UNESCO member states meet later this week on the Biden administration’s bid to rejoin the Paris-based U.N. scientific and cultural body, a move that will inject hundreds of millions of welcome dollars into its coffers and give the United States a say in shaping programs ranging from climate change to education and artificial intelligence.

Few expect any surprises on the outcome of the deliberations, which will be held at an extraordinary UNESCO session Thursday and Friday. There have been no reports of serious objections by the agency’s 193 members, although China and Russia have offered some critical and cautionary remarks.

Yet even as many welcome Washington’s move to rejoin over concern that competitors like China are filling the void, some observers wonder how long that welcome will last. Next year’s U.S. presidential elections are looming, potentially ushering in another administration hostile to UNESCO’s policies and membership.

Still others suggest Israel, which similarly defunded and ultimately left the body, should follow Washington’s footsteps in returning.

UNESCO itself has given an enthusiastic thumbs up to the U.S. request to rejoin earlier this month. Secretary-General Audrey Azoulay — who has taken pains to erase perceptions UNESCO was biased against Israel and woo Washington back — called it “a historic moment.”

“The reason why the U.S. is coming back is a strong signal that UNESCO’s mandate is more relevant than ever,” said UNESCO’s New York office head, Eliot Minchenberg, in an interview, laying out a raft of UNESCO programs reflecting U.S. priorities including fighting antisemitism and Holocaust education.

“In the absence of the U.S., of course others have stepped up and helped, but it is definitely not the same as the U.S. presence and engagement — both financially, diplomatically and politically,” he added.

Also welcome are U.S. dues that once accounted for 22% of UNESCO’s budget. The Biden administration has proposed slowly paying off the $619 million in arrears, starting with $150 million in 2024 dues and back payments.

French baguettes and the Everglades

Located not far from the Eiffel Tower, the small agency — known officially as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization —runs a raft of programs from promoting education and free press, to fighting against climate change and antisemitism.

Many know it best for helping to preserve and showcase the cultural and physical heritage of member states. French baguettes, Tunisian harissa, Finnish sauna culture and Colombian marimba music have all landed on UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage list.

More than a thousand sites have also made UNESCO’s World Heritage List, including two dozen in the U.S., from the Statue of Liberty to the Everglades and Yellowstone national parks.

Even today, some U.S. universities and other private groups continue collaborating with UNESCO.

That includes the Massachusetts-based nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists, whose deputy director for climate and energy programs, Adam Markham, says without membership the U.S. cannot weigh in on key discussions around climate change and World Heritage sites.

China

“You’re seeing China taking a lot of leadership roles,” said Markham, who can still participate in scientific meetings as a member of a nongovernmental organization. “I’m not saying that’s a good thing or a bad thing. It’s just changing the geopolitical relationships that the U.S. has with other UNESCO partners.”

The U.S. first quit UNESCO in 1984 under the Reagan administration, over corruption concerns and an allegedly pro-Soviet tilt. It rejoined under another Republican president, George W. Bush, then suspended dues under Democrat Barack Obama, when Palestine became a member.

In 2018, President Donald Trump pulled the U.S. out altogether over perceived anti-Israel bias and management issues, with Israel following suit.

Now, politics are again driving America’s return — this time, over concerns Beijing may otherwise have an outsized say in sensitive programs like artificial intelligence.

“Joe Biden’s administration has realized that the empty chair policy is incompatible with the defense of the country’s interests and that its absence from this forum ends up serving those of its great rival, China,” wrote France’s Le Monde newspaper in an editorial — even as it warned against Washington’s “fickleness.”

“The succession of departures and returns can only raise questions about the durability of the…decision, less than two years before a presidential election that could bring the party of ultra-nationalist retreat back to the White House” it added, referring to the Trump administration.

Israel next?

China’s ambassador to UNESCO has indicated Beijing was ready to work with a newly rejoined Washington. But the state-backed China Daily was blunter.

“Whether the U.S. will play a positive role in the agency remains a conjecture,” it wrote in an editorial. “If… its return is just for regaining its own influence against that of China in the organization, the U.S. will likely just be a troublemaker.”

