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Welcome to Bloomberg Opinion I Amy Morris. This has so far been a scorching hot summer throughout much of the world that's got everyone packing a bag for a quick getaway. We'll talk to analysts who say, enjoy it while you can, and if sports is your thing, a new cricket league in the US could prove to be wildly popular. It's only just launched and it's already garnered a huge following. And as hot as it's been, you really do need to stay hydrated. But what's in that diet soda or
sugar free coffee? We'll drink in the latest health guidance on artificial sweeteners from the World Health Organization. Let's get started, though, with a trip to the Arctic. A coalition of environmental organizations is endorsing President Biden's run for re election. It also comes as the president is facing criticism for recent environmental decisions like approving oil drilling projects on protected lands
in Arctic Alaska. At the league's annual Capital Dinner in Washington, d C. President Biden said he knows his administration has more to do on the environment.
Get into one hundred percent clean energy by twenty thirty five, moving all electric vehicles in the future of mege America only five hundred thousand EV charging station coast to coast, conserving thirty percent of our lands and waters by twenty thirty.
But as we are about to learn, drilling in the Arctic is no small endeavor. Let's find out more with Bloomberg opinion columnist Liam Denning, who covers energy and commodities, and he joins us. Now. Now, Liam, you had mentioned in your column that someone described to you that drilling for oil in the Arctic is like drilling on the moon.
Tell me about that, Well, you certainly appreciate that when you actually go to the north slope of Alaska. So the way I went was I flew into Anchorage and then took another flight two hours north. It's a pretty epic commute for the all workers who had that way.
You fly past Denali, over the Alaskan interior, and then over the Brooks Range, which is kind of where the Arctic Circle starts, and so the trees end and you come out on the other side of the Brooks Range and you're met with this, you know, quite unique flat landscape of you know, lots of snow and ice, tundra, strange polygonal pools that form on the surface. And then as you get closer to the coast, which is where the all fields are, you begin to spot these small
kind of outposts of industrial activity. Although they're on land, they what they look like to me was really almost like an archipelago of islands. Their man made gravel paths where work takes place, where the rigs operate. But there's some gravel roads there, but they're almost they're largely cut off.
And I would say when when when that oor man described it as drilling for oil on the Moon, I mean, in some ways he did mean that that the landscape is very odd, and you know, it's very cold, obviously, particularly during winter. But I think what he was really getting at was just how remote it feels. And when you're there, you get this sense that you're quite cut off from the outside world.
You spending time up there have been able to file several columns for the Bloomberg Terminal about some of your experiences, and it's all based on climate change in geopolitics, changing the strategic landscape of the High North. So how is this now impacting the search for oil and gas?
Yeah, so if you maybe a little history will help. So oil was discovered in large quantities on the North Slope at the end of the sixties, but because of lingering unresolved issues around Native Alaskans claims on the land, and because of at that time the recent oil spill of Santa Barbara in California, development of the oil fields that did not go ahead. They were mired in legal disputes and environmental disputes. What changed things was the nineteen
seventy three oil shock. So suddenly it became imperative to develop US oil resources to help offset the power of OPEC. And so what you saw in nineteen seventy three was that Congress effectively force the construction of the Trans Alaska Pipeline, effectively ended all the legal disputes via an Act of Congress and the building of that pipeline, which takes oil from the North Slope down to Valdez on Alaska's ice
free southern coast that enabled development. And so you see, although Alaska and oil is not necessarily the cheapest or the easiest to get, there is a lot of it and it's on home turf, so strategic considerations allowed for its development, and in some ways we're seeing a bit of that again today. You know, if you think about where oil development is on the Alaska North Slope, now, you know, we've really had several decades of decline in Alaska.
It used to be producing more than two million barrels a day. It's now down to about four hundred thousand or so barrels a day. But we saw President Biden's administration recently approved the Willow Project, their highly controversial project. Certainly the Biden administration's body language was that it didn't
really want to approve it. But I think Russia's invasion of Ukraine and what that did to energy markets last year changed the equation in kind of an echo of what happened in the early nineteen seventies.
