0. Hello im Adrian Finighan and this is counting the cost on aljazeera a weekly look at the world of business and economics this week as campaigners demand the world does more to tackle Climate Change we delve into the multibillion dollar Carbon Trading market is it fit for purpose or are the biggest polluters being given a free pass. Big data and algorithms that discriminates we find out why women and people of color continue to get a raw deal from Silicon Valley plus president putin shunned by the west completes his pivot to the east. Scientists already suggest that the planet may have crossed a series of tipping points that mean Global Warming is unstoppable the European Union has declared a Climate Emergency urging nations to cut Greenhouse Gas emissions to 0 by 2050 the question is how one method is Carbon Trading weve all come across some form of taxes or extra charges for using plastic bags coffee cups and of course the optional Carbon Footprint charges when you buy a flight but this is a much larger market for even larger polluters and its a growing market the value of traded Global Markets for Carbon Dioxide allowances soared 250 percent last year to a record high of 144000000000 euros a call according to riff initiative that of 45 national and 25 sup National Markets with governments trying to set a price for a ton of carbon companies. Buy certificates to offset their emissions to avoid penalties companies can buy the emission credits of others tesla for example has sold emission credits to fair chrysler and General Motors making 1700000000. 00 since 2012 so how successful Carbon Trading becomes really depends upon china the worlds biggest polluter what its been the biggest investor in Renewable Energy its stepped up spending on coal powered plants at home and abroad and has yet to launch its own Carbon Trading market beijing would like richard nations to do and spend more than poorer nations for past emissions but it looks like europe will push for a new green deal that could see the European InvestmentBank Spending a trillion dollars on shifting the economy to clean a forms of energy the United Nations believes that we need to spend 48. 00 trillion dollars by 2050 in order to save the planet joining us now from london as they hold lee anthony is the cochair of the carbon track Advisory Board of the newly appointed executive director of the Mission Possible platform good to have you with us antony is the trading of Carbon Emissions working. Good morning from a very chilly london yes i believe it is always been a rocky road to get here though we have had a few stops and starts so we started in europe with a european wide emissions trading market. Well over a decade ago and it was going very well we had very strong prices that were driving emissions down across a whole range of sectors but what hadnt been anticipated laws what would happen in the Global Financial crisis so emissions collapsed in in europe and it was no mechanism in that system to deal with that imagine if we got into the Global Financial crisis having set Interest Rates on money supply for 80 years but we did that for carbon prices and carbon caps and it took quite a long time to change the structure put in place a mechanism to bring out the excess supply that was created by the Global Financial crisis thats now down in prices have recovered quite well to around 25. 00 euros and again that market is driving down emissions and were also seeing markets emerge around the world for example in china and some regional schemes in california so i think it is working but theres still a long way to go to get this absolutely right but governments and regulators a still giving permits to polluters and thats a problem isnt it. Well when it when any change you need transition measures and i think what has happened is in when were imposing a carbon price for a trading mechanism we started with free allocation but we transition away from that so for example again in the european scheme 57 percent of the allowances are now you have to buy them for the power sector 100 percent have to be bought for some of the sectors that are considered to be exposed to International Competition from you know their up their competitors that dont have a carbon price they get it they get a certain amount of reallocation but they have to prove that theyre exposed to that International Competition is why some politicians are now talking about border adjustments for products coming in having to pay some kind of levy related to the you know the carbon impact of ok despite the fact that there are penalties how do you answer the critics who say that this this permit system does nothing but give emitters a clear conscience that they can continue to pump out Greenhouse Gases. Well Carbon Market schemes tend to operate within a closed system of in a a bubble so you set a cap for your economy and the Carbon Market is just one of the policy tools that youre using to drive down emissions usually sits alongside other policy tools like product standards regulations around Energy Efficiency and so forth so its not that the emission you know that the value is created in the permits by the fact that emissions are fixed than they have to be reduced some way the system doesnt work if youre not within that closed loop and it doesnt work if if emissions are not being driven down that theres not a cap on that sector on that part of the economy but i think it is critical as we go forward that everybody accepts the Carbon Pricing is just 1. 00 of the tools on a pathway to net 0 emissions say that the whole thing has to be part of a an overall approach i think also if we had started Carbon Markets at a at the right levels 20 years ago we could probably level left a lot of the work so that carbon price is too late you know we we have too short a period of time over which we have to reduce emissions so its going to have to sit alongside other a range of other policy measures to get us to where we need to be poorer nations and so they would like rich and nations to pay more for the past emissions at the u. N. Is in favor of that but thats thats a bit of a Sticking Point isnt it. It always has a sort been an argument between the developed in the developing world i mean its based on an argument of equity that you know the developed world has been emitted in countries like the u. K. The United States for a century now and theyve built their development on that century of emissions so weve used up quite a lot of carbon budget and so you know understandably the developing world is same well you know we should have that opportunity as well the problem is were you know were all in the same lifeboat were all going to be impacted and actually many many of those in poor part of the world are going to be in those developing countries are going to be impacted 1st and harder and they wont they have less. Resources to deal with those impacts i think theyre increasingly realizing we all need to take action i think the good news is in many cases the new Clean Technologies can allow those countries to leapfrog what we have used in the u. K. Much as as many developing countries that leapfrog fixed line telecoms systems and gone straight to mobile systems in terms of Energy Generation it is now possible to leapfrog you know coal fired power stations and go straight to renewables and Clean Energy Sources that are now just as good and theyve scaled up and their cost competitive with things like coal and what we need to do is look at that in and of a sectors as well the of a hard to be industrial sectors as the has been really good to talk to you on counting the cost many thanks indeed for being with us. Thank you very much well as we reported earlier the European Union is taking the lead in pushing for a new green deal and the new head of the European CentralBank Christine Lagarde once the bank to take into consideration Climate Change when