Cruise control: port cities push back against ships

This is an audio transcript of the FT News Briefing podcast episode: Cruise control: port cities push back against ships

Marc Filippino
Good morning from the Financial Times. Today is Friday, September 2nd, and this is your FT News Briefing.

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Washington has fired a new shot in its tech battle against China. Tight job markets in the US and in Europe could keep central bankers feeling hawkish. And the pandemic gave popular port cities a chance to ask themselves, “Do we really like all these cruise ships?”

Oliver Barnes
Where tourism died down over the pandemic, there was a chance to reflect upon the impacts of overtourism and some of the impacts on the environment.

Marc Filippino
Plus, our global health editor will tell us about another effect that Covid-19 is having on people’s health. I’m Marc Filippino, and here’s the news you need to start your day.

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The US government comes out with its latest jobs report today. Economists and monetary policymakers at the Federal Reserve are watching these numbers closely. Analysts are expecting a slowdown in jobs growth for August with 300,000 positions added to the economy. Our US economics editor Colby Smith says that’s down from the red-hot job numbers in July when there were more than half a million new jobs.

Colby Smith
Stepping down from that, you know, might not be enough relief for the Fed to be kind of rethinking how aggressively it’s tightening monetary policy. That being said, what they’re really looking for is any sign that the labour market is starting to soften even at the margins. So if we see a slower pace of monthly jobs growth, I think that’s something that will be encouraging for them. They’ll also be looking at average hourly earnings and any movement on the unemployment rate front. But I don’t think we’re at the point yet where we’re seeing the full kind of impact of the interest rate increases that have been delivered so far on the labour market. And that just might encourage the Fed to kind of keep at its tightening campaign until they’re seeing a more substantive move in the data.

Marc Filippino
Colby Smith is the FT’s US economics editor.

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Eurozone unemployment continues to fall. Yesterday, the European Commission reported that unemployment in the bloc fell to an all time low of 6.6 per cent. The job market strength and the risk of sharp wage increases makes it more likely the European Central Bank will keep monetary policy tight. Several policymakers have said as much recently. And next week the ECB is expected to raise rates three quarters of a percentage point. That’s even more than its half a point increase in July.

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Cruise ships are filling up again after a painful pandemic. People are now eager to travel. Vaccine requirements are easing and popular port cities are coming back to life. There’s just one big problem: many of the cities where cruise ships dock aren’t so keen on the ships anymore. To talk about this, I’m joined by the FT’s Oliver Barnes. Hi, Oliver.

Oliver Barnes
Hey, thanks for having me.

Marc Filippino
So why is this pushback happening now?

Oliver Barnes
So for the European cities where places like Barcelona, places like Venice, Palma de Mallorca in Spain, where tourism died down over the pandemic, there was a chance to reflect upon the impacts of overtourism and some of the impacts on the environment. Those flood of cruise tourists coming back is making them reflect upon exactly kind of what level of demand and the numbers of tourists they want to return to the cities and maybe think about a reset in their relationship with cruise tourists.

Marc Filippino
Oliver, can you talk about the specific concerns that cities have?

Oliver Barnes
Barcelona has kind of spearheaded what’s happening this year, and effectively there are two complaints. Firstly, it’s the effects of overtourism. They’re starting to see the effects of overcrowding in the city, the perhaps antagonistic relationship between tourists and the locals. A lot of it is a kind of cost-benefit analysis, right? So the criticism is, is that cruise tourists come into town, they don’t spend very much money because they’re on these all-inclusive packages on the boats, and then they get back on the boat and they leave and what they’ve left behind them a lot of campaigners and some of these politicians say is just air pollution and a small amount of spend. And then the other is the environmental impacts. Cruise ships tend to be very polluting. They have huge effects on air pollution. And also a number of these mayors have been elected on a green agenda, so have an incentive to show how they’re ratcheting up pressure on an industry which emits a large amount of carbon dioxide.

Marc Filippino
And what does the cruise industry have to say about these concerns?

