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      in US Politics

      Trump's public lands chief refuses to leave his post despite judge's order

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      A controversial environment chief in the Trump administration has said he has no intention of leaving his post after a US district court judge deemed his tenure and ongoing occupation of the position illegal.William Perry Pendley, head of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), said this week that the judge’s ruling “has no impact, no impact whatsoever”.“I have the support of the president,” he told the Wyoming Powell Tribune. “I have the support of the secretary of the interior and my job is to get out and get things done to accomplish what the president wants to do.”Perry has served as director of the BLM since July 2019, when the interior secretary, David Bernhardt, temporarily authorized him to the post. The BLM manages 248m acres – or 10.5% of all land in the US, the most of any agency, mostly in 11 western states and Alaska. It manages public lands for conservation as well as livestock gazing and resource extraction, and critics say the Trump administration has prioritized the latter.President Trump formally proposed Pendley for the post in July 2020, but withdrew the nomination after congressional Democrats indicated unanimous opposition to his appointment, and some Republicans seemed unlikely to support him owing to his fringe views. Pendley has never been confirmed by the Senate to serve as BLM director.After Montana’s Democratic governor, Steve Bullock, brought a case claiming that Pendley’s service was unconstitutional, US district judge Brian Morris ruled two weeks ago that Pendley had “served unlawfully” for the last 424 days, prohibited him from acting as director and suggested that his decisions during his tenure be thrown out or reversed.The interior department said it would appeal against Judge Morris’s ruling.In response to Pendley refusing to vacate his post, the Montana senator Jon Tester accused him of a power grab “in service of his long-held goal of selling off our lands and enriching his corporate allies”.As a former industry attorney and longtime president of the Mountain States Legal Foundation (MSLF), a litigation organization funded by conservative and industry groups including the Charles Koch Foundation and Exxon Mobil, Pendley boasts a deep background of legal advocacy for extractive resource industries on public lands.He has made light of killing endangered species. The Guardian obtained a 2017 recording in which he told a group of North Carolina rightwing activists, “This is why out west we say ‘shoot, shovel and shut up’ when it comes to the discovery of endangered species on your property.”Congressional Democrats also expressed concern with his views on social justice and racial inequality. Pendley has mocked Native American land management practices and dismissed the Black Lives Matter movement as based on a “lie”. More

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      in US Politics

      Trump has made fracking an election issue. Has he misjudged Pennsylvania?

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      In early August, Ginny Kerslake’s lush green yard in a middle-class Pennsylvania suburb turned into a muddy river, thanks to another spill at the pipeline drilling site opposite her house. A couple of days later, 10,000 gallons of drilling mud, or bentonite clay, contaminated a popular recreational lake that also provides drinking water for residents of Chester county.The spills are down to construction of the Mariner East (ME) pipelines – a beleaguered multibillion-dollar project to transport highly volatile liquids extracted by fracking gas shale fields in western Pennsylvania to an export facility in Delaware county in the east, ready to ship to Europe to manufacture plastics.In Pennsylvania, four years after Trump beat Hillary Clinton by 44,292 votes to win the state, the controversial pipeline project has helped make fracking a political flashpoint in the debate over energy, the climate crisis, environmental inequalities and the influence of big business.Fracking was a hot topic in this week’s vice-presidential debate, and the Republican party has blanketed the state with ads falsely claiming a Biden administration would ban the practice. Kerslake was unimpressed by the debate, but like many local anti-fracking voters she is hopeful that a Democratic administration might, at least, be persuadable on the issue.“The direct impact in our township has opened our eyes to how elected officials and government agencies we expect to protect us but don’t … Without fracking, there are no pipelines and vice versa,” said Kerslake, speaking in front of the noisy, unsightly drilling site, which can operate from 7am to 7pm six days a week.The ME horizontal directional drilling (HDD) project – which is subject to multiple criminal and regulatory investigations – has caused major disruption to dozens of suburban and rural communities, contaminated surface and groundwater sources in hundreds of mud spills, and created countless sinkholes in parks, roads and yards since construction began in early 2017.At least 105,000 people live within a half-mile blast radius of the ME pipeline system, which carries highly flammable, odourless and colourlessgases in liquified form; many more Pennsylvanians attend schools, libraries and workplaces in close proximity.Pennsylvanians suffer the country’s second-worst air quality, thanks to greenhouse-gas-emitting industries, and according to one recent poll, 83% of voters in the state think climate change is a serious problem and 58% look unfavourably at lawmakers who oppose strong action to combat it. More