Bloomberg opinion columnist Liam Denning on the booms and busts of drilling for oil in Alaska that it does seem like a pendulum swinging there. Liam and there's plenty of oil and gas in the Arctic. There's also this very loud argument for leaving it there, which makes perfect sense. But is anybody listening to that? Because even if President Biden, who as you described, didn't seem like a real hundred percent wanted to and still yet said okay, let's just go ahead and do it, is there a race to
drill there? Is there an overwhelming necessity? Is that the lesser of two evils walk me through that?
So I think it's that is the absolutely central question about all of this. I think the first thing to say is that when although there is a lot of oil and gas believed to be under the Arctic, and not not just in you know, under US territory, but obviously also under Russia, Canada and Norway other Arctic countries, I'm very skeptical whenever people talk about a scramble for anything in the Arctic, because nothing happens there quickly, because
of the harsh environment, because of the remoteness. You know, just to give you a sense, most of the oil and gas that's believed to be in under Alaska is actually under the waters offshore. A lot of that hasn't been developed because it's very hard to develop oil and gas in a sea where you know, suddenly everything freezes up and your platform is surrounded by ice. I did see from the air one project there, the North Star project,
it's just off the coast near Prude Bay. From awarding the lease to the first barrel of oil being produced from that field, it took twenty two years, and most companies simply cannot take that kind of duration risk or the cost involved to do that. So I think the first thing to say is there's unlikely to be a scramble for oil and gas in the Arctic, just because
it's too hard to do anything and it takes too long. Now, on the other question of you know, why would we develop it at all when we're staring down the barrel of climate change, I think Alaska symbolizes, you know, a broader issue for all major energy consuming countries, which is balancing that need to address this inexorable issue of climate
change with immediate issues of energy security. And so, you know, just taking it back to President Biden and Willow, you know, last year when all price is spiked on the back of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. You know, we saw in nominal terms, we saw the highest average gasoline prices this country has ever seen, and in response, the President released barrels one hundred and eighty million barrels from the
Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Now, I think it would have been very difficult politically at least for him to then turn around and say, well, we need to release these emergency barrels to deal with our immediate needs, but I'm not going to approve this project that actually provides US based
oil to meet our country's needs. And I think, you know, Willow isn't going to be the last time that we faced that dilemma, because the fact is, we have a system right now that is still overwhelmingly dependent on fossil fuels. Their share of our energy system is coming down, but it's coming down pretty gradually. And really, when we talk about, you know, an energy transition, the main thing we need to transition is our demand is how do we use energy? You know, if you cut off oil supply and cause
prices to spike, yes you will. You'll cause people to change their behavior, but in a very disruptive and importantly politically unhelpful way. And you know, even for a president like Joe Biden, who wants to transform the economy in a decarbonized way. He has to consider, you know, how elections are going to go every two years in order to keep that project going.
Liam Denning is a Bloomberg Opinion colonist. He covers energy and commodities. Want you to stay with us. We're going to leave the frosty cold temperatures of the Arctic for the scorch heat of this summer travel season. You're listening to Bloomberg Opinion.
You're listening to the Bloomberg Opinion podcast. Catch us Saturdays at one and seven pm Eastern on Bloomberg dot Com, the iHeartRadio app, and the Bloomberg Business App, or listen on demand wherever you get your podcasts.
You're listening to Bloomberg Opinion. I'm Amy Morris, and we are deep into the summer travel season. Higher prices don't seem to be slowing anyone down. Families are packing up the car, couples are booking the flights, and the next few months are expected to be a blowout for jet setting. But maybe you want to enjoy it while it lasts, because this could all be a prelude to customers raining in their wanderlust. We welcome Bloomberg opinion columnist Andrea Felstad,
who covers consumer goods and the retail industry. Andrea, tell us what you've found, because right now it looks like nothing is stopping us. We've got all this pent up vacation time energy and we have to burn it.
