things are, of course, different this time around. Mr. Trump and those in his orbit have had years to hatch plans. So it's about time we look at who's in that orbit. Donald Trump's team of economic officials and advisors is unusually large and disparate.
Simon Rabinovich is our U.S. economics editor. There's three main groups that we've identified, what we call the conservative mainstreamers, the America firsters, and tech tycoons. They have lots of experience both in government and in the private sector, but there's also a lot of differences. And so the question is whether these make for better policy or make for chaotic governance? Well, let's start by sort of defining each of these three sets. Who are the conservative mainstreamers in your framing?
The conservative mainstreamers are the ones that, in many respects, hold the most prominent offices. So for example, you've got Scott Bessent, who will be Treasury Secretary, Howard Lutnik, the Commerce Secretary, Doug Burgum, who will be running the Interior Department. They all have formidable backgrounds. Scott Bessent has a hedge fund manager, Howard Lutnik running a big Wall Street firm, Cantor Fitzgerald, and Doug Burgum, who is both a serial entrepreneur, as well as former governor of North Dakota.
Investors and diplomats alike have been quite happy about these appointments. There are more controversial appointments by Trump and other areas of government, but the feeling was, as one diplomat put to me, that when it came to the economy, Donald Trump had kept the clown car away from Syria's business.
And the hope is that, given that these are relatively mainstream conservatives, they'll sand down the rough edges of Trumponomics. There obviously is a desire for protectionism, for high tariffs that horse through Trumponomics and have done so for a decade. And the feeling, at least the hope, is that these conservatives will help to push against that, help to moderate Trump's agenda. That leads neatly on then to the second group you mentioned, the America firsters. Who were they? What do they want?
The America Firsters are, in many respects, the backbone of Trumponomics. And you can really trace a line back to Donald Trump's entry into the National Political Debate a decade ago with the idea that America has to maintain its dominance of the global order that had been sinking. And therefore, it was up to Trump and his acolytes to rebuild it. And he did so in the first term. And the hope is that in the second term, they'll get even farther.
There's a series of people in the America first movement who will have very important roles throughout the Trump administration. And I think one difference actually with the first Trump administration is that not just the high level officials, but also many low level officials have signed on to this ideology, if you will, have been molded in the shape of it. So therefore, it ends up looking like a much stronger movement than the first time around. So who are the big players that you're talking about there?
So the most important, the Supremo, if you will, is Stephen Miller. He'll be the deputy chief of staff for domestic policy in the White House. In Trump's first term, he spearheaded the crackdown on immigration. Once again, he will be leading the anti-immigration efforts, which may be a lot more aggressive this time around. But he also has a hand in everything from trade policy to deciding how to manage the budget.
On the trade side, the new lead trade representative will be Jameson Greer. He's seen as somebody who will be pushing for higher tariffs across the board. That, of course, is something that Trump has talked about and wants. It'll really be up to Greer to kind of engineer how it's actually done.
Peter Navarro and Arch China Hawk will be back in the White House, and perhaps the most pivotal player of all amongst the America Firsters will be Russ Vote. He was the co-creator of the controversial Project 2025, and both his supporters and his detractors believe that he's been developing a plan over the past number of years to take down the administrative state, to challenge the deep state. He's the one whose
going to be trying to undo a lot of Joe Biden's green tech clean energy policies. He's looking to eliminate employment protections for civil servants, and he's looking for new ways to try to shrink the government budget. So he's really an important player. He'll be running the Office of Management and Budget. You may not see him day to day, but he will be the America first or who's driving things behind the scenes.
And then the last in your taxonomy, the Tech Tycoon, I'm thinking of one in particular.
Yeah, and of course everybody at this point is familiar with Elon Musk's role as Donald Trump's first buddy and running the Department of Government Efficiency. Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk appear to be great friends, at least for the time being. Of course, there is a lot of skepticism about what they'll actually be able to achieve in practice, but Musk's role within the White House clearly very important. Beyond him, though, there's lots of others. Mark Andreessen, who's
one of the co-founders of Andreessen Corowitz, a Silicon Valley venture capital giant, is not involved formally in any role, but has been spending, he says, half of his time at Mar-a-Lago since the election advising on everything from tech policy to who to appoint to important roles. Amongst those who have been appointed to important roles, David Sacks, another giant in the tech space as one of the co-founders of PayPal,
is going to be the AI and crypto czar for Donald Trump. And there'll be people in the office of science and technology and lots of advisors to musk and sacks into the White House science office, trying to both shrink the federal workforce, reduce regulation, especially on crypto and AI, and just make the government much more tech friendly.