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      in World Politics

      India’s New Agricultural Policy After Decades of Farmer Suffering

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      In India, June 5 was a turning point in the history of the country’s agriculture. The government passed three ordinances to unshackle farmers from the restrictive marketing regime that has managed the marketing of agriculture produce for decades. This sweeping stroke promises to bring the entire world of farming technology, post-harvest management and marketing channels at the doorstep of the farmer. The challenge now is to put these promises into action. The national vision of the farm sector is to double the income of farmers by 2022. This move is revolutionary since income is intrinsically linked to how the markets of the harvested produce function.

      First, the Farmers’ Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Ordinance provides much-awaited freedom of choice to farmers and traders. Now, farmers can sell and purchase produce through trading platforms other than the notorious markets operated by the Agriculture Produce Marketing Committee (APMC). An article published on Fair Observer in 2019 rightly observed how forcing farmers to sell their produce to APMC markets led to the problem of monopsony. As the only buyer of produce, APMC markets faced no competition and offered farmers very low prices. This ordinance promises to increase farmer incomes significantly.

      360° Context: The State of the Indian Republic

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      Second, the Farmers (Empowerment and Protection) Agreement on Price Assurance and Farm Services Ordinance further empowers farmers by creating a framework for direct engagement with processors, agri-business firms and large retailers.

      Finally, the Essential Commodities (Amendment) Ordinance releases farm produce from the restrictions imposed by the Essential Commodities Act by severely curtailing regulations on farm produce. Such restrictions will now be permissible only under extremely emergent circumstances.

      The trigger for these sweeping changes may have been the disruption in the production and supply chains due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The health crisis and the resulting nationwide lockdown necessitated drastic steps to provide immediate relief to the agriculture sector. However, we must not forget that agricultural marketing reforms have been in public discourse for nearly two decades. In practice, they always appeared to take two steps backward for every step taken forward. Petty politics, instead of agricultural needs, dominated these decisions. Hence the officials of the Ministry of Agriculture deserve recognition. They have used a crisis as an opportunity to free farmers from the oppressive yoke of red tape, rigged markets and little choice.

      Poor Infrastructure, Corruption and Lack of Accessibility

      Before discussing the details of the three ordinances, let us briefly review the existing structure and context of the marketing of agriculture produce. The overarching legislations governing agricultural markets are the APMC acts of the respective Indian states. These were enacted with the laudable objectives of ensuring fair prices to farmers and safeguarding them from the exploitation of middlemen. They aimed to enable farmers to sell their produce easily.

      Embed from Getty Images

      These acts created the institution of the APMC, which operates agricultural markets commonly called APMC mandis, the Indian word for a market. Ironically, the APMCs have achieved the precise opposite of what their architects envisaged. In their enthusiasm to ensure stability, most state governments discouraged the rise of private mandis and even criminalized setting up competing markets. This created monstrous monopolies of APMC mandis controlled by influential cartels. Instead of offering fair prices to farmers, these mandis artificially manipulated prices. The management of APMC mandis remained opaque and exploited farmers while claiming to serve them. In particular, small and marginal farmers were at the mercy of wealthy traders at these markets.

      Unsurprisingly, the January 2019 report of the parliamentary standing committee on agriculture noted that the APMC acts had not achieved their purpose. With cartels at APMC mandis dictating the terms of trade, farmers face unreasonable deductions from the sale returns of their produce in the form of market fees, commission charges and other levies that rightfully should be paid by traders. On occasions, these farmers are charged the same fees multiple times. Corruption is rampant. Aside from a handful of exceptions, mandis tend to have poor infrastructure. Basic facilities for post-harvest management of agricultural produce such as grading, sorting and packaging are lacking. Supporting services, such as banks, post offices and resting places, have also failed to develop. If some facilities exist in some mandis, they are of extremely poor quality.