its making Monetary Policy decisions i caught up with us both from the Frankfurt Financial Center when he was here in doha and asked him how this green Monetary Policy might work. When you have been at the i. M. F. And world being meeting in washington a couple of weeks ago there was a clear sense that something ought to be done and the e. C. B. Is acknowledging that they want to support those screen policies i would see not what some of been asking less greece creating for for korean assets i dont think thats going to happen but what we eventually will see is a push towards more risk weight of assets that eventually will learn will have negative impact on the environment do you think of this is something that the Financial Sector the. Of the world bank that they should actually be involved or is it their responsibility to push the us to lead from the front bt is the answer is clearly yes because we are talking about a critical situation if they dont lead now when would be the time to lead and how and how to believe them when they would lead by putting the limits of how you act as a Financial Services company in a way that these will have strong incentives to look at what their clients do ins and helping their clients progress all the way to become more sustainable its not the way that that you would sort of cut off everybody else from from credit that its not immediately sustainable it would bore more constructive approach that accompany those clients and take them through the process to become more sustainable thats what we all need to do if thats the case to add to what extent if youre playing catch up here that its almost its almost too late as the should have been happening someone should have had the foresight to have been doing this long ago when we signed side turn your is no more our i had the privilege at university to here to academics which at that time already has been have the foresight. And youve had a lot of discussions but like always in politics the time is only right when the crisis is near so politicians need a certain sense of urgency before they move theres been a lot of criticism particularly from germany about the c. B. S. Monetary policy the. Huge stimulus things going to change do you think with Christine Lagarde in charge now the whole thing there is criticism bows for substance and style let me probably start with the style and and and here Christine Lagarde very clearly said she said she wants a more global style she wants more change you want to more open discussion thats what we what we havent seen the past and its a sink that was part of the of the issue when it comes to Monetary Policy itself there is always an argument in there in the council whether or whether or not to expand i think clearly that negative Interest Rates have reached a point where you have to discuss what the benefits or the trade offs are really justify. Additional easy and the latest who spoke out or some to a Bank Governor from the bank of italy where you would probably least expect it so negative interest right have run their course but of course the central bank has more ammunition its been really good stewards you on carriage of course thanks to cover his ears going to blush. Now every time you use your phone computer an app or a website youre leaving a digital footprint that tells a story about you and that can be used to Sell Services back to you now where you watch films or listen to music the data can be used by algorithms to make helpful suggestions for other material that you may want to watch but it can also give away your sex your age. And you know race notes that manipulation of data thats starting to raise concerns because it can be used to discriminate against women and people of color for example tech entrepreneur david hanson claimed that apples new credit card gave him 20 times the credit limit but his wife apple cofounder Steve Wozniak tweeted that he had a similar experience with the card operated by Goldman Sachs a wall street regulator launched a probe into possible discrimination the new york to pop into Financial Services also opened an investigation into Health Care ProviderUnited Health group after an algorithm allegedly favored white patients over black the socalled information economy is becoming a huge issue for the European Union germanys chancellor Angela Merkel has urged europe to seize control of its own data from the likes of Amazon Microsoft and google there are so many issues for us to discuss here lets bring in our guest joining us from london is frederica counselor who is a missile attack policy fellow good to have you with us on counting the costs fredricka how widespread is discrimination particularly against women and is this partly down to the fact that the coding industry is is so male dominated. Thanks for having me i think a lack of diversity is a real problem in the Tech Industry and not just in the Tech Industry if the workforce was more diverse especially in management and in engineering the outrageous scandals that were seeing now would be picked up much earlier and we also would see very very different products but i also think its important to say that diversity alone thats not the only problem that the Tech Industry has theres a general lack of accountability and the sort of automation and automated discrimination that weve seen just empty fis this existing problem which is the lack of accountability you talk about that. Discrimination that automatic discrimination the problems with facial recognition for example have been there tell us about that sure as the studies have shown that some of the most widely available commercial forms of facial recognition have very Different Levels of accuracy for people for basically anybody who is not male and white and thats a serious problem because on the one hand you could say its great that a system doesnt recognize me but it also means that theres a higher chance of you being misclassified of mis identified i always like to say such technology is a well you know when it works and its kafkaesque when it isnt so you could be flack to something youre not and the onus is always on you to then prove that the system is wrong amazons algorithm is reported to have screened out all of the women in a recruitment process facebook reported to determine that the people were gay if they liked certain posts other any checks and balances in place to catch issues like this. Its incredibly difficult and i think its important that the cases that we talk about on the news those only the tip of the iceberg most algorithmic harm is incredibly invisible so a good example would be you were applying for the job for a job that you really wanted to have and you get rejected but you will never know whether there was simply more qualified candidates or whether there was an Automated System that analyzed your video call and flack to as someone who is deceptive or simply has the wrong personality the problem is always you often dont know that the systems are being used at all you dont know whether you have to discriminated against and if you have them there is hardly ever a way to correct wrong decisions and if the original data set i suppose has a bias then the algorithms will think perhaps but its the norm in other words its the cubans its the programmers the the local problems im not the technology itself there are many different sources of discrimination the data is one discrimination and also be hard coded so there are different sources and im also glad that you mention humans humans are terrible in so many ways theres institutional discrimination in hiring in the Justice System so what were seeing is not something thats entirely new but what is new is the quality so Automated Systems can discriminate at scale and it can discriminate in a way thats very invisible and very hard to tackle and challenge how do we fix this then fredricka i think we need to start with the