So in this view of three different groups with different interests, perhaps ideologies, even, are they going to be collaborating or competing, do you think?
Well, the bull case, a positive case about Trumponomics is that they will really complement each other. America Firsters are really the motor, the driving force of Trumponomics. You then have the mainstream conservatives who are the shock absorbers who are trying to keep the car on the road, not let it get too wild or even too fast. But then you've got the tech tycoons and they're injecting new energy. They're coming up with new tools for
and the way that government can operate. And so maybe Trumponomics really ends up just making American governance and the economy that much stronger and more efficient. So that's the way to view the collaboration, though. What about the possibilities or different sectors, indeed, where there's competition?
One of the themes of Trump's first administration was that you had this constant fight, if you will, in the Court of Trump. And he would sit back and adjudicate between the different groups or even the different factions. And I think there's reason to think that something like that might play out again. I mean, the most obvious division
is between the America firsters and the mainstream conservatives on tariffs. Trump has talked about as much as 20% tariffs on the rest of the world, 60% plus on China, that could easily turn into a very big debate. It's even possible that on the tax side, there will be differences. And just lastly, we've already seen a dispute flare up on the immigration side.
If you look at a lot of the appointments that have been made, especially on the tech and science side, Sri Ram Krishna, who was Indian born now an American citizen, a real power in Silicon Valley, but you then had some America firsters who came out and questioned why somebody of Indian birth
had risen to such a powerful position in the Trump administration. So there's lots of points of division and we are going to see these divisions exposed. Politics can be really, really nasty. We've already seen wrangling over the budget. So the Trump team is stronger, but it's going to be put to the test. Thanks very much for joining us, Simon. Thank you, Jason. Always pleasure.
As every year, 2024 ended with a flurry of words of the year. They give you a sense of what people are interested in, or obsessing about. But with apologies for my pronunciation, let me take you back to 2019, when a widespread word in Northern Europe was fleegscam. It's Swedish for flight shame, as in guilds because taking a flight releases so much carbon.
Virtue-signaling travelers also had Tukskleta train-brag to describe the alternative. It's clear by now that most travel is environmentally costly. But after hearing this story, I think we need a new word. Swedish listeners, how do I say tourism shame? Long-distance travel is often criticized for the carbon emissions that it generates, and arguably tourism, so travel that is not or cannot be classed as essential, is the one that gets the most criticism of the lot.
Rachel Dobbs is our environment editor. Our study in nature communications by researchers in Australia found that carbon emissions from tourism are sky high compared to other industries and have no signs of slowing down. So tell me what's in the study. What exactly did they show?
They looked at overall global tourism emissions from 2009 to 2020 just before the start of the COVID pandemic. And they showed that the emissions from global tourism grew pretty steadily and consistently by an average of 3.5% a year. That is notable in that it is double the rate of the emissions for the global economy in general.
And by 2019, the emissions were 5.2 gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent, which is almost 9% of the world's total. And it built on previous research that the group had done, which showed that tourism emissions were four times bigger than previously thought, because for the first time when they first started doing this research back in 2018, they factored in all of the other stuff as well as transport that tourists do like shopping and eating and all that kind of stuff.
So if there is this recognition that tourism is a big contributor, why is it going up so much?
The researchers also thought emissions would stabilize. And that's not because tourism hadn't grown or wouldn't continue to grow. There has been pretty solid growth in tourism demand. It's risen consistently alongside population sizes and income levels. But what has happened is that both tourism has changed. So countries that have already developed their domestic or nearby market. So they're getting tourists from those places already are increasingly trying to attract long haul travelers.
