The Question
Does carbon capture and storage work?
Talking Points
- Russian drone strikes rattled Ukraine's energy generators
- Thousands protested in France over living costs
- European leaders battled stubborn and rising inflation
- Cement giant Lafarge was fined for working with ISIS
- Donald Trump testified in E. Jean Carroll defamation suit
- Joe Biden cracked open 15m barrels of oil from US reserves
- Deadly clashes killed 50 in the Chadian capital N'Djamena
- Indonesia banned cough syrup after 99 children died
- Turkey was accused of chemical weapons use against Kurds
- Science: if you're mosquito-bite prone it's because you stink
Deep Dive
Well, that was quick. This week Liz Truss resigned. She's left her party, and country, in a shambolic state.
Swift fan, swift reign
There is a street in the Melbourne suburb of Carlton that is lovelier than the rest. On it, rows of Victorian-era terraces and wide paths abut a generous, verdant, median strip. It is oriented North-South, and it runs up to the old jewel of the city: the park-wreathed Royal Exhibition Building. It's the kind of street that they name after important people. And George Canning was indeed important. He was a famed English statesman during the Napoleonic Wars and featured prominently in the ensuing imperial arm-wrestle. As England's Foreign Secretary, he thwarted the French and Iberians in South America (chiefly by backing the independence of Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico). Contemporaries labelled him a genius. And so the name Canning still adorns streets, buildings, and geographical features across what used to be the empire. Just one blemish: he had the bad luck of dying 119 days after assuming the premiership in 1827, making him the shortest-serving prime minister in the history of the office.
Liz Truss has smashed Canning's record by an astonishing two months and change. Harry Cole and James Heale's biography Out Of The Blue: The inside story of Liz Truss and her astonishing rise to power won't hit the shelves for another six weeks. On Wednesday, Home Secretary Suella Braverman resigned, casually lobbing a grenade over her shoulder as she departed. That same day, Tory backbenchers were in states of genuine dismay and sadness over how savagely MPs were being whipped on a fracking vote. Party elders appeared on the doorstep of Number 10 the following day. They weren't there for a cuppa. That afternoon, Truss walked out the front door of 10 Downing Street and addressed the baying crowd of journalists over the road, "I recognise that, given the situation, I cannot deliver the mandate on which I was elected by the Conservative party. I have therefore spoken to His Majesty the King to notify him that I am resigning as leader of the Conservative party". At 90 seconds, it came in on the short side of most political resignation speeches.
What an innings. The pound crashed, markets failed, the BoE threw good money after bad to keep the country afloat, and some poor sods watched the interest repayments on their mortgages double. The lasting image of her premiership won't be Kwasi Kwarteng's walk of shame to the staff car, nor her empty seat in the Commons. It will be a slightly browned lettuce in a wig. Last weekend one typically uncharitable British tabloid posed the question (and posted a livestream): can the prime minister outlast this head of lettuce stored at room temperature. If that's the lasting visual imprint, the soundtrack will be Truss's own favourite song, Taylor Swift's Blank Spaces. It contains a prophetic line.
So it's gonna be forever / Or its gonna go down in flames
If she's not too busy with Midnights please tell Swift that we have the answer.
Party crashers
When a 35-year-old Truss was first elected by the good folk of South West Norfolk she joined the Free Enterprise Group — a subset of Conservative MPs intent on reheating Margaret Thatcher's ideas in 2010. It was an exciting time for the Tories; David Cameron has just led them out of the wilderness.
Alongside her were youngish luminaries like Kwasi Kwarteng, Priti Patel, Dominic Raab, and Chris Skidmore. They cowrote Britannia Unchained a book-length lamentation about kids these days: "The British are among the worst idlers in the world. We work among the lowest hours, we retire early and our productivity is poor. Whereas Indian children aspire to be doctors or businessmen, the British are more interested in football and pop music". They sketched out shopworn Conservative policies: tax-breaks for job-creators, reduce benefits for slackers, cut deadwood from the public service. "We are convinced Britain's best days are not behind us. We cannot afford to listen to the siren song of statists who are happy for Britain to become a second rate power in Europe, and a third rate power in the world. Decline is not inevitable."
After 12 years of Conservative rule, Britain is a third rate power. Austerity has worsened the lives of tens of millions of working Britons. Tax-breaks for the City did not usher in a new golden era. The public service is in tatters. David Cameron's clever politicking saw Britain sever ties with the European Union. The result revealed a stark truth: political parties are no longer the locus of ideology nor cohesive organising units. A deleterious economic system has eroded the meaningful social bonds beyond kith and kin; party identification is just one more victim. Liz Truss doesn't shoulder the blame for this: she was just using last century's ideas to convince an electorate that no longer exists.
The next Conservative party leader will face the polycrisis of rising inflation, energy supply shocks, soaring debt, deglobalisation, great power rivalry, collapsing party loyalty, war in Europe, pandemic, Western hemisphere recessions... the list goes on. If Boris Johnson is the answer to this then the party has misheard the question.
Worldlywise
There's a sunflower in my soup
The vast majority of climate coverage piled in on the most boring question: is throwing a few perfectly good cans of tomato soup on a Vincent van Gogh effective activism? It's a cheap click. Plenty of readers get worked up by this topic and so traffic is guaranteed. Here's the unified inkl position: who cares!? Direct action is not burdened by the need to calculate ROI. That's nerd talk. All you need to know is printed on their t-shirts in block lettering. It's all marketing and public relations so let's dispense with it entirely.
