Merkel's People Brand Trudeau a Judas Goat on Climate Change

Has Justin Trudeau joined Donald Trump in Angela Merkel's class of "unreliables"? The German view is that Trudeau has become a Judas goat on climate change who threatens Merkel's hope of building a consensus to isolate Donald Trump at the upcoming G20 summit.  From Der Spiegel:

German Chancellor Angela Merkel had actually thought that Canada's young, charismatic prime minister, Justin Trudeau, could be counted among her reliable partners. Particularly when it came to climate policy. Just two weeks ago, at the G-7 summit in Sicily, he had thrown his support behind Germany. When Merkel took a confrontational approach to U.S. President Donald Trump, Trudeau was at her side.

But by Tuesday evening, things had changed. At 8 p.m., Merkel called Trudeau to talk about how to proceed following Trump's announced withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement. To her surprise, the Canadian prime minister was no longer on the attack. He had switched to appeasement instead.

What would be wrong with simply striking all mentions of the Paris Agreement from the planned G-20 statement on climate, Trudeau asked. He suggested simply limiting the statement to energy issues, something that Trump would likely support as well. Trudeau had apparently changed his approach to Trump and seemed concerned about further provoking his powerful neighbor to the south.

The telephone call made it clear to Merkel that her strategy for the G-20 summit in early July might fail. The chancellor had intended to clearly isolate the United States. at the Hamburg meeting, hoping that 19 G-20 countries would underline their commitment to the Paris Agreement and make Trump a bogeyman of world history. A score of 19:1.

For his part, the prime minister is disputing the Spiegel account, sort of. EnviroMin, Dame Cathy, claims Spiegel had a wonky translation of what was actually said by Trudeau to Merkel.

“We’re absolutely committed to climate action and the Paris agreement and we’ve been extremely vocal about this,” McKenna said, adding that she made this position clear in her bilateral discussion with her American counterpart, Scott Pruitt.

She also said she told Pruitt that the accord is “not open for renegotiation, although we are in the phase of negotiating the rules.”

The picture der Spiegel paints of what really went on at the G7 meeting is nothing short of bleak on the climate change front.

Led by the Italian G-7 presidency, the plan had been for a joint reaction to Trump's withdrawal, an affirmation from the remaining six leading industrial nations: We remain loyal to Paris.

Suddenly, though, Britain and Japan no longer wanted to be part of it. British Prime Minister Theresa May didn't want to damage relations with Trump, since she would need him in the event of a hard Brexit, the Chancellery surmised last week. And given the tensions with North Korea, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe couldn't put his country's alliance with the U.S. at risk. In other words: Climate policy is great, but when it comes to national interests, it is secondary.

Climate change is now the expendable priority? Trump has browbeaten the consensus?

America, it seems, will remain the world's power broker for the time being.

When the most powerful heads of state and government gather in Hamburg in less than a month, that fact could make things difficult for the event's German hosts, and not just when it comes to climate policy. The international situation hasn't been this unclear in a very long time and it is impossible to predict how the meeting participants will act and how the summit will unfold. There are "so many fault lines," says a source in the Chancellery: The battle for free trade and protectionism, the war in Syria, the Qatar crisis and the ongoing fighting in Ukraine all pose a threat to summit bonhomie.

In internal discussions, a list of unpredictable variables has been drawn up. At the very top is Donald Trump. 

...

Merkel's advisers are working on an "Action Plan on Climate, Energy and Growth," a document that had initially been planned for the 19 in Merkel's original 19:1 calculation. But hope is fading that enough heads of state and government can be found to sign the document. Thirteen pages long, the paper asks signatories to commit themselves to "the restructuring of energy systems consistent with Paris" and to their "nationally determined contributions" to cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

For the Americans, the document is an imposition. It includes a number of items in which the Paris Agreement is expressly affirmed and substantiated - the pact that Trump has just withdrawn from. "Our actions are guided by the Paris Agreement," the document states, the goal of which is that of "holding global temperature increases to well below 2 degrees." The paper also discusses the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 and the $50 billion that industrialized nations have pledged to make available to help developing nations reach their targets. An array of items that, as has recently become apparent, Trump has little use for. 