And most importantly, tourism as an industry hasn't done nearly as well as many other industries in decoupling growth and emissions. So when you look at carbon intensity, which is the amount of emissions per dollar spent or dollar burned for tourism, it's now 30% higher than the average for the global economy and four times higher than the average for the service sector. So why hasn't the industry tried to get more green or is it impossible?
So they have tried. There have been a lot of attempts to green up tourism industry. There's a UN-backed international carbon offsetting scheme for flights. Europe's emissions trading scheme incorporates some flights. There are other schemes both in Europe and elsewhere to try and encourage technological advances that would make things more sustainable.
sustainable, so making engines more efficient, making planes lighter, making sustainable aviation fuels. There's also various accreditation schemes to try and make hotels more sustainable and stuff like that. But most of those do not appear to have worked. In large part, that is because of the aviation industry, which has done some very, very successful lobbying that has helped them sidestep a lot of those attempts to reduce emissions.
So, for example, because of that pressure, offsets under the international scheme are very cheap. Often, airlines won't have to buy them a tool if they use just a very small amount of sustainable fuel, which is also heavily subsidized in America. So that's all sort of on the supply side of the getting there, mostly. What about on the demand side, the tourists themselves?
Yeah, so a big part of this is also the way in which tourists behave, which is different from the way that they behave at home when you're on holiday, you've got all that shopping and dining out and generally having a good time and doing activities. All of that is very emissions intensive and it also crucially is really hard for countries to account for.
because the emissions are coming from all sorts of different sources across the economy, all the supply chains of food, all that kind of stuff. And that makes it really, really difficult for countries to know what they're actually trying to tackle. Only two countries properly tot up tourism emissions, and that's New Zealand and Denmark.
And one of the things that the authors of this study are doing in this research is making a global database, I think they've got 175 countries now, in which they have actively tried to find out all of the tourism emissions, which should then help policymakers or the governments of those countries start to make decisions to try and reduce them. And at the mention of national governments, I mean, this is a sort of unevenly spread problem, like the really hotly-touristed countries have a bigger problem than places that people don't really want to go to.
Yes, it is, but it is also really important to note that this is also a very unevenly spread problem the other way around. So the countries where tourists are coming from and therefore where the tourists themselves are generating emissions is distributed very unevenly. Three quarters of the total emissions came from the top 20 countries with the highest per capita tourist emissions, which are overwhelmingly rich countries. Poor countries tend to, unsurprisingly, have far less outbound tourism.
But that said, the absolute rise in emissions from tourism actually was driven by domestic travel within just three countries, which is America, China and India. Obviously, America is rich, parts of China are rich, some Indians are rich, but overall those populations are not necessarily who we would think of as being very, very wealthy. So it is reasonable to say that it is a structural problem with the sector overall.
So what's to be done though? If this is, in a sense, just one of the other knock-on effects of a world that is in general growing richer and people want to spend their money, how they want to spend it.
I think the main takeaway from this is that changes to tackle this really have to start being made at the government policy level. A lot of the initiatives that I talked about that seem to have not done very well were aimed at business levels. So for that, countries need to, A, really do the work of finding out what emissions are generated by tourism, and then arguably set thresholds for the number of tourists
that they are allowing in. That is not going to be popular at all, although certain moves to mitigate the effect of tourism in other areas like charging tourists for coming on day trips to Venice suggests actually that possibly the tide is changing on the way in which governments are prepared to capitalise on people wanting to spend their money. Obviously, also, that comes on top of the need to further tighten up regulation around aviation, which also is going to mean making alternatives like trains cheaper and more available.
And also beyond that, given that a lot of these emissions are coming from all over the economies that people are visiting, it is just hastening the transition to renewables as much as possible. Rachel, thanks very much for joining us. Thanks, Jason. Even in the 21st century, odd astronomical events can be troubling to us.
Anro is the economist's obituaries editor. For almost all of 2025 from March to November, Saturn's rings will disappear. And the reason is simple, these rings, which are anything between a few tens of meters and thousands of meters deep, form a giant structure, which is in fact 282,000 kilometers wide,
For most of Saturn's 29-year journey around the Sun, these rings which are made of ice and rocks are lit from above by the Sun. And for the other half of that 29-year journey, they're lit from below, but at two points, they're sideways on to the Sun, and at that stage, they disappear.
