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      Yellen seeks to tamp down concern over US government spending under Biden

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      The US treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, on Sunday sought to tamp down concerns that Joe Biden’s plans on infrastructure, jobs and families will cause inflation, saying spending will be phased in over a decade.“It’s spread out quite evenly over eight to 10 years,” the former chair of the Federal Reserve told NBC’s Meet the Press.She said the Fed would monitor inflation carefully.“I don’t believe that inflation will be an issue but if it becomes an issue, we have tools to address it,” Yellen said. “These are historic investments that we need to make our economy productive and fair.”Addressing Congress on Wednesday, Biden said his “American Jobs Plan is a blue collar blueprint to build America. That’s what it is.”He has said his plans will be paid for by a series of tax increases on the wealthiest Americans, less than 1% of the population, and by raising corporate taxes. Some Democrats have expressed concerns such increases will slow economic growth.“We’re proposing changes to the corporate tax system that would close loopholes,” Yellen said.“This comes also in the context of global negotiations to try to stop the decades-long race to the bottom among countries in competing for business by lowering their corporate tax rates. And we feel that will be successful.The president has pledged that no family earning under $400,000 will pay a penny more in taxes“The president has pledged that no family earning under $400,000 will pay a penny more in taxes. And we’ve been assiduous in sticking to that pledge.”Republicans oppose corporate tax increases. The Louisiana senator Bill Cassidy told Fox News Sunday: “Academics would say if you raise taxes on corporations, you have lower wages, you have less investment, and you hurt shareholders. Think pension funds.“Now, if it’s OK to have lower wages for working people, it’s a blue collar thing. If it’s OK to have less investment, it’s a blue collar thing. But if you want higher wages, if you want more investment, if you want more efficient deployment of capital, than it’s anti-blue collar.”Speaking to CBS’s Face the Nation, the White House chief of staff, Ron Klain, countered Cassidy’s claims.Corporations, he said, “got that giant tax cut in 2017 [under Donald Trump]. What we’re talking about is just rolling some of that tax cut back. So we’re talking about putting the rate back up to 28%. It was 35% before that tax cut came. So corporates would still have a lower tax rate than the rate they had prior to 2017.“We think that 2017 tax cut didn’t meet its promise. You didn’t see massive investments in [research and development], you didn’t see wages go up. What you saw was CEO pay go up … So we think we can raise those taxes on corporations and fund the things that make the economy grow. Bridges, roads, airports, rail.”Republicans also oppose the scope of Biden’s infrastructure proposals, contending priorities such as expanding green energy, electric cars and elder and child care should not be pursued.“The administration needs to kind of be honest with the American people,” Cassidy said. “If you really want roads and bridges, come where Republicans already are. If you want to … do a lot of other stuff, well that’s a different story. Roads and bridges, we’re a lot closer than you might think.”Yellen would not speculate on whether Biden would accept a bill from Congress that does not include a way to pay for the spending increases he wants.“He has made clear that he believes that permanent increase in spending should be paid for and I agree,” she said. More

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      Biden stakes claim to being America’s most pro-union president ever