Oliver Barnes
So they’re pushing back on this and saying that they’re taking efforts to move toward net zero by 2050, as lots of companies are. The big yardstick along the way for the cruise industry is 2030, at which point under EU legislation that’s passing its way through the European Parliament at the moment, they will have to plug into the electricity grid at port as opposed to using fuel to power the boats when at port. The cruise ships are making progress with that and it looks like most cruise ships will be able to use that technology by 2030. And of course, that resolves a lot of the criticisms around air pollution. But the ports don’t necessarily have the capacity to do that, and it takes a lot more effort to build out the electricity grid to accommodate for that new technology. So while the cruise industry says it’s making progress, there are going to be major hurdles along the way to get there and resolve some of those debates around the impact they have environmentally on cities.

Marc Filippino
Oliver Barnes is the FT’s leisure industries correspondent. Thank you, Oliver.

Oliver Barnes
Thank you.

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Marc Filippino
There’s growing evidence of further serious illnesses from Covid-19. There’s been a lot of focus on long Covid, with its ongoing fatigue and brain fog. But now there’s also concern about long-term effects on the heart and the brain. Here’s the FT’s global health editor, Sarah Neville.

Sarah Neville
It’s about increased susceptibility to regular known conditions like heart attacks, strokes, diabetes, that seem to be present in significantly greater numbers in those who had Covid than those who haven’t caught Covid.

Marc Filippino
Sarah has been reporting on an FT analysis using data from the UK’s National Health Service or NHS.

Sarah Nevill
And that data analysis showed that there’d been a really significant rise in deaths from heart attacks in the two years from 2019 to 2021. So sort of broadly the first two years of the pandemic and this rise applied to all age groups apart from the very elderly. The over eighties didn’t see a rise, which we may speculate could be, sadly, because a lot of older people actually died from Covid who might otherwise have passed away with heart attacks. That’s purely speculative. But what is not speculative and what’s clear from the data is that all the younger age groups or the under eighties had seen a rise.

Marc Filippino
Sarah also looked at research into another vast trove of patient data, this one from the Department of Veterans Affairs in the US.

Sarah Neville
I spoke to a wonderful researcher, Dr Ziyad Al-Aly, who’s based at the Washington University in St Louis, Missouri. And Dr Al-Aly’s findings strikingly showed a larger number of people getting heart attacks, strokes, diabetes, as I mentioned earlier, when they’d been infected. And the absolute numbers sound quite small. There’s a, just a 4 per cent greater chance of having a heart attack if you’ve had Covid than if you haven’t had Covid, according to Dr. Al-Aly’s work. But as he pointed out to me, when you think of the really huge numbers of people catching Covid worldwide, that 4 per cent will translate into very, very large numbers that he feels are really going to strain health systems around the world in the years to come.

Marc Filippino
Sarah Neville is the FT’s global health editor.

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Before we go, the US has banned a top computer chip maker from selling its cutting-edge chips to Chinese customers. Nvidia said in a filing yesterday that the US is requiring special licences to sell two of its processors. Those processors are critical for artificial intelligence work. Nvidia said the crackdown is to prevent the chips from being used by the Chinese military, but they’re also used in corporate data centres. So these restrictions could hurt some of China’s top companies. Beijing condemned the move. It called it a technological blockade. Nvidia shares were down 11 per cent at one point yesterday.

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You can read more on all of these stories at FT.com. This has been your daily FT News Briefing. Make sure you check back next week for the latest business news. The FT News Briefing is produced by Sonja Hutson, Fiona Symon and me, Marc Filippino. Our editor is Jess Smith. We had help this week from David da Silva, Michael Lello and Gavin Kallmann. Our executive producer is Topher Forhecz. Cheryl Brumley is the FT’s global head of audio, and our theme song is by Metaphor Music.

This transcript has been automatically generated. If by any chance there is an error please send the details for a correction to: typo@ft.com. We will do our best to make the amendment as soon as possible.