      Additionally, the number of such markets is grossly inadequate. The National Commission on Farmers has recommended that an agriculture market should serve a geographical area of not more than 80 square kilometers, whereas the existing national average is 496 square kilometers. Both the quantity and quality of APMC mandis are lacking. It’s tragic that an institution established to protect farmers from exploitation has become the source of it. It is for this reason that the parliamentary report recommended that creating alternative marketing platforms should be a priority. It observed that the APMC acts had led to restrictive markets and obstructed the emergence of competitive markets. Regrettably, the Indian farmer did not have the right to choose his customer thanks to the APMC acts.

      The APMC mandis tend to be noisy, messy, chaotic and unhygienic. So, it is no surprise that a large number of farmers, especially the small and marginal ones, do not sell to APMC mandis, but they do to intermediaries and unlicensed traders. Though there are no official figures available, various studies place the share of these informal intermediaries or middlemen at 30-55%. The figure is lower in the case of food grains but very high for horticulture produce.

      There exist, in many places, several layers between the farmers and the mandis. Thus, the safety net that these mandis aim to provide farmers is already diluted. The much-maligned middleman has become an integral part of the agriculture marketing system. One of the most significant aspects of the three ordinances promulgated on June 5 is to recognize and integrate these middlemen into a liberalized regulatory framework. Now, they can enter into bona fide trade relations with farmers.

      A New, Better Approach

      In 2003, the Ministry of Agriculture attempted reform after prolonged discussions. It came out with a model legislation for states to emulate: the APMC Marketing (Development and Regulation) Act, 2003. Curiously, the focus here also remained on regulation; the preamble mentions “improved regulation in marketing” before it talks of the “development of an efficient marketing system.” In contrast, the recent ordinances offer a pleasant contrast. The term “regulation” itself has been done away with. The first ordinance declares its objective to be “promotion and facilitation” and the second one “empowerment and protection.” These ordinances present a paradigm shift in Indian agricultural policy.

      The key objectives and their provisions in the trade and commerce ordinance are as follows:

      creation of an ecosystem of freedom of choice to farmers and traders for sale and purchase of farmers’ produce
      formation of competitive alternative trading channels
      promotion of transparent and barrier-free intra-state trade and inter-state trade
      facilitation of trade of produce outside the physical premises of notified markets
      creation of viable electronic trading platforms

      As per the new ordinances, farmers are to be paid on the day of the transaction or within a maximum of three working days. They do away with the onerous licensing system that required farmers to obtain several licenses to trade in different mandis within the same state. Gone is the market fee in the “trading area,” which is defined as any area of transaction outside the present day-notified mandi.

      Now, APMC mandis will now face serious competition and might be spurred into reforming themselves. Further, to the great relief of farmers, the dispute resolution mechanism has been kept simple and local, with preference being accorded to resolution through conciliation. The ordinance also envisages a price information and market intelligence system, thus equipping farmers for determining the price of their produce.

      The key features of the price assurance and farm services ordinance are as follows:

      creation of a national framework on farming agreements
      protection and empowerment of farmers in their engagement with the likes of large agribusiness firms, wholesalers and large retailers
      promotion of remunerative price agreements and a fair and transparent framework

      The ordinance also recognizes the possibility of an adverse impact on the rights of sharecroppers in the changed business environment. Hence, it has a specific provision for protecting their rights. The risk of markets and prices is likely to be transferred from the farmers to the contracting entities. Finally, the essential commodities ordinance clearly states, “the regulatory system needs to be liberalized … for the purpose of increasing the competitiveness in the agriculture sector and enhancing the income of farmers.” Accordingly, regulation of farm produce such as cereals, pulses, oilseeds, edible oils, onions and potatoes is only possible in extraordinary circumstances such as war, famine, a natural calamity of grave nature or an extraordinary price rise.

      Ensuring Lasting Change

      The reforms in agriculture marketing by way of these three ordinances are holistic. A primary problem with earlier legislation was that farmers could only sell their produce to specified traders in particular locations. As a result, farmers have been inevitably pushed to alternative buyers outside the legal framework, including middlemen and direct buyers. Small and marginal farmers suffer from an inherent disadvantage in such an environment. They lack access to market information. Even when they have some information, they lack the capital and technology that high-value crops require. The liberalization of agricultural markets will increase revenue avenues for farmers and improve their monetary returns.