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      Just over 100 days into his presidency Joe Biden is showing that he is one of the most pro-union presidents in American history, declaring the “unions built the middle class” in his address to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday.Union membership has declined precipitously in the US and accounted for about 10.8% of US employees last year, just over half the rate in 1983. Unions have also suffered notable setbacks in recent years, mostly recently failing to get the votes to unionize at an Amazon warehouse in Alabama.None of this has dampened Biden’s ardor for organized labor, or Republican opposition to it.Last Monday, Biden issued an executive order establishing the White House Task Force on Worker Organizing and Empowerment, a move that aims to help unions expand their ranks. On Tuesday, Biden named Celeste Drake, to head his new “Made in America” program, which is designed to steer more federal money to US manufacturers. Drake is longtime trade expert at AFL-CIO, the US’s largest union federation.Also last week, the White House issued a fact sheet saying that Biden’s proposed $2.3tn infrastructure plan would create many union jobs in construction, clean energy and other fields – by, for instance, requiring companies that receive money under the legislation not to oppose unionization efforts.Biden’s new taskforce is seen as an important pro-union move – headed by Vice-President Kamala Harris, it includes most cabinet members and aims to have the entire executive branch promote unionizing and collective bargaining. In this way, Biden is undertaking an extraordinary effort to help reverse the decades-long decline in labor unions’ membership and power.In announcing the taskforce, the White House said “the shrinking of America’s middle class [is] associated with the declining percentage of workers in unions”.The taskforce, officials say, will recommend ways to use existing policies and programs to promote organizing and will also explore new policies to further that goal. “This is an all-hands-on-deck effort,” Jared Bernstein, a member of the president’s council of economic advisers, told the Guardian. “The marching order from the president is everything we do in the job market space needs to reflect the importance of unionization.”One White House official noted that the percentage of federal workers in unions, 28%, is lower than the percentage of state and local government workers. He said the administration might seek to increase that percentage by communicating with federal employees on the advantages of joining unions.Robert Bruno, a professor of labor relations at the University of Illinois, called Biden’s creation of the new taskforce “a significant historical step”. “The idea of the White House using this as a platform – it seems every cabinet member is on the taskforce – is a pretty profound statement about the importance the Biden administration places on collective bargaining and organizing workers.”A White House fact sheet seemed to acknowledge the complaints of many labor leaders who argue Democratic presidents have done too little to strengthen unions. “No previous administration has taken a comprehensive approach to determining how the executive branch can advance worker organizing and collective bargaining,” the fact sheet said.During his first 100 days, Biden has acted repeatedly to promote unions. On his very first day, he fired the National Labor Relations Board’s anti-union general counsel. On 28 February, he issued a video that some historians say was the most pro-union statement ever by a sitting president, one that many saw as indirect support for the unsuccessful Amazon unionization drive. Biden has vigorously supported the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, (Pro Act), the most pro-union legislation to advance in Congress since the 1930s. The House approved it in March, but it faces a filibuster in the Senate. Among other things, the Pro Act would take away some of corporate America’s most effective tactics in fighting unionization and give state and local employees in all 50 states the right to unionize.Biden has backed other legislation that labor strongly supports. He has pushed to lift the federal minimum wage to $15, and after a $15 minimum lacked the votes to pass the Senate, he issued an executive order on Tuesday setting a $15 minimum for federal contractors. Unions also applaud Biden’s efforts to create 12 weeks’ paid leave for new parents and workers who need to care for sick family members.“Biden has a long record of being very pro-union. The challenge now is figuring out what he can do with Congress, what he can do without Congress and what he’s willing to do without Congress,” said Rebecca Givan, a professor of labor studies at Rutgers. “Supporting organized labor is a win-win for him. It builds on his electoral base. It addresses what he sees as the key problems ailing our country, not the least of which is economic equality, and it builds broader support for Democrats up and down the ballot across the country.”Some labor experts say Biden may prove to be even more pro-union than Franklin D Roosevelt, who signed landmark legislation creating a minimum wage and giving workers a federal protected right to unionize. Givan said that for Biden to be arguably as pro-labor as FDR, he will need to go beyond rhetoric and take some far-reaching pro-labor actions and enact some important pro-labor legislation.Seth Harris, a White House labor adviser, told the Guardian: “In the past we’ve had very good-faith efforts by some presidents to do individual things, like executive order and regulatory actions [to help unions]. The question is, what about a whole-of-government approach? We never sit down and think about what it would be like if the whole government was organized around the principle that worker organizing was a good thing and not a bad thing.”Biden appears eager to use multiple tools and tactics to promote unions, including his procurement powers, through $600bn in annual federal contracting. That power might be used to organize the lightly unionized clean energy industry, officials said.“We know that about two-thirds of Americans approve of unions from a 2020 Gallup poll,” said Bernstein of the council of economic advisers. “We know that only 6% of private-sector workers are union members. There is a huge gap between the number of working Americans who want to be represented by unions and have collective bargaining and the number who are in unions. It could make a very big difference in this space to have a president who uses the bully pulpit to make this a front-and-center preference.”None of this has sat well with Republicans. Representative Virginia Foxx of North Carolina, the ranking Republican on the House education and labor committee, criticized Biden for creating the new taskforce, saying that move “further solidified his cushy relationship with union bosses; the same people responsible for swindling workers’ hard-earned paychecks and pushing radical, unworkable policies that lead to lower economic growth”.But for all his talk of bipartisanship, Biden seems keen to promote unions despite the potential blowback and is actively courting working Americans in his efforts. “Union workers earn roughly 13% more than non-union workers on a similar job site,” the White House said in a fact sheet. “They also experience drastically lower rates of labor standards violations,” like wage theft or safety violations. The fact sheet noted that 60% of the nation’s 16 million union members are women and/or people of color.In an interview, a senior White House official said Biden was very concerned about the weakened state of worker power and sees unions as the best method of increasing it. “His framing of worker power and unionization has always been a matter of getting a fair shake at the bargaining table,” the official said. “He looks at the bargaining table and sees a woman of color in the healthcare sector and on the other side of the table, a bunch of people with a lot more power than she has, and that’s what he wants to balance out.” More