That's right, that is still the case. I mean, you know, travel is still very much in demand. Some research from PwC earlier in the year found that, you know, customers would cut back on like many many other things before they cut back on the holiday. That being said, we are starting to see a few little indications of cracks in that demand now. PwC did some follow up research in June and it's really interesting because one of the
things they've noticed is that Britain's are booking later. I mean, this has been a trend ever since the pandemic that people hold off from booking later. So it has been an ongoing trend. But you would think by now it would start to normalize. What we've seen is actually the opposite, that we're starting to see more late booking, and this is because of uncertainty over household finances. I mean, as in the US. You know, also in Britain we've had, like you know, a cost of living crisis. We've had
high energy, food bills. They are starting to sort of moderate a little bit. The thing that is now coming up that is worrying consumer goods companies it is the interest rate environment. You've got a million people who need to refinance their mortgage this year. They're facing significantly higher costs and so you know, some of them are actually
waiting to see if they should book the holiday. The other thing is, and this is the case in the US, there was also some research from destination analysts and we've seen a similar thing in the US about sticker shop for prices. You know, you've probably noted that holidays have gone up. You know, holidays and flights have become much more expensive, and some consumers are holding off to see can I afford to go away and will the price come down. They're waiting, you know, perhaps you know, a
last minute deal, or they're saving up to book. They're also waiting because last year and I think in the US you've had some this year, but in Europe last year we had really bad disruption to travel. So some people are waiting to see if there's going to be a repeat of that this year. Before they booked their holidays.
I wanted to ask you about that. I remember last year, all the delays and the canceled flights. I actually wound up getting tangled up and all of that. It was a nightmare. So and just to read book a flight. So my question is Number one, did that damage that relationship? Is that part of the reason why people are kind of holding back from booking these flights because there's a little trust issue there. And number two is all of this something we sort of view through the lens of
the pandemic. Is that the yardstick now that we are measuring all of this by pre pandemic and post pandemic.
So thirteen percent of the people that were holding off from traveling, according to PwC, was in case sorry, seventeen percent was if there is disruption. Thirteen percent was if there are travel restrictions. But so seventeen percent of the people that have that I haven't booked are doing so because they're waiting to see whether there is that disruption. It's definitely worrying people in Europe. It does seem like it's calmed down this year, so that might encourage people
to book. And in terms of the question about the pandemic, yes, we are seeing all this from the lens of the pandemic. We were all cooped up, lockdown, we couldn't travel, and because of that, people really valued their travel. So they're sort of signs that they're not spending as much on experience on things, but they're spending more on experiences meals out travel. And when I was researching my column on where interest rates would hit people, a few people I
spoke to said anywhere but travel. But it does seem even within the confines of that that there are some cracks emerging and some people are being a little bit more cautious with travel. I think this summer will still be really really good for the industry. Lots of people are but they're prepared to pay. But I think going forwards that the autumn winter season and in to next summer, we may see, you know, that might not be quite strong.
And we are talking with Bloomberg Opinion columnist Andrea Felstad about how travel may not be the same after this summer. What are you seeing as far as the impact on the travel industry. Are they feeling it? Are they buckling up for what may be to come. Are they kind of enjoying all the tickets and all the traveling now.
They're definitely enjoying all the ticket prices and the holiday prices now. But that this PwC research had some quite interesting factors, and also some other tour operators were talking about some some slight impacts that we're seeing. So the Thomas Cook which is is now an online a travel travel travel company, they found that there was a bit of change on what people were booking. They were they were maybe going for different destinations and there were maybe
choosing slightly cheaper destinations. So they were going to like mainland Spain, which is perhaps a bit cheaper. It's around twenty percent cheaper than the Balaric Islands or the Canary Islands. So they're they're they're still going somewhere that's lots of family fun, but it's cheaper. The other thing we are seeing, and this was in the in some of the short term holiday lets from air DNA, which tracks the market, is that they're seeing quite a lot of bookings for
Septmber and October. So because of the prices are so high for the summer, they're extending through to those later months. We're also seeing this in the States as well. There was some research and destination analysts that also found that those shoulder months were were quite popular.