      The proof of the pudding is in eating. The success of the ordinances will be determined by their implementation, which must be carried out in letter and spirit. While the ordinances remove aberrations and deficiencies in the regulatory structure, achieving their goals requires a strengthening of institutional capacity and infrastructure. Investment in agriculture, post-harvest infrastructure and marketing framework are all grossly inadequate. While these reforms should spur investment, it would be premature to expect that to happen automatically. Further efforts and interventions are called for. The big challenge ahead is to implement these reforms in the incredibly diverse markets across the country and to build strong alternatives as envisaged by the new legislation.

      A seemingly unrelated point is important regarding these ordinances. A recent article criticized the bureaucracy for drafting documents in language that was “officialese or bureaucratese.” This pejorative term is used for language full of jargon that is wordy and vague. Such criticism cannot be leveled against these ordinances. They serve as exemplars for other official documents. They are simple, straightforward and eminently understandable. The philosophy, intention and objectives of the ordinances are effectively spelled out in the preambles, which are among the best-drafted government documents in recent times. The trick now lies in achieving what they say.

      *[The author is a former secretary of the Ministry of Fisheries, Animal Husbandry and Dairying for the Indian government.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in US Politics

      A second Trump term would be 'game over' for the climate, says one of the world's top climate scientists

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      This article is published as part of Covering Climate Now, a collaboration of 400-plus news outlets to strengthen coverage of the climate story. The Guardian is the lead partner of CCN.Michael Mann, one of the most eminent climate scientists in the world, believes averting climate catastrophe on a global scale would be “essentially impossible” if Donald Trump is re-elected.A professor at Penn State University, Mann, 54, has published hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific papers, testified numerous times before Congress and appeared frequently in the news media. He is also active on Twitter, where earlier this year he declared: “A second Trump term is game over for the climate – really!”, a statement he reaffirmed in an interview with the Guardian and Covering Climate Now.“If we are going to avert ever more catastrophic climate change impacts, we need to limit warming below a degree and a half Celsius, a little less than three degrees Fahrenheit,” Mann said. “Another four years of what we’ve seen under Trump, which is to outsource environmental and energy policy to the polluters and dismantle protections put in place by the previous administration … would make that essentially impossible.”None of Mann’s 200-plus scientific papers is more famous than the so-called “hockey stick study”, which Nature published on Earth Day of 1998. With two co-authors, Mann demonstrated that global temperature had been trending downward for the previous one thousand years. Graphed, this line was the long handle of the hockey stick, which surged abruptly upwards in about 1950 – represented by the blade of the stick – to make the 1990s the warmest decade in “at least the last millennium”.In 1999, Mann became an assistant professor at the University of Virginia, where he was targeted by the climate denier crowd, an experience detailed in his 2012 book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars. He received death threats, he says, and had emails stolen. Virginia’s former attorney general Ken Cuccinelli, a hard-right Republican, subpoenaed documents related to Mann’s research funding in an effort to prove fraud. A Washington Post editorial blasted Cuccinelli for “mis[using] state funds in his own personal war against climate science”. In 2014, affirming a lower court’s decision, the supreme court of Virginia ruled against Cuccinelli, who now serves as a top official in Trump’s Department of Homeland Security.Mann denies that it’s a partisan statement to say that four more years of Trump would mean “game over” for the climate. More

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      in US Politics

      What does the first climate question at a US debate in 20 years reveal?