Russia’s foreign ministry said it, too, was willing to welcome back the U.S., but warned Washington needed to follow UNESCO’s rules and “should pay back its astronomical debt unconditionally and in full.”

In Israel, Michael Freund, a former communications advisor to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, cast the U.S. return as a “fiasco” and UNESCO “as an appalling club,” in an opinion in The Jerusalem Post.

But the newspaper’s own editorial suggested Israel might consider rejoining the agency — picking which programs to support while boycotting others — to counter Palestinian “disinformation.”

Mixed reactions over UNESCO have been sounding in the U.S. as well.

“Returning to UNESCO is a waste of time and money, and not an effective riposte to China,” John Bolton, a former national security advisor under President Trump, wrote in the New York Post. He called on Congress, with the House of Representatives now controlled by Republicans, to block UNESCO funding and said no current Republican presidential candidate appeared to support rejoining the agency.

But Markham, of the Union of Concerned Scientists, says he saw a different reaction when he spoke recently to a group of historic preservationists in New Jersey.

“The one thing they burst out spontaneously in applause was when I said the US had announced it was going back to UNESCO,” he said. “And I’m certain there were Republicans as well as Democrats in that audience.”
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When millionaire Steve Fossett’s plane went missing over the Nevada range in 2007, the swashbuckling adventurer had already been the subject of two prior emergency rescue operations thousands of kilometers apart.

And that prompted a prickly question: After a sweeping search for the wealthy risktaker ended, who should foot the bill?

In recent days, the massive hunt for a submersible vehicle lost during a north Atlantic descent to explore the wreckage of the Titanic has refocused attention on that conundrum. And with rescuers and the public fixated first on saving and then on mourning those aboard, it has again made for uneasy conversation.

“Five people have just lost their lives and to start talking about insurance, all the rescue efforts and the cost can seem pretty heartless — but the thing is, at the end of the day, there are costs,” said Arun Upneja, dean of Boston University’s School of Hospitality Administration and a researcher on tourism.

“There are many people who are going to say, ‘Why should the society spend money on the rescue effort if (these people) are wealthy enough to be able to … engage in these risky activities?’”

That question is gaining attention as very wealthy travelers in search of singular adventures spend big to scale peaks, sail across oceans and blast off for space.

The U.S. Coast Guard declined Friday to provide a cost estimate for its efforts to locate the Titan, the submersible investigators say imploded not far from the world’s most famous shipwreck. The five people lost included a billionaire British businessman and a father and son from one of Pakistan’s most prominent families. The operator charged passengers $250,000 each to participate in the voyage.

“We cannot attribute a monetary value to Search and Rescue cases, as the Coast Guard does not associate cost with saving a life,” the agency said.

While the Coast Guard’s cost for the mission is likely to run into the millions of dollars, it is generally prohibited by federal law from collecting reimbursement related to any search or rescue service, said Stephen Koerting, a U.S. attorney in Maine who specializes in maritime law.

But that does not resolve the larger issue of whether wealthy travelers or companies should bear responsibility to the public and governments for exposing themselves to such risk.

“This is one of the most difficult questions to attempt to find an answer for,” said Pete Sepp, president of the National Taxpayers Union, noting scrutiny of government-funded rescues dating back to British billionaire Richard Branson’s hot air balloon exploits in the 1990s.

“This should never be solely about government spending, or perhaps not even primarily about government spending, but you can’t help thinking about how the limited resources of rescuers can be utilized,” Sepp said.

The demand for those resources was spotlighted in 1998 when Fossett’s attempt to circle the globe in a hot air balloon ended with a plunge into the ocean 805 kilometers off Australia. The Royal Australian Air Force dispatched a Hercules C-130 transport aircraft to find him. A French military plane dropped a 15-man life raft to Fossett before he was picked up by a passing yacht.

Critics suggested Fossett should pay the bill. He rejected the idea.

Late that same year, the U.S. Coast Guard spent more than $130,000 to rescue Fossett and Branson after their hot air balloon dropped into the ocean off Hawaii. Branson said he would pay if the Coast Guard requested it, but the agency didn’t ask.