I can I can vouch for that summer. I was not able to travel because of the price, so I extended it out to September, and instead of blanging a whole week, I just booked a fat weekend.
You know, exactly, That's exactly what we'll see. We'll see, you know, people trading down from from weeks to weekends. But then saying that obviously sort of sort of also surveyed travel operators and the one area they were less concerned about they were most optimistic about was the luxury and high end because you know, as we've seen in the luxury industry, wealthier people were hit less by everyday
costs and so they can still afford to travel. So it will be in that mid market to value and that we might see some of these changes.
Andrew, before we let you go, let me ask you about how long it may take before we get back to normal, or is there a normal anymore? Do we have a new baseline because of the pandemic and all of the commotion and chaos that it has caused within not just our own personal lives and our paychecks and the way we spend our leisure time, but the travel industry as well. Is this a new normal? Yes?
I think it is a new normal, and it all comes back to how much we miss travel during the pandemic. So even if things slow down, there will still be an element I think of prioritizing travel over other things because we were also cooped up that Having said that, we'll have had two good years of travel, so perhaps next year it might not be such a priority. I still think it will be quite a priority, maybe not quite as much.
Andrea Felstad is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist who covers consumer goods and the retail industry. And don't forget We're available as a podcast on Apple, Spotify or your favorite podcast platform.
And we're learning more about Ross Perot Junior of Dallas looking to bankroll a new cricket league in America, And as it turns out, this isn't the first time we've seen a Texas billionaire looking to launch a new cricket league in the US, joining us now to talk it through Bloomberg Opinion columnist Bobby Gosh, Bobby covers foreign affairs, and he's going to help us out with this. Okay, Bobby, what is the plan?
Rosparrow Junior and a bunch of Indian tech leaders, including Sachia Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft or all bank rolling through the tune of one hundred and twenty million dollars. Major League Cricket America's first big attempt to create a
proper cricketing league. It kicks off, if that's the right expression, on Friday, July thirteenth in Dallas, Texas, at a cricket Stadium, America's first proper cricket stadium, and it will feature six teams and made up primarily of players of Indian origin, Indian or subcontinental origin, although there is a fairt mattering of Australians and Englishmen and people from the Caribbean in
those teams. So this is a big gamble on cricket taking route in America, but it's not predicated on cricket becoming an American sport to challenge let's say baseball, which is its distant cousin, or football or any other major American sport. This one is directed primarily at the diasporas from countries where cricket was already a passion and primarily the Indian diaspora.
Okay, let's dig into that. We want to start off with the history of this. We've seen this before, haven't we.
Well, yes, about a decade ago, another Texas billionaire, Alan Stanford, talked up a big plan to support cricket in the United States. He had a business, he was a wealth manager based in Antiga in the Caribbean, where cricket was pretty big, and he caught the bug and he felt like he could bring that sport to the United States. Of course, famously, he then got caught essentially running a ponzi scheme and was cent to jail for one hundred and ten years, and his dreams of bringing cricket to
America sort of went by the wayside. This time, I think it's a little more realistic because a great deal has changed in that ten year period, including the size and more importantly, perhaps the wealth of the Indian immigrant community. There are now two points to three million Indian immigrants in this country. They are the most wealthy of all the many diasporas in America, and that makes and they come preloaded with cricket. I mean, I am Indian American myself.
I grew up in India. And if you did, then you were already programmed to love cricket and to be passionate about it. And that's what the founders of this new league are counting on. They're counting on people like me to watch on television, to pay for tickets, to go and see games at stadiums, and bring our passion and maybe along the way convert one of one or two of our non cricketing American friends into the spot.
Okay, so you are already a fan, like you say, it's already baked into you and those around you. So do you feel like this has a shot? Are people going to support this? Is there any risk that it may somehow, and I hope you follow what I mean when I say this somehow be corrupted by being Americanized.