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      The long-awaited climate question in last night’s presidential debate broke a 20-year silent streak from moderators on the crisis – thrusting it into prime time but also revealing just how stuck in the past much of the US is on the issue.After more than an hour of chaos as the candidates talked over each other, the Fox News anchor Chris Wallace asked Donald Trump: “What do you believe about the science of climate change and what will you do in the next four years to confront it?”Former vice-president Al Gore – who was the last candidate asked directly about climate change in a general election debate, in 2000 – praised Wallace in a tweet for “asking serious and well-researched questions about the climate crisis”. In 2008, the vice-presidential candidates were asked to debate what is true and false about the climate crisis and the presidential candidates were asked about reducing US dependence on foreign oil.The exchange was the most substantive discussion yet of the climate crisis in a general election presidential debate, said Bracken Hendricks, co-founder of the climate group Evergreen Action. But, that is not necessarily saying much, given the previously low bar.“However, Chris Wallace also fell into several common traps of asking whether climate change is real and discussing the cost of action without the crucial context of the cost of inaction,” Hendricks said. “The moderators of future debates should build on this foundation and investigate the candidates’ divergent plans on the climate crisis.”The debate could have focused on the starkly contrasted futures Americans must choose between – tackling the crisis that global leaders call the biggest ever threat to human rights, or fueling it.Instead, Wallace framed the existence of a human-made climate crisis as something that is for some Americans still debatable, asking Trump “What do you believe about the science of climate change” and “[Do] you believe that human pollution, gas, greenhouse gas emissions, contributes to the global warming of this planet”.Science unequivocally shows humans are the predominant cause of global warming.Trump fell back on his common refrain that he wants “crystal clean water and air”, argued we have “the lowest carbon” and said China, Russia and India send up “real dirt into the air”.Wallace pushed Trump to explain his views on climate science, asking if he believes human pollution contributes to global warming of the planet.“I think a lot of things do, but I think to an extent, yes,” Trump said.Despite that response, Trump refused to acknowledge the impacts of climate change, which include worse wildfires. And he said climate action would drive energy prices “through the sky”.Trump proudly cheerleads fossil fuels. His administration has torn down essentially every federal climate action the US has ever undertaken. And his position on climate science waffles from thinking it’s a flat-out “hoax” to questioning that humans are the main cause and confusing it with air pollution.Biden, on the other hand, has laid out a $2tn plan to invest in green infrastructure that will try to eliminate US climate pollution by the middle of the century.Wallace queried Biden on his climate plans, and the former vice-president spoke at length about his proposal. He said it would create “millions of good-paying jobs” and that the cost of inaction is more severe weather. He took a jab at Trump for suggesting dropping a nuclear weapon on hurricanes – which are intensifying because of the climate crisis.Biden said he does not support a Green New Deal – a vision for large-scale spending to fight the climate crisis and inequality that has become a buzzword for Republicans who see Democrats as radical.“You just lost the radical left,” Trump said.Biden would put 40% of climate investments toward environmental justice, including in communities of color that are more likely to be surrounded by polluting fossil fuel infrastructure. But it stops short of progressive calls for Medicare for All and a federal jobs guarantee, two key components of the Green New Deal.While many climate advocates were elated that a climate question was asked at all, others were disappointed.“Hot and unpopular take: I would have been OK with Wallace skipping,” said RL Miller, political director of Climate Hawks Vote. “He asked a very shallow question with limited follow-up.” More

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      in World Politics

      Climate Disruption and the American Obsession with Control

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      For this week’s debate between US President Donald Trump and his Democratic challenger Joe Biden, the moderator, Chris Wallace, has ambitiously proposed six topics. They presumably represent what he believes are the most important and urgent issues to clarify for the two candidates. The topics are: Trump’s and Biden’s records, the Supreme Court, COVID-19, the economy, race and violence in our cities, and the integrity of the election.

      John Branch and Brad Plumer may feel that something is missing in Wallace’s list. They are the authors of a lengthy New York Times article that appeared last week under the title “Climate Disruption is Now Locked In. The Next Moves Will Be Crucial.” Perhaps Wallace reasoned that attempting to debate climate change would make no sense since everyone knows Trump simply denies that there is an issue to debate. In such a debate he might just follow Jordan Peterson, who in five minutes dismissed the entire climate issue as “an absolutely catastrophic nightmarish mess” on which it is not worth wasting our precious time.