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      The first 100 days of Biden were also the first 100 without Trump – that’s telling | Robert Reich

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      By almost any measure, Joe Biden’s first 100 days have been hugely successful. Getting millions of Americans inoculated against Covid-19 and beginning to revive the economy are central to that success.Two-thirds of Americans support Biden’s $1.9tn stimulus plan, already enacted. His infrastructure and family plans, which he outlined on Wednesday night at a joint session of Congress, also have broad backing. The $6tn price tag for all this would make it the largest expansion of the federal government since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. But for most Americans, it doesn’t feel radical.Rather than bet it all on a single large-scale program such as universal healthcare – which Bill Clinton failed to accomplish and which Barack Obama turned into a target of Republican fearmongering – Biden has picked an array of popular initiatives, such as preschool, public community college, paid family and medical leave, home care and infrastructure repairs, which are harder to vilify.Economists talk about pent-up demand for private consumer goods, caused by the pandemic. Biden is responding to a pent-up demand for public goods. The demand has been there for years but the pandemic has starkly revealed it. Compared with workers in other developed nations, Americans enjoy few if any social benefits and safety nets. Biden is saying, in effect, it’s time we caught up.Even on the fraught issue of race, the contrast with Trump has strengthened Biden’s handBesides, it’s hard for Republicans to paint Biden as a radical. He doesn’t feel scary. He’s old, grandfatherly. He speaks haltingly. He’s humble. When he talks about the needs of average working people, it’s clear he knows them.Biden has also been helped by the contrast to his immediate predecessor – the most divisive and authoritarian personality to occupy the Oval Office in modern memory. Had Biden been elected directly after Obama, regardless of the pandemic and economic crisis, it’s unlikely he and his ambitious plans would seem so benign.In his address to Congress, Biden credited others for the achievements of his first 100 days. They had been accomplished “because of you”, he said, even giving a nod to Republicans. His predecessor was incapable of crediting anyone else for anything.Meanwhile, the Republican party, still captive to its Trumpian base, has no message or policies to counter Biden’s proposals. Donald Trump left it with little more than a list of grievances irrelevant to the practical needs of most Americans: that Trump would have been re-elected but for fraudulent votes and a “deep state” conspiracy, that Democrats are “socialists” and that the “left” is intent on taking away American freedoms.Biden has a razor-thin majority in Congress and must keep every Democratic senator in line if he is to get his plans enacted. But the vacuum on the right has allowed him to dominate the public conversation about his initiatives, which makes passage more likely.Trump is aiding Biden in other ways. Trump’s yawning budget deficits help normalize Biden’s. When Trump sent $1,200 stimulus checks to most Americans last year regardless of whether they had a job, he cleared the way for Biden to deliver generous jobless benefits.Trump’s giant $1.9tn tax cut for big corporations and the wealthy, none of which “trickled down”, make Biden’s proposals to increase taxes on corporations and the wealthy to pay for infrastructure and education seem even more reasonable.Trump’s fierce economic nationalism has made Biden’s “buy American” initiative appear innocent by comparison. Trump’s angry populism has allowed Biden to criticize Wall Street and support unions without causing a ripple.At the same time, Trumpian lawmakers’ refusal to concede the election and their efforts to suppress votes have alienated much of corporate America, pushing executives toward Biden by default.Even on the fraught issue of race, the contrast with Trump has strengthened Biden’s hand. Most Americans were so repulsed by Trump’s overt racism and overtures to white supremacists, especially after the police murder of George Floyd, that Biden’s initiatives to end police brutality and “root out systemic racism”, as he said on Wednesday night, seem appropriate correctives.The first 100 days of the Biden presidency were also the first 100 days of America without Trump, and the two cannot be separated.With any luck, Biden’s plans might prove to be the antidote to Trumpism – creating enough decent-paying working-class jobs, along with benefits such as childcare and free community college, as to forestall some of the rightwing dyspepsia that Trump whipped into a fury. More