Galileo Galilei in 1610 was the first astronomer really to study Saturn through his telescope. He deduced that there were phenomena called handles on either side, and he took these to be a constant phenomenon, but by the end of 1612, they'd disappeared. And he was mightily disturbed by this, and he noted in a letter to a friend, has Saturn devoured his own sons?
Saturn was named after Saturn as the Roman god of farming. So he was the god of life and death, the birth and decay growth, and he was based on Kronos, the Greek god of time. So Saturn became both the planet of order and slow progression and the planet of death and decay.
And this was summed up really in the Roman feast of Saturnalia. This was a time when Romans gave each other presents and had a very jolly time as we do at Christmas time. It was supposed to be a fortaste of a golden age of peace and fruitfulness.
but it was also a time in which the normal social order was reversed and servants gave their master's orders. There was a feeling of anarchy about it with the dances through the streets and so on. That was also rather worrying phenomenon. Something of that dual meaning of Saturn can be found too in Gustav Holst's suite from 1926, The Planets.
This is a wonderful section. It was the composer's own favourite. And it begins with a very slow, measured thread of Saturn as time progressing. But then it slowly starts falling apart and becomes chaos and the trombones come in with very bright, discordant notes. And in the end, the whole thing is verging on collapse.
until a peace settles in, a peace that might be a acceptance, or may just be despair. And that to me mirrors the Western world's approach to old age, because Saturn is the planet of old age in house suite.
The modern world is so obsessed with youth and wanting to keep faces, skin, bodies as long as possible as useful as they can be. Some people want to get themselves frozen or are happy to undergo all kinds of awful experiments to preserve youth forever. Saturn's tread is certainly not welcome. And there are other reasons too to fear it.
By the end of the 17th century, scientists other than Galileo were looking at Saturn with more powerful telescopes and deciding that the rings were not handles, but they were flat. There were also several of them. And Christian von Heigens declared that they were made of rocks and ice and shards of other planets that had been destroyed.
Saturn had a very strong gravitational force, and this was pulling smaller planets or asteroids apart as they approached it. They were in fact, as W.G. Zabald remarked once, the detritus of vanished worlds.
And it's this extremely melancholy thought about the Rings of Saturn that animates the book, Zebald Root, which is called the Rings of Saturn, and is set on the coast of Suffolk.
Sabold simply wanders around in this book from place to place and finds everywhere. Carcuses of abandoned boats and dilapidated melancholy towns and country houses where nothing happens railway lines that seem to go nowhere. Everything is on the negative side and whenever he takes one of his
Typical historical or literary diversions, they tend to be about burial customs, graveyards and so on. The whole history of the world, he said, follows a route which can go down only into the dark. The world was in fact a vast necropolis obsessed with death.
Yet Seybard's book is also a book that proceeds in a very strange way. It doesn't inevitably go towards decay. It wanders here and there. It never fixes in one place. And it's certainly not in a straight line. The idea of a continuum between past, present and future is simply not there.
And this, according to Carlo Rovelli, an Italian physicist, is how we must now imagine time. There's no structure on time, there's no arrow of past present future, except what humans themselves construct in order to give some structure to their lives. We ourselves are time.
Time itself is not an arrow, it is just events and change itself. And we have no option in this year of the disappearance of Saturn's rings, but to embrace even the strangest changes that we see.
That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. The show's editors are Chris Impe and Jack Gill. Our Deputy Editor is John Joe Devlin, and our sound designer is Will Rowe, with help this week from Alex Portfelix. Our Senior Producers are Lori Galloway and Sarah Larnock, and our Senior Creative Producer is William Warren. Our Producers are Mike Edieva and Benji Guy, and our Assistant Producer is Henrietta McFarland, with extra production help this week from Emily Elias and Jonathan Day.
On this week's episode of The Weeknd Intelligence, her West Coast correspondent, Herring Braun, went to Batersfield, California, a town that was absolutely built on oil in a state that now wants to absolutely do away with the stuff. We'll see you back here tomorrow for that.