      The Extinct Race of “Reasonable Viewers” in the US

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      But there may be another reason for Wallace’s hesitation. It raises other more important issues, too complex to evoke in the type of reality TV show we call a presidential debate. Branch and Plumer describe the severity of the problem: “Managing climate change, experts said, will require rethinking virtually every aspect of daily life: how and where homes are built, how power grids are designed, how people plan for the future with the collective good in mind. It will require an epochal shift in politics in a country that has, on the whole, ignored climate change.”

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Epochal shift:

      The one type of historical event that modern democracies have no means of dealing with and no hope of addressing even if the entirety of their voting populations acknowledged the need.

      Contextual Note

      After listing some of the types of disasters — droughts, fires, tropical storms — that are observable today and whose frequency is increasing, the authors raise the most fundamental question that concerns “humanity’s willingness to take action.” In other words, like politics itself, it is all about the resolution to act. The proverb reassures us: Where there’s a will, there’s a way. The problem the authors evoke but never really address lies in identifying the agent with the will and how it might be empowered to act.

      The article claims that “climate disruption” has now appeared on “center stage in the presidential campaign.” Trump denies there is a problem, but Biden has announced the measures he would take to address the issue. They include “spending $2 trillion over four years to escalate the use of clean energy and ultimately phase out the burning of oil, gas and coal,” building “500,000 electric vehicle charging stations” and “1.5 million new energy-efficient homes and eliminate carbon pollution from the power sector by 2035.”

      Sophie Austin reports for Politifact that most environmentally sensitive commentators have expressed approval of Biden’s plan. But she adds that “some climate activists say his plan doesn’t go far enough to reduce carbon emissions and protect Indigenous lands from fossil fuel pollution.” Dan Gearino notes on the Inside Climate News website that, while the Biden plan is praiseworthy on paper, it doesn’t appear to be the candidate’s highest priority: “This doesn’t mean climate change and clean energy are top-tier issues for the candidates,” Gearino writes. Branch and Plumer call the next moves “crucial.” Biden appears to consider talk about the next moves crucial.

      Historical Note

      The Times authors maintain that the only solution will be an epochal shift. That means reversing historical trends embedded deep in the culture. They should be looking well beyond politics toward changes in culture, lifestyle and the rules that govern economic relationships. But, as often happens with The New York Times, its perspectives never seem to go beyond national policies and politics. “Nations,” they write, “have dithered so long in cutting emissions that progressively more global warming is assured for decades to come, even if efforts to shift away from fossil fuels were accelerated tomorrow.”

      Nations cannot cut emissions. They can legislate by establishing quotas. They can tax certain activities and commodities to discourage emissions. But, apart from, for example, reducing the size of their bloated militaries, champion consumers of fossil fuel, nations and their governments do not have the power to cut emissions. People have that power. But at the very minimum that means, as the authors have insisted, “rethinking virtually every aspect of daily life.” 

      Thinking and rethinking may be enough to satisfy journalists, but if it doesn’t lead to action. It serves no other purpose than to provide copy for the media. Don’t journalists spend most of their ink transcribing what politicians “think” before agreeing that nothing ever gets done? Thinking things through, Hamlet style, can sometimes aggravate the problem, creating the equivalent of social melancholia.

      Doing rather than simply thinking implies radically redefining relationships with other people and the environment, including reframing our dependence on technologies and consumable goods most people may not be ready to relinquish. The authors insist that while the problem is grave, it’s not too late. Something can be done. They reassuringly quote an environmental historian: “It’s not that it’s out of our control. The whole thing is in our control.”

      Some analysts of US culture have identified establishing and maintaining control as the culture’s dominant core value. This nevertheless creates an unsustainable paradox. For three-quarters of a century, Americans have used the dollar to establish control over the global economy. When President George W. Bush pulled out of the timid resolutions for climate control of the Kyoto Protocol in 2001, he cited as his compelling reason that “mandates in the Kyoto Treaty would affect our economy in a negative way.”

      Donald Trump and the entire Republican Party have never veered from Bush’s logic, justified with this specious line of reasoning: “We do not know how much our climate could or will change in the future. We do not know how fast change will occur, or even how some of our actions could impact it.” In other words, Americans don’t like to think about what they can’t control. They prefer to focus on the one thing they believe they control: the economy. Of course, those who observed how well Bush controlled the economy in 2007-08 or Trump did in 2020 may object that if that’s what they mean by control, maybe they should just give up their global military empire, retreat to their bunkers and let Adam Smith’s invisible hand retake control.