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      The Guardian view on Biden’s 100 days: going big, but not big enough | Editorial

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      Joe Biden’s first 100 days in office signalled that the future does not have to be a rerun of the past. The US president’s speech to Congress this week made it clear that Trumpism was a warning from history, a reminder that no republic is guaranteed to last. The US remains in danger – its decline accelerated by an iniquitous economic model, and by leaders unable or unwilling to remedy it. It is a relief to find in the White House a president who wants to bridge divisions rather than widen them. Mr Biden should be praised for saying he will stop the rot and recognising the challenge to democracy posed by autocracy. But his response risks being undone by an obsession with containing non-existent fiscal risks.The Biden White House proposes spending $4trn, with about half the money used to rewrite the social contract. The rest will create jobs, with infrastructure investments to repurpose the post-Covid economy for a zero-carbon world. The problem is not that money is being spent to fix a broken society. Neither is it wrong to ask the rich to pay their fair share of tax. The problem is that Mr Biden says spending must be balanced by tax rises or savings from other government programmes.This is a self-imposed and self-defeating constraint. It seems bad economics to pay for every dollar invested in early childhood education when each greenback yields $7.30 in benefits. A number of centrist Democrats have already signalled their opposition to the proposed tax hikes. If Mr Biden wanted cash, he could back the Internal Revenue Service to go after the $1tn in unpaid taxes every year. With a razor-thin Democratic majority in the US Senate, there is a risk that privileging arbitrary fiscal limits will lead to laws not being enacted or spending being pared back to match reduced revenues.Mr Biden’s intention to bust a failed economic paradigm is a good one. It would be a scandal if it were sacrificed on the altar of budget neutrality. The threat to liberal democracy is not from fiscal incontinence but political polarisation. America has spent decades running up large deficits with no adverse macroeconomic consequences. In Washington, a debt crisis always seems to be coming. Yet it never arrives. The nation is increasingly endangered by growing levels of inequality, financial instability and ecological calamity. The Gilded Age looks egalitarian compared with the emerging concentration of riches. Either democracy must be renewed by freeing the state from ideological restrictions or wealth is likely to cement a less democratic regime.It makes little sense for Mr Biden to elevate balanced budgets when the country faces existential choices, a point recently made by two Obama-era White House economic advisers. No one doubts the sincerity of the Biden team. The question is whether they have subordinated the scale of the crises to congressional politicking. Columbia University’s Adam Tooze pointed out that the president’s climate spending amounts to about 0.5% of US GDP, an amount 10 times smaller than that required to decarbonise the economy. The economist Stephanie Kelton wrote that to accommodate such large expenditures, the Biden administration “would have to develop a robust plan with a focus on containing inflationary pressures”. These are the arguments that Mr Biden should be having with his party, not whether the wealthiest ought to pay for anti-poverty programmes.It is better to let the government’s fiscal balance settle to whatever level is required to deal with the multiple emergencies the US faces, given the spending and portfolio decisions of the private sector. It is not the case that the government’s ability to spend is constrained by budgetary accounting or temporary while interest rates remain low. The US Federal Reserve’s bond-purchasing programmes can control yields. Mr Biden’s economic team understands that a strong economy benefits the bottom half of America most. However, his spending plans threaten to centre the debate on reducing the deficit rather than rescuing the country. More