Nine years later, after Fossett’s plane vanished over Nevada during what should have been a short flight, the state National Guard launched a months-long search that turned up the wreckage of several other decades-old crashes without finding the millionaire.

The state said the mission had cost taxpayers $685,998, with $200,000 covered by a private contribution. But when the administration of Gov. Jim Gibbons announced that it would seek reimbursement for the rest, Fossett’s widow balked, noting she had spent $1 million on her own private search.

“We believe the search conducted by the state of Nevada is an expense of government in performance of government action,” a lawyer wrote on behalf of the Fossett estate.

Risky adventurism is hardly unique to wealthy people.

The pandemic drove a surge in visits to places like national parks, adding to the popularity of climbing, hiking and other outdoor activities. Meanwhile, the spread of cellphones and service has left many people feeling that if things go wrong, help is a call away.

Some places have laws commonly referred to as “stupid motorist laws,” in which drivers are forced to foot the emergency response bill when they ignore barricades on submerged roads. Arizona has such a law, and Volusia County in Florida, home to Daytona, enacted similar legislation this week. The idea of a similar “stupid hiker law” is a regularly debated item in Arizona as well, with so many unprepared people needing to be rescued in stifling triple-digit heat.

Most officials and volunteers who run search efforts are opposed to charging for help, said Butch Farabee, a former ranger who participated in hundreds of rescue operations at the Grand Canyon and other national parks and has written several books on the subject.

Searchers are concerned that if they did charge to rescue people “they won’t call for help as soon as they should and by the time they do it’s too late,” Farabee said.

The tradeoff is that some might take that vital aid for granted. Farabee recounts a call in the 1980s from a lawyer who underestimated the effort needed to hike out of the Grand Canyon. The man asked for a helicopter rescue, mentioning that he had an important meeting the following day. The ranger rejected that request.

But that is not an option when the lives of adventurers, some of them quite wealthy, are at extreme risk.

At Mount Everest, it can cost tens of thousands of dollars in permit and expedition fees to climb. A handful of people die or go missing while hiking the mountain every year — prompting emergency response from local officials.

While the government of Nepal requires that climbers have rescue insurance, the scope of rescue efforts can vary widely, with Upneja estimating that some could cost “multiple dozens of thousands of dollars.”

Nepal’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not respond to a message seeking comment.

On the high seas, wealthy yachtsmen seeking speed and distance records have also repeatedly required rescue when their voyages run astray.

When the yacht of Tony Bullimore, a British millionaire on a round-the-world journey, capsized 2,253 kilometers off the Australian coast in 1997 it seemed he might be done for. Clinging to the inside of the hull, he ran out of fresh water and was almost out of air.

When a rescue ship arrived, he swam desperately toward the surface.

“I was starting to look back over my life and was thinking, ‘Well, I’ve had a good life, I’ve done most of the things I had wanted to,” Bullimore said afterward. “If I was picking words to describe it, it would be a miracle, an absolute miracle.”

Australian officials, whose forces rescued a French yachtsman the same week, were more measured in their assessment.

“We have an international legal obligation,” Ian McLachlan, the defense minister said. “We have a moral obligation obviously to go and rescue people, whether in bushfires, cyclones or at sea.”

Less was said, however, about the Australian government’s request to restrict the routes of yacht races — in hopes of keeping sailors to areas where they might require less rescuing.
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Evan Burroughs has spent eight years touting the virtues of an Oregon pilot program charging motorists by the distance their vehicle travels rather than the gas it guzzles, yet his own mother still hasn’t bought in.

Margaret Burroughs, 85, said she has no intention of inserting a tracking device on her Nissan Murano to record the miles she drives to get groceries or attend needlepoint meetings. She figures it’s far less hassle to just pay at the pump, as Americans have done for more than a century.

“It’s probably a good thing, but on top of everybody else’s stress today, it’s just one more thing,” she said of Oregon’s first-in-the-nation initiative, which is run by the state transportation department where her son serves as a survey analyst.

Burroughs’ reluctance exemplifies the myriad hurdles U.S. states face as they experiment with road usage charging programs aimed at one day replacing motor fuel taxes, which are generating less each year, in part due to fuel efficiency and the rise of electric cars.