Devastating floods in Nigeria have barely rated a mention this week, or in weeks gone by. It is the sixth-most populous nation on the planet and right now 33 of its 36 states are submerged . At least 1.3m people have been displaced and the death toll stands at 603. It buckets down in Nigeria's rainy season (April-October). Some areas in the south, where the Niger meets up with the Atlantic, receive up to 4000mm. It has never been as bad as this year. The damage is pronounced in the farmland upstream of where the Benue meets the Niger. It's even worse just south in Anambra state. Governor Chukwuma Soludo had this to say, "Beyond the immediate coping strategy... there is a national conversation that needs to happen. We can no longer deal with perennial flooding as an emergency."
The problems faced by Nigeria resonate globally. Booming population growth has led to rapid development of flood plains . River banks are denuded. Cities expand without adequate water management systems. These are devilish problems to unpick. The disadvantageous make-up of the nation state is even trickier. Each rainy season, neighbouring Cameroon must release water from the Lagdo dam high on the Benue in order to maintain its own structural integrity. This has a direct and deadly impact further down the river. Our neighbours' problems are our own.
Balls and books
See, we've got all bases covered.
Between 2008 and 2021 every Men's Ballon d'Or was taken home by Ronaldo or Messi. That's not exactly true, Luka Modric nabbed one in 2018 and Covid deleted the 2020 prize, but you get the point. The annual award has been about as thrilling as the three-way Grand Slam raffle between Rafa, Djokovic, and Federer. This year, the judges at France Football finally discovered some new talent. Karim Benzema took home the trophy this year. The spritely 34-year-old is the oldest winner to date. Benzema captains both Real Madrid and the French national team. He was a shoe-in for a goal a game last season as his club won La Liga and the UEFA Champions League.
Barcelona captain Alexia Putellas took a second Women's Ballon d'Or. Her back-to-back awards are notable for their novelty (she is the first two-time winner), unlikeliness (she missed a sizeable portion of the season with a serious knee injury) and controversy (Brits think it should've been Beth Mead, Australians think Sam Kerr was dudded). It's never all smiles at these awards but this year's event in Paris was particularly acrimonious with Paris Saint-Germain star Kylian Mbappe getting a rancorous response from the crowd over a mooted trade.
The Ballon d'Or of having ideas and writing them down, the Booker Prize, was also awarded this week. Sri Lankan novelist Shehan Karunatilaka won the prestigious award (and fifty thousand quid thank you very much) for his expansive work The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida . It is an oblique interrogation of the brutal civil war that wracked Sri Lanka for decades. A war photographer wakes up dead in a bustling bureaucratic purgatory and must solve his own murder. It doesn't bear describing: just go buy it. In his acceptance speech Karunatilaka said he hoped, "that in the not-so-distant future... that it is read in a Sri Lanka that has understood that these ideas of corruption and race-baiting and cronyism have not worked and will never work."
The Best Of Times
Come on now
Embarrassing over-achievers Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci of BioNTech fame believe that they will be producing mRNA cancer vaccines "before 2030".
Smile like you mean it
Can you smile yourself happy? Curiously, this small question has proven one of the most hotly-contested ideas in psychology. Entire schools of thought have risen and fallen since a 1980 study comprised pens, mouths, and The Far Side comics. 17 laboratories failed to recreate that study, and later meta-analysis of 100 studies found that smiling had no impact. But a recent study of 4,000 people across 19 countries has once again tilted the debate in favour of the physiology helping determine emotion. You can try this science at home.
The Worst Of Times
We're only doing this once
Please stop booking this obviously unwell man for primetime interviews .
It's the climate, stupid
Alaskan snow crab populations have crashed by 80% in four years. Billions upon billions of little scuttling friends. Warmer oceans have an oversized impact on cold-climate creatures.
Highlights
The Image
Samoa put on a fearsome display ahead of their Rugby League World Cup match against England (they lost 60-6). Photo supplied by the ABC .
The Quote
"Get the house in good repair before rain comes, and prepare to undergo the major tests of high winds and waves, and even perilous, stormy seas."
– Chinese President Xi Jinping strikes a foreboding tone in his third-term victory lap address. Let's hope that China navigates the shoals of the 21st century with more joy than Xi does his metaphors.
The Number
HK$2,380,000,000 market cap
- This week the famed distiller Kweichou Moutai overtook Tencent as China's most valuable company . While we would hate to take anything away from the baiju manufacturer (a potent brew which should not be toyed with), this is really the loss of Pony Ma's once-great tech conglomerate. Since Xi Jinping's 2021 crackdown, Tencent has more than halved in market capitalisation. It's bottoms up at both companies, for different reasons.
20 bottles of vodka
- Say what you will about Silvio Berlusconi: he's an easy person to buy birthday presents for. His many decades in public life have given us nothing if not an unsettlingly comprehensive view of his predilections (this is a family newsletter so we won't reprint the obvious ones). The three-time premier and tycoon turned 86 in September and received 20 bottles of the hard stuff and "a very sweet letter" from Russian President Vladimir Putin. Which, if we're perfectly honest, will probably be enough to shift Rome's foreign policies.
The Headlines
"Humans are 8% virus — how the ancient viral DNA in your genome plays a role in human disease and development" — The Conversation . We're 8% what now?
"Everyone Wants to Be a Hot, Anxious Girl on Twitter" — The Atlantic . Speak for yourself.
The Special Mention
The Japanese researchers who've developed an AI Buddha to answer questions about spirituality get the gong this week . It was only a matter of time before we started worshipping them...
The Best Long Reads
- Financial Times sits down with Ron DeSantis
- Businessweek kills it with John Mack
- Bloomberg hides out in Singapore
The Answer...
A fter half a century and billions spent... well... sometimes you've just got to admit you bought a lemon.