There's not much risk of that because the Americanization of cricket ironically has already happened. It happened strangely enough in India when a big cricket league it's called the IPL, the Indian Premier League, was launched eight or nine years ago in India. It was done specifically with very American style hoopla Indian cricket teams. In fact, some of them actually employed American cheerleaders to go over and teach Indians how to do cheerleading. So, if you like, the Americanization
of cricket has already happened. It's the question of the cricketization of America.
Now, oh, that's interesting way of looking at it. Okay, So help me figure out how this is going to work. Why parole, why cricket? How is this going to work financially?
So most of the founders, most of the sponsors and and owners of teams of the six teams are Indians and Indian Americans. Rosboro is kind of the odd man out because his business partner is Indian and sort of, if you like, inculcated him into the culture of cricket, and he sort of he recognized not only the passion that Indian Americans bring to the sport, but he also,
as a good businessman, saw a business opportunity. There's a very large Indian and South Asian generally community in the Texas Fort Worth area, and he saw the opportunity there was a chance to get in on the ground floor of what could become the next soccer over maybe twenty thirty years, and you know, we follow the arc of how soccer evolved in this country from a niche sport
into something more substantial. He's counting on cricket doing the same thing, riding on the back just as soccer sort of road on the passion of Latin American communities living in the United States. He's counting on cricket doing the same on the back of Indian Americans, Pakistani Americans, British Americans, Australian Americans, and Afro Cuba, Afro Caribbean Americans. All of
these communities. If you add them all up, we're talking about anywhere between ten and twenty million people, which is not a small number.
Can you compare it with anything in the US. I don't mean the sport itself, but the passion.
Like all passions, you know, sports fans are nuts about their sport. With Indians and cricket, it's I would argue, it's a little more intense because in India cricket is not just the most popular sport, but it's almost cultural in a way that I suppose once upon a time, baseball used to be in America. America has many different sporting passions. There's baseball, there's football, there's hockey, there's basketball. These are big sports with big followings. Americans interested in
sports can choose from several. In India, until fairly recently, cricket was almost literally the only game it out. A friend of mine, a sports journalist back in India, used to say, if you count the top ten most popular sports in India, one through nine, cricket. And so Indians are single minded in their passion for cricket because for a very long time they really didn't have success in
any other sporting arena. That makes it. And don't forget there's a billion plus in billion and a quarter billion, one point four billion Indians and so it's the single largest most populated country in the world now, so that's a big number. The promoters of Major League cricket in the United States are also counting on Indians back in
India to watch on television. So the television rights, the advertising potential that comes from such a big potential television audience, all of those factor into the chances of this becoming a success.
That's what I wanted to ask you about. But it occurs to me that this particular endeavor they don't care whether somebody like me, Like I'm a big football fan, right, so I've never seen cricket in my life. I would be interested in learning because I dig sports, but I'm not the audience. And I wonder if you were to indoctrinate me, or to bring me along, or to help sort of teach me the way. What should we look for in a typical cricket match. What's exciting?
Well, cricket comes in very different formats, and the longest format or it is stretched over five days. The good news is this is not that this is a short format called T twenty. It takes about the same It takes about the same amount of time of your average baseball game. So it's a short version of the sport. It's a nice afternoon, a nice evening out. The ticket prices at the stadiums will be quite low, twenty thirty dollars.
You know, there'll be some bleacher seating, but there'll also be some seating on the grass, and you can bring a picnic basket and have a lovely day. And the sponsors and the promoters will make special effort to try and educate a non cricketing audience. But they're being realistic. They realize that this ain't happening overnight. I mean, look how long it took for soccer to take root in this country. And soccer is a much simpler sport for
a newbie to absorb. Cricket is, let's be clear, very complex and has lots of rules, and some of those rules are not intuitive and don't make sense. So it'll be a long time twenty thirty forty years before, realistically, if ever, Americans who didn't have cricket in their blood so to speak, take to the sport. But the important point is that for MLC to be a success, that
doesn't have to happen. As long as there are sufficient numbers of diaspora and as long as there is a big television audience who can buy into this, that's going to be good enough.