      Embed from Getty Images

      After reassuring readers that everything is “in our control,” the article makes its own “epochal shift” when it tells us that “climate scientists have shown that our choices now range from merely awful to incomprehensibly horrible.” The authors reassure us that even if control isn’t total, we can be satisfied with partial control, which could be deemed a good enough solution for control-obsessed Americans: “The best hope is to slow the pace of warming enough to maintain some control for humanity.” By invoking “humanity,” they also seem to be admitting that it is no longer about the US running the show on its own. Returning to the theme, largely neglected in the article, of accepting to change our lifestyle, the authors then pinpoint the real problem: “Whether Americans can adopt that mentality remains an open question.” The rest of humanity has no choice because, unlike Americans, they have no reason to believe in their capacity to control everything.

      Unsurprisingly, The Times article ends with a reassuring conclusion, though in this case it retains a timid touch of ambiguity. After admitting that “climate change’s biggest problem may be the sense that it is beyond our control,” the authors cite a climate scientist who offers this philosophical wisdom: “What’s beautiful about the human species is that we have the free will to decide our own fate. We have the agency to take courageous decisions and do what’s needed. If we choose.” In other words, endowed with free will, we are beautifully free to retake control. The only remaining question is this: Who precisely is the “we” with the “agency to take courageous decisions”?

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in World Politics

      Trump at the UN: A Failure to Lead

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      True to himself, US President Donald Trump completely failed to address any of the issues confronting the global community in his keynote speech to the 74th General Assembly of the United Nations. Instead, he used the platform to criticize China, to excoriate Iran, to boast of how big and dangerous the US military has become, and to urge every nation to close its borders to even the most hungry or persecuted migrants. He did, however, think it appropriate to support the right of all Americans to own as many guns as they want.

      In the same speech, Trump made headlines with his words urging the world to hold China accountable for having “unleashed this plague on to the world,” in reference to the COVID-19 pandemic, and for deliberately encouraging the coronavirus to spread. The White House cut these words from the transcript posted on its website. Perhaps even the administration’s press office did not have the stomach to publish such libel.

      This speech to the UN was a moment when the leader of the free world — as a US president might once have been seen — could actually attempt to lead. The speech was an opportunity to inspire and to set out a roadmap to a better future. Trump chose to do the reverse. The world is facing a triple crisis of an international pandemic, economic collapse and climate emergency. Trump could only reach out for people to blame: the Chinese, Iranians or Venezuelans. He failed to mention that the United States has the biggest coronavirus death toll of any country in the world, with over 200,000 dead and counting. 

      Nor did Trump comment on the millions out of work or that America’s west is burning at the same time that its southeast is inundated by hurricane after hurricane. These are not just America’s problems: Trump did not address the dire straits of billions of non-Americans impacted by these dangers. Why would he? This is the true measure of “America First.”

      The American leadership vacuum is a grave danger to not just Americans but to us all. Trump’s failure to act early to stem coronavirus infections — a deliberate decision he made to fatuously “avoid panic” — will likely cost the lives of tens of thousands more Americans on top of the current staggering death toll. The US withdrawal from the World Health Organization in the middle of the pandemic signaled that Trump wanted no part of the international leadership out of the health crisis. The resultant deaths will be beyond imagination.  

      Trump has employed the same approach to international economics. His regime’s policy has been to withdraw from trade agreements, set up sanctions barriers against competitors and allies, and complain that everyone else’s industrial policies are more successful than his. Trump has also embarked on a determined effort to weaken the international institutions — the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization and so on — that have enabled the world economy to prosper for the past 75 years. The world is going to need a great deal of leadership to emerge out of the current economic wasteland, on a scale of what was done to repair the damage of the Second World War. We can rely on Donald Trump to be absent from that role, too.

      As for the climate emergency, Trump has chosen to deny it. More than that, he has proceeded to undo everything previous US governments and the international community had done to try to save the planet from disaster. All of these crises are going to produce millions of refugees across the world. Trump couldn’t care less.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More