Throwing in the towel? Not quite, perhaps.

On the issue of climate, the decisive question will be whether the Germans are willing to seek conflict with Trump. But it currently doesn't look as though they are, with government officials eager to avoid turning the climate statement into an instrument of power politics. Instead, Merkel is likely to retreat to a role that suits her better anyway: that of mediator. As the host, officials say, Germany will focus on playing intermediary at the summit.

On the other hand, though, Merkel also isn't interested in the type of compromise proposed by Trudeau. After the G-7, she said that climate protection was too important to her to engage in compromise.

Ultimately, the end result could be that the issue is largely ignored. The G-20 isn't a climate conference, officials are saying, and the conflicts might be better suited for the next global climate summit, scheduled to take place in Bonn at the end of the year.

Meanwhile, Der Spiegel has responded to Trudeau's request for a retraction:

DER SPIEGEL would like to stress that the article did not claim Prime Minster Justin Trudeau told chancellor Angela Merkel that he would call his commitment to the Paris Agreement into question. However, sources within the government in Berlin told DER SPIEGEL that the prime minister suggested to Angela Merkel to keep references to the Paris treaty out of the G-20 declaration in Hamburg. This would allow U.S. President Donald Trump to sign the planned declaration on energy.

There's a Reason the Dodo Bird Went Extinct.

Sometimes pending change is difficult to imagine much less accept. That's okay for you and me but we expect something a good deal better from those who would govern us. That's why we give them a share of our income and the power to employ the experts that we, individually, could never afford so that the near future could be revealed to them and enable them to act for the common good.

The "common good." I know. I typed that with a straight face but I couldn't stifle the laugh more than a few seconds. Oh well.

Here's the thing. There are credible arguments being made that we are on the verge of major change. One of these changes is said to be the approaching end of the internal combustion engine. As someone who grew up with the car culture, living not far from America's Motor City, the demise of the gasoline or diesel powered auto isn't easy to accept but I could be wrong.

Back in 2015, Trump's favourite investment bank, Deutsche Bank, released a report predicting a bright future for solar power. The bank cautioned investors to think twice about putting their money into conventional (coal, oil and gas powered) electrical utilities predicting they could be going the way of the Dodo bird. As solar panel and electrical storage costs fell, the bank's consultants envisioned a world, including relatively sun-free Germany, where the average householder would generate his own power, enough to supply all of the family needs and charge the affordable family electric car.  Sure enough, solar panels have been falling in price. No argument there.

Now there's a report predicting an early demise for car dealerships across North America.

According to a study from RethinkX, an independent think tank in San Francisco, greater demand for electric cars, coupled with increased demand for ride sharing, will eventually eliminate the need for dealerships altogether.

The authors of the report — technology investor James Arbib and Stanford University economist Tony Seba — aren't the first to prognosticate the death of dealerships, but it is the speed with which they think it will happen that is notable.

They believe it will occur in the next seven years.

It's the "radically lower cost" of ride-sharing and electric vehicles that "really drives the speed and the adoption scale of this disruption we're forecasting," said Arbib.

...

Arbib and Seba believe that due to the composition of an electric engine, people will spend less time bringing in their cars to dealerships for repairs and servicing.

"You only have 20 moving parts in the power train of an electric vehicle, but 2,000 in the power train of a gasoline vehicle, so there is far less to go wrong," said Arbib.

According to the Canadian Automobile Association, the average cost of maintenance and repair on a gas-powered car is just over $1,000 per year, or $0.07 per kilometre. This number goes up depending on the age of the vehicle and distance travelled.

Electric vehicles could last longer. Right now, Tesla is offering infinite kilometre warranties. Arbib expects the lifetime of these vehicles to be about 500,000 miles (approximately 800,000 km) in the early 2020s, and potentially a million miles by the end of that decade.

500,000 miles? For a lot of us that's a lifetime of driving and the idea of doing it in an affordable, emissions free car that you fuel up at home from your solar panels is, frankly, irresistible.