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      Amazon’s sales up 44% as US economy soars 6.4% in first quarter

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      Amazon’s sales increased 44% to $108.5bn in the first three months of the year as the company’s pandemic boom continued into 2021.The sales figures from the online shopping and web services giant came after the release of slew of positive economic reports that suggest the US is shaking off the worst of the pandemic recession.Amazon made a profit of $8.1bn for the quarter – $2.7bn a month – beating analysts’ forecasts after a series of better than expected results from tech companies and others.While Amazon profited throughout the coronavirus downturn, there are now signs that the economic recovery is spreading.The news came after the commerce department said the US economy took off in the first quarter, soaring 6.4% on an annual basis as rising vaccinations, a massive round of government stimulus and a steady recovery in the jobs market helped reverse some of the impact of the coronavirus pandemic.The annualized rate suggests the US economy is firmly on the road to recovery. In normal times US gross domestic product (GDP) – the broadest measure of the economy – grows at about 2-2.5% a year, but the pandemic triggered wild swings as the country went into lockdown and businesses shuttered.The news comes amid a flood of good news for the US economy. The corporate earnings season has seen many sectors of the economy from banking to automotive bouncing back from the pandemic. Apple too reported bumper results on Tuesday, the latest tech company to record booming sales during the pandemic. New York City, the center of the US pandemic last year, will fully reopen on 1 July, while 43% of the population has received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine and more than a quarter of the US is now fully vaccinated.US stock markets set record highs again after the GDP report and copper prices, seen as key indicator of economic demand, rose to $10,000 a tonne for the first time since 2011.The outpouring of good news is all the more remarkable given the scale of economic woe the pandemic heaped on the US economy.A year ago US unemployment hit a post-second world war high of 14.8%, it has since fallen to 6%. The economy suffered its worst quarterly contraction in history last year, shrinking 32.9% on an annualized basis. It grew at 4.3% in the last three months of 2020 after recording a remarkable annual growth rate of 33.4% in the previous three months.“The increase in first-quarter GDP reflected the continued economic recovery, reopening of establishments, and continued government response related to the Covid-19 pandemic,” the commerce department said.Problems remain, the number of people filing for unemployment benefits each week is still high. On Thursday the labor department said 553,000 people filed for benefits last week. The number has been falling sharply but remains close to twice as high as pre-pandemic levels and the jobs market is still down 8.4m jobs.Racial disparities also remain. Black and Latino Americans suffered the hardest as the pandemic closed businesses across the US and their unemployment rates remain elevated in comparison with white Americans. Women, too, have been pushed out of the workforce by the shutdowns, triggering what some economists have dubbed a “shecession”. Lack of childcare and other issues have meant that 1.8 million women have left the workforce entirely.But the fast rollout of vaccines, the reopening of businesses and the Biden administration’s $1.9tn stimulus bill have boosted consumer confidence and fueled an impressive recovery.The US government sent cheques to 90 million Americans in March and consumer confidence is approaching pre-pandemic levels having risen for four months in a row. Consumer spending accounts for two-thirds of US economic activity.Consumption growth surged 10.7% over the quarter and the US savings rate grew to 21.0% from 13.0%. Capital Economics expects those savers to start spending now that Covid-19 restrictions are lifting.“With the elevated saving rate, households are still flush with cash and, now that restrictions are being eased as the vaccination program proves a success, that will allow them to boost spending on the worst-affected services, without needing to pull back too much on goods spending,” the economic forecasting group wrote in a note to investors. More

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      US split on vaccine passports as country aims for return to normalcy