The federal government is about to pilot its own such program, funded by $125 million from the infrastructure measure President Biden signed in November 2021.

So far, only three states — Oregon, Utah and Virginia — are generating revenue from road usage charges, despite the looming threat of an ever-widening gap between states’ gas tax proceeds and their transportation budgets. Hawaii will soon become the fourth. Without action, the gap could reach $67 billion by 2050 due to fuel efficiency alone, Boston-based CDM Smith estimates.

Many states have implemented stopgap measures, such as imposing additional taxes or registration fees on electric vehicles and, more recently, adding per-kilowatt-hour taxes to electricity accessed at public charging stations.

Last year, Colorado began adding a 27-cent tax to home deliveries from Amazon and other online retailers to help fund transportation projects. Some states also are testing electronic tolling systems.

But road usage charges — also known as mileage-based user fees, distance-based fees or vehicle-miles-traveled taxes — are attracting the bulk of the academic attention, research dollars and legislative activity.

Doug Shinkle, transportation program director at the nonpartisan National Conference of State Legislatures, predicts that after some 20 years of anticipation, more than a decade of pilot projects and years of voluntary participation, states will soon need to make the programs mandatory.

“The impetus at this point is less about collecting revenue than about establishing these systems, working out the kinks, getting the public comfortable with it, expanding awareness around it,” he said.

Electric car sales in the U.S. rose from just 0.1% of total car sales in 2011 to 4.6% in 2021, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. S&P Global Mobility forecasts they will make up 40% of the sales by 2030, while other projections are even rosier.

Patricia Hendren, executive director of the Eastern Transportation Coalition, said figuring out how to account for multistate trips is particularly important in the eastern U.S., where states are smaller and closer together than those in the West. Virginia’s program, launched in 2022, is already the largest in the nation and will provide valuable lessons, she said. 

Hendren’s organization, a 17-state partnership that researches transportation safety and technology innovations, participated in one of the earliest pilot projects and eight others since. The biggest hurdle, she said, is to inform the public about the diminishing returns from the gas tax that has long paid for roads.

“This is about the relationship between the people who are using our roads and bridges and how we’re paying for it,” Hendren said. “We’ve been doing it one way for 100 years, and that way is not going to work anymore.”

Eric Paul Dennis, a transportation analyst at the Citizens Research Council of Michigan, said the failure of states to convert years of research into even one fully functional, mandatory program by now raises questions about whether road usage charging can really work.

“There’s no program design that I have seen that I think can be implemented at scale in a way that is publicly acceptable,” he said. “That doesn’t mean that a program can’t be designed to do so, but I feel like if you can’t even conceive of the program architecture that seems like something that would work, you probably shouldn’t put too much faith in it.”

Indeed, a chicken-and-egg dispute over how to proceed in Washington state has stymied road usage charging efforts there.

Lawmakers passed a bill last month that would have begun early steps toward a program by allowing collection of motorists’ odometer readings on a voluntary basis. Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee vetoed the measure, though, arguing that Washington needs a program in place before starting to collect citizens’ personal data.

States also must grapple with the social and environmental implications of their plans for replacing the gas tax, said Asha Weinstein Agrawal, director of the National Transportation Finance Center at San Jose State University’s Mineta Transportation Institute.

The institute has conducted national surveys every year since 2010 and found growing support for mileage-based fees, special rates for low-income drivers and rates tied to how much pollution a vehicle generates, she said.

Weinstein Agrawal said public policy, and the way transportation is funded, often fails to reflect states’ growing emphasis on curbing carbon emissions as a way to deal with climate change.

“To switch over to a system that makes it cheaper to drive a gas guzzler and more expensive to drive a Prius,” she said, “seems both symbolically problematic and to be sending, in the most literal way, the wrong economic incentives to people.”

Evan Burroughs said his 85-year-old father, Hank, who drives an electric car, avoids paying significant vehicle registration fees by participating in Oregon’s program, while Burroughs himself has paid an extra dollar or two each month for his Subaru Outback.

“To me, that’s worth it to be part of the experiment,” he said, “and to know I’m paying my fair share for the roads.” 
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