Thank you so much. Bobby Goes and a Bloomberg Opinion columnist who covers foreign affairs. Bloomberg Opinion continues with yet one more reason why maybe we should all lay off the sugar, especially if it's in the form of a diet soda. This is Bloomberg.
You're listening to the Bloomberg Opinion podcast. Catch us Saturdays at one and seven pm Eastern on Bloomberg dot com, the iHeartRadio app and the Bloomberg Business App, or listen on demand wherever you get your podcasts.
You're listening to Bloomberg Opinion. I'm Amy Morris. The World Health Organization has classified aspartame as a possible carcinogen last week, but even before that ruling, there were already some pretty good reasons to avoid products that contained the artificial sweetener. Joining us now, Bloomberg Opinion columnist Faye Lamb Fay just bottom line this for us. What does this mean for diet soda drinkers.
Well, I was actually kind of surprised it wasn't already on this list of possible carcinogens, because that includes anything where there's even you know, a few studies where a rat got cancer, the radiation from your cell phone, who considers a possible carcinogen. So sometimes something that's just where there's a health scare and a lot of studies are done, you know, inevitably some rat gets cancer somewhere and that
can get on this list. So I don't consider that list to be you know, a reason necessarily to avoid something. But I think it does raise a little bit of awareness that these sweeteners are you know, they're unnatural chemicals, and some people really drink a lot of diet soda.
So is that something we should keep in perspective. Then, when you were talking about the term possible carcinogen, what actually that would mean?
Yeah, I mean it means that a few studies have hinted that there might be a link with some cancers. I think in this case it's mostly animal studies. I don't think there are any human epidemiological studies that show that humans who drink diet soda are more likely get cancer. So what fascinated me was that there are some human studies that show different health harms and problems with diet soda, including some that may explain why people often don't lose weight when they switch diet soda.
I wanted to actually ask about that. Since aspartain has been introduced in the diet, particularly in the United States, have we seen improvements in health less diabetes, lower OBCD rates?
No, No, not at all, And it didn't seem to help lower blood sugar. The thing is that people would go for diet soda. For the reasons people usually would choose those is because they think, well, they're not fattening, they're not going to raise my blood sugar. I'm not gonna they're not going to raise my risk of getting type two diabetes.
Did they compare anything else, I'm just assuming that they did. But I'm curious how aspartame may be different from other artificial sweeteners like zacharin or stevia, or even natural ones like honey or agave syrup.
Yeah. Well, the study that I wrote about that I thought was fascinating, they actually looked at four sweeteners. They looked at saccharin, superlose aspartame, and stevia. They did look at these natural ones, which I think act a lot more like sugar. You know, they're very similar to sugar. They're chemically similar. These these these the four that they studied, were chemically distinct from sugar. So they found that they within a couple of weeks, they actually had an effect
on your microbiome. That the bacteria, the friendly bacteria that help you digest your food and live in your gut, that they seem to have an effect on that. And it looks like the artificial sweeteners actually have an adverse effect on blood sugar control, and blood sugar control is a big factor in obesity and type two diabetes, so apparently these artificial sweeteners can actually have some of the same types of harmful effects as sugar.
Bottom line is perhaps just getting rid of those diet colas out of your diet if what you're trying to do is lose weight and watch your sugar intake.
Yeah, you know, I think this researcher said he drinks water, I'd like coffee iced coffee. There've been a lot of studies on that and so far nothing really harmful has turned up. So you know, I guess it all depends on how much sugar you put in that ice coffe. At least you have the option to put either none or very little in whereas when you reach front coke, it's going to have either it's either going to have a lot of sugar or if you go with the diet, it's going to have the aspertain in it.
Faith Lam is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist and host of Follow the Science podcast and That Does It. For this week's Bloomberg Opinion, we are produced by Eric mollow and you can find all of these columns on the Bloomberg Terminal. We're also available as a podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform. Stay with us. Today's top stories and global business headlines are coming up. I maybe Morris, this is Bloomberg.