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      With summer around the corner, Americans are desperate for some sense of normalcy as the rollout of the Covid-19 vaccine continues. Some businesses and lawmakers believe they have a simple solution that will allow people to gather in larger numbers again: vaccine passports.But as with so many issues in the US these days, it’s an idea dividing America.Vaccine passport supporters see a future where people would have an app on their phone that would include their vaccine information, similar to the paper record card from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that is given when a person is vaccinated. People would flash the app when entering a large venue for something like a concert or sports game.While many other countries have implemented or are considering vaccine passports, in a country where political divides have determined belief in mask usage, social distancing and even the lethality of the virus, it comes as no surprise that there is already a political divide over whether vaccine passports should be used at all.Leaders of some Democratic states have embraced the idea of vaccine passports at big events like concerts and weddings.New York launched its Excelsior Pass with IBM in late March with the intention of having the app used at theaters, sports stadiums and event venues. California health officials will allow venues that verify whether someone has gotten the vaccine or tested negative to hold larger events. Hawaii is working with multiple companies on a vaccine passport system that would allow travelers to bypass Covid-19 testing and quarantine requirements if vaccinated.“Businesses have lost a lot of money during this whole period here so there’s a lot to recoup,” Mufi Hannemann, president and chief executive of the Hawaii Tourism and Lodging Association, told local news station Hawaii News Now. “We’re anxious to get this economy moving forward in a safe and healthy manner.”On the flip side, a growing number of states are passing laws banning vaccine passports, citing concerns of privacy and intrusion on people’s decisions to get vaccinated.“Government should not require any Texas to show proof of vaccination and reveal private health information just to go about their daily lives,” said Governor Greg Abbott, who ordered that no government agency or institution receiving government funding should require proof of vaccination.The governors of Mississippi, Florida, Tennessee, Arizona and Indiana have passed or voiced support for similar laws.Splits have already taken place. Norwegian Cruise Line, for example, told the CDC it would be willing to require passengers be fully vaccinated before boarding, but Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, said his ban on vaccine passports prohibits such a mandate.Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, like many colleges and universities, said they would require students to be vaccinated before returning to campus in the fall, but the school is considering backtracking the policy following DeSantis’s order.Though conservative figures like Donald Trump Jr, who called vaccine passports “invasive”, have started to broadly attack Democrats for backing vaccine passports, the White House has made it clear the federal government has no plans to release a vaccine passport, or require mandatory vaccines.“The government is not now nor will we be supporting a system that requires Americans to carry a credential,” said Jen Psaki, White House press secretary, earlier in April.Psaki said the White House would release guidance for businesses and local governments who wish to implement vaccine passports.Vaccine passports have historically been used when crossing country borders. For example, some countries, including Brazil and Ghana, require people to have the vaccine against yellow fever before entering their countries. And while vaccine passports have not been used widely domestically in the US, vaccine mandates, and the proof of vaccines needed to carry them out, are common. Many schools require students to get a host of vaccines, while many healthcare systems often require the annual flu vaccine for employers.Sensitivity around a vaccine passport is probably an offshoot of a broader vaccine hesitancy. Recent polling has shown that vaccine skepticism has a partisan bent: 30% of Republicans said they would not get the vaccine versus 11% of Democrats, according to the Covid States Project. David Lazer, professor of political science at Northeastern University and a researcher with the Covid States Project, said “partisan divides on behaviors and policies have been acute throughout the pandemic”, but Democrats and Republicans are more evenly split on vaccines compared with other policies against Covid-19, like mask-wearing and social distancing.The term “passport” could also be turning people away from the concept, said Maureen Miller, an epidemiologist with Columbia University, as it implies that verification requires more personal information beyond vaccination status. A recent poll from the de Beaumont Foundation confirmed this, with Republican respondents being more supportive of vaccine “verification” over a “passport”.Miller said the World Health Organization, which is developing its own Smart Vaccine Certificate and standards for vaccine verification programs, has been adamant about making the distinction between a certificate and a passport.“A passport contains a lot of personal information, and a vaccine certificate does not,” Miller said. “It contains only the information necessary to convey the fact that the person has been vaccinated.”Other groups including the Vaccine Credential Initiative and the Covid-19 Credential Initiative are working on coming up with standards for digital vaccine passports with the aim of building trust in vaccine verification programs.Miller said the ultimate goal would be to reach herd immunity in the US, which would nix the need for vaccine passports but would require working through the skepticism that exists in the country.“People are not going to feel comfortable in large numbers, in social environments until we hit a kind of herd immunity, where, when you bump into someone, the risk of an infectious person bumping into someone who’s susceptible is decreased tremendously,” Miller said. 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      Shaping the Future of Energy Collaboration