Which brings us back to the question of our supposedly science-loving political leadership. Have they heard about this? What are their science types - the experts you and I provide to them - telling them? What sort of advice are they getting? But, if they haven't heard about this, if they haven't been briefed on this, if they haven't received analysis and advice, why not?

And why, if this information is credible, is our federal government (and our western provincial governments) so frantically doubling down on bitumen extraction and export. That's entirely counter-intuitive.

Jeez, wouldn't it be great to have those questions answered?

This Was Bound to Happen. Ivanka Under the Spotlight.

A buffoon of a president, almost as unpopular at home as he is abroad. His glamorous fashionista daughter hawking her signature brand of clothing and accessories. A ticket to Indonesia. Enter The Guardian. Oh, dear, what can the matter be?


The reality of working in a factory making clothes for Ivanka Trump’s label has been laid bare, with employees speaking of being paid so little they cannot live with their children, anti-union intimidation and women being offered a bonus if they don’t take time off while menstruating.

The Guardian has spoken to more than a dozen workers at the fashion label’s factory in Subang, Indonesia, where employees describe being paid one of the lowest minimum wages in Asia and there are claims of impossibly high production targets and sporadically compensated overtime.

The workers’ complaints come only a week after labour activists investigating possible abuses at a Chinese factory that makes Ivanka Trump shoes disappeared into police custody.

Oh well, it's still short of actual slavery.

Chief Justice McLachlin Giving Up the Gavel

She's done a fine job for the past 17 years as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada.  That's coming to an end on December 15th when Beverley McLachlin bids the court adieu.


McLachlin advanced collegial relations among Type A judges and lawyers where cliques had often formed, pushing for consensus and clearer statements of Canadian law. Under her administration, backlogs cleared, and the court made leaps in public outreach.

She was the target of Conservative critics for leading a judicially “activist” court that thwarted the will of Parliament, but she always rejected that label, and argued it was elected legislators who tasked judges with implementing the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The 1982 constitution gave courts the ability to overturn laws that limited rights in an unreasonable and unjustifiable way.

Last fall, in an exclusive interview McLachlin told the Star she felt she still had work to do to integrate an expected new judge. With the arrival of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s first appointment, Malcolm Rowe, the bench had a full complement for the past fall, winter and spring session.

I'm deeply grateful to McLachlin for leading the Supreme Court during the Harper decade and, by staying faithful to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, showing the courage to thwart his excesses.

As for the current prime minister, his office released a statement loaded with the typical gushy words and yet his government still refuses to accept the McLachlin court's per curiam decision in the Carter case.  Deeds, not words, Justin.

Oh Yeah, Thucydides, That Guy. Remember Him?

You'll have to go back to the fifth century B.C. when the Athenian, Thucydides, looked at Athens and Sparta and pondered whether an aggressive, rising power challenging a dominant power could ever have a peaceful outcome.

Graham Allison's book, "Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides Trap?" looks to the past for insights on our near future.

History, according to Allison, isn't encouraging. There have been sixteen of these occasions. Twelve of them resulted in wars. Twelve for sixteen or two for three is terrific in baseball but a lousy result in geopolitics. From Bloomberg:


For three-quarters of a century, the U.S. has been the dominant world power. China is now challenging that hegemony economically, politically and militarily. Both countries, with vastly different political systems, histories and values, believe in their own exceptionalism.

The two nations, Allison argues, are "currently on a collision course for war," which he says can be averted only if both demonstrate skill and "take difficult and painful actions to avert it."

I've known Allison for almost four decades. He's been sweeping in and out of government, serving five Republican and Democratic administrations from Washington and his perch at Harvard. He's a first-class academic with the instincts of a first-rate politician. He brings to the "Thucydides Trap" an impressive sweep of history and geopolitical and military knowledge. Unlike some academics, he writes interestingly.

Allison analyzes why so many rising powers ended up in wars with established ones, and why some didn't. The best contemporary examples are the German rise that led to World War I contrasted with the confrontation between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, which was kept from escalating into hot war for more than four decades.

...

The rise of China offers a classic Thucydides trap. In 1980, China's economy was only a tenth the size of the U.S. economy. By 2040, Allison reckons, it could be three times larger. China considers itself the most important power in Asia, irrespective of U.S. commitments and alliances with allies in the region. With President Donald Trump presiding over a White House hostile to international institutions, Chinese President Xi Jinping has at least a claim on the title of premier global leader.