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      The cancelation of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s much-awaited visit to India is disappointing but unsurprising. India, a country with nearly 1.4 billion people, is currently confronting a second wave of COVID-19 infections. Though all is not lost as bilateral talks are expected to take place virtually on April 26. High on the agenda remains the launch of Roadmap 2030, which will foreseeably set the tone for India-UK relations in a post-COVID era and pave the way for a free trade agreement.

      The Missing Pieces to Avoid a Climate Disaster

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      This shared vision, forming a critical piece of the “global Britain” agenda and the UK’s post-Brexit foreign policy, is expected to lay out a framework for enhanced cooperation across a much broader set of policy pillars. One such area is climate action, which is a key part of economic growth strategies and the global green energy agenda for both countries.

      As signatories to the 2015 Paris Agreement — the international treaty on climate change — India and the UK have sizable ambitions to invest in creating cleaner and sustainable energy systems. This time last year, the United Kingdom experienced its longest coal-free run to date, a significant milestone for an economy that generated about 40% of its electricity from coal just a decade ago. While India’s green energy transition is comparatively nascent, it has made significant strides toward expanding its renewable energy capacity, especially in solar power, where it is emerging as a global leader.

      Energy Sources

      Although the two countries have vastly different energy sources and consumption patterns, this creates a unique opportunity for each economy to capitalize on its individual strengths. In offshore wind power, the UK is the largest global player, while India has only begun to scratch the surface of its wind potential. The United Kingdom’s technical prowess will play a crucial role in supporting the growth of India’s offshore wind energy — from the meteorological expertise required to evaluate wind patterns and energy production potential to joint research and development opportunities.

      The growth of electric vehicles (EVs) is another area where each market has distinct strengths. India, for example, can rely on the UK’s experience as it undertakes the massive infrastructure exercise of deploying smart charging EV stations. The UK can draw on India’s success with battery-powered three-wheelers to develop sustainable last-mile connectivity solutions. Strengthened bilateral cooperation on these fronts will not only accelerate the EV revolution globally but can also serve to contain China’s dominance in this market.

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      The Indian and British governments are closely collaborating around climate action. This is evident from recent trips to India by the UK’s Alok Sharma, the president of this year’s UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) that will take place in Glasgow, and Lord Tariq Ahmad, the minister for South Asia and the Commonwealth.

      It is, however, important to expand the scope of these engagements to include small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which constitute a powerhouse of skill and experience. SMEs based in the UK can play a significant role in supporting India’s energy transition. British companies could adapt their innovations for the local market, while in turn benefiting from India’s strong manufacturing base and engineering skills. To tap into this market opportunity, governments could facilitate SME-focused trade delegations as well as joint-venture opportunities for cleantech startups.

      Green financing would play an equally important role in truly unlocking the value of such partnerships. This would be through existing bilateral instruments like the Sustainable Finance Forum and Green Growth Equity Fund or the UK’s soon-to-be-launched revenue mechanism that will mobilize private investment into carbon capture and hydrogen projects. This is especially important for India, which is looking at green hydrogen in a big way and is set to launch its first national hydrogen roadmap this year. As the UK’s carbon capture market grows, this could support India’s plans to produce hydrogen from natural gas, creating new avenues for technology sharing.

      If one thing is clear, it is that the opportunities are immense and the existing foundation is strong. With the stage set and the actors in place, Roadmap 2030 could certainly stand to benefit not just India and the UK, but the world at large in delivering a cleaner, more affordable and resilient energy future.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Existential challenges from China, climate and more demand new US industrial policy | Robert Reich

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      America is about to revive an idea that was left for dead decades ago. It’s called industrial policy and it’s at the heart of Joe Biden’s plans to restructure the US economy.When industrial policy was last debated, in the 1980s, critics recoiled from government “picking winners”. But times have changed. Devastating climate change, a deadly pandemic and the rise of China as a technological powerhouse require an active government pushing the private sector to achieve public purposes.The dirty little secret is that the US already has an industrial policy, but one that’s focused on pumping up profits with industry-specific subsidies, tax loopholes and credits, bailouts and tariffs. The practical choice isn’t whether to have an industrial policy but whether it meets society’s needs or those of politically powerful industries.Consider energy. The fossil fuel industry has accumulated “billions of dollars in subsidies, loopholes and special foreign tax credits”, in Biden’s words. He intends to eliminate these and shift to non-carbon energy by strengthening the nation’s electrical grid, creating a new “clean electricity standard” that will force utilities to end carbon emissions by 2035 and providing research support and tax credits for clean energy.It’s a sensible 180-degree shift of industrial policy.A proper industrial policy requires that industries receiving public benefits act in the public interestThe old industrial policy for the automobile industry consisted largely of bailouts – of Chrysler in 1979 and General Motors and Chrysler in 2008.Biden intends to shift away from gas-powered cars entirely and invest $174bn in companies making electric vehicles. He’ll also create 500,000 new charging stations.This also makes sense. Notwithstanding the success of Tesla, which received $2.44bn in government subsidies before becoming profitable, the switch to electric vehicles still needs pump priming.Internet service providers have been subsidized by the states and the federal government and federal regulators have allowed them to consolidate into a few giants. But they’ve dragged their feet on upgrading copper networks with fiber, some 30 million Americans still lack access to high-speed broadband, and the US has among the world’s highest prices for internet service.Biden intends to invest $100bn to extend high-speed broadband coverage. He also threatens to “hold providers accountable” for their sky-high prices – suggesting either price controls or antitrust enforcement.I hope he follows through. A proper industrial policy requires that industries receiving public benefits act in the public interest.The pharmaceutical industry exemplifies the old industrial policy at its worst. Big pharma’s basic research has been subsidized through the National Institutes of Health. Medicare, Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act bankroll much of its production costs. The industry has barred Americans from buying drugs from abroad. Yet Americans pay among the highest drug prices in the world.Biden intends to invest an additional $30bn to reduce the risk of future pandemics – replenishing the national stockpile of vaccines and therapeutics, accelerating the timeline for drug development and boosting domestic production of pharmaceutical ingredients currently made overseas.That’s a good start but he must insist on a more basic and long-overdue quid pro quo from big pharma: allow government to use its bargaining power to restrain drug prices.A case in point: the US government paid in advance for hundreds of millions of doses of multiple Covid-19 vaccines. The appropriate quid pro quo here is to temporarily waive patents so manufacturers around the world can quickly ramp up. Americans can’t be safe until most of the rest of the world is inoculated.Some of Biden’s emerging industrial policy is coming in response to China. Last week’s annual intelligence report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence warns that Beijing threatens American leadership in an array of emerging technologies.Expect more subsidies for supercomputers, advanced semiconductors, artificial intelligence and other technologies linked to national security. These are likely to be embedded in Biden’s whopping $715bn defense budget – larger even than Trump’s last defense budget.Here again, it’s old industrial policy versus new. The new should focus on cutting-edge breakthroughs and not be frittered away on pointless projects like the F35 fighter jet. And it should meet human needs rather than add to an overstuffed arsenal.Biden’s restructuring of the American economy is necessary. America’s old industrial policy was stifling innovation and gouging taxpayers and consumers. The challenges ahead demand a very different economy.But Biden’s new industrial policy must avoid capture by the industries that dominated the old. He needs to be clear about its aims and the expected response from the private sector, and to reframe the debate so it’s not whether government should “pick winners” but what kind industrial policy will help the US and much of the world win. More