Allison depicts plausible scenarios of how conflicts between these two superpowers could break out: disputes over Taiwan or the South China Sea, or an accidental provocation by a third party -- it was the assassination of an Austrian archduke by a Serbian terrorist that triggered World War I -- or, less likely, a quarrel related to economic competition.

...

Allison isn't a pessimist. He argues that with skillful statecraft and political sensitivity these two superpowers can avoid war.

Xi is a ruthless autocrat, but a smart one with a sense of history and China's customary patience.

In the U.S., by contrast, the current commander-in-chief shows little interest in history and is irrational, insecure and impulsive.

That's scary.

My take?  I doubt that China's economy will be three times larger than America's by 2040. For a host of reasons - geopolitical, demographic, environmental and ecological - I suspect China may be already close to her zenith.

This reminds me of a paper I read a couple of years ago written by three prominent Chinese academics in which they explored growth and the Chinese government's options for controlling it. They noted that the entrepreneurial class in China and India aspire to Western affluence as do the remainder of their populations. However, given the sheer size of those two countries' populations, there are not nearly enough resources on this planet to provide that standard of living.  The only solution to this paradox they foresaw was to create "islands of affluence" floating atop a sea of relative poverty. This would require iron fist policies to suppress social upheaval over inequality facilitated by the politbureau. That's a major destabilizing event and internal instability can result in external aggression. 

Factors such as these may actually increase the risk of conflict between major powers especially should the Chinese pursue a "lebensraum" policy through southeast Asia and Asia Pacific.

In Case You Missed It Last Night

Once again, John Oliver hit it out of the park:


 

The Age of Anger

I feel it. You do too. We all do if at somewhat different levels.

Chris Hedges writes that the Age of Anger is the entirely predictable, even inevitable outcome of late stage neoliberalism.  Hedges, in reviewing the writings of Pankaj Mishra, suggests that we're not nearing the edge of an abyss, we're already beyond it:

The nihilism and rage sweeping across the globe are not generated by warped ideologies or medieval religious beliefs. These destructive forces have their roots in the obliterating of social, cultural and religious traditions by modernization and the consumer society, the disastrous attempts by the United States to carry out regime change, often through coups and wars, and the utopian neoliberal ideology that has concentrated wealth in the hands of a tiny cabal of corrupt global oligarchs.

This vast, global project of social engineering during the last century persuaded hundreds of millions of people, as Pankaj Mishra writes in “The Age of Anger: A History of the Present,” “to renounce—and often scorn—a world of the past that had endured for thousands of years, and to undertake a gamble of creating modern citizens who would be secular, enlightened, cultured and heroic.” The project has been a spectacular failure.

...

This rage is expressed in many forms—Hindu nationalism, protofascism, jihadism, the Christian right, anarchic violence and others. But the various forms of ressentiment spring from the same deep wells of global despair. This ressentiment “poisons civil society and undermines political liberty,” Mishra writes, and it is fueling “a global turn to authoritarianism and toxic forms of chauvinism.”

Western elites, rather than accept their responsibility for the global anarchy, self-servingly define the clash as one between the values of the enlightened West and medieval barbarians. They see in the extreme nationalists, religious fundamentalists and jihadists an inchoate and inexplicable irrationality that can be quelled only with force. They have yet to grasp that the disenfranchised do not hate us for our values; they hate us because of our duplicity, use of indiscriminate industrial violence on their nations and communities and our hypocrisy. The dispossessed grasp the true message of the West to the rest of the planet: We have everything, and if you try to take it away from us we will kill you.

...

The proponents of globalization promised to lift workers across the planet into the middle class and instill democratic values and scientific rationalism. Religious and ethnic tensions would be alleviated or eradicated. This global marketplace would create a peaceful, prosperous community of nations. All we had to do was get government out of the way and kneel before market demands, held up as the ultimate form of progress and rationality.

Neoliberalism, in the name of this absurd utopia, stripped away government regulations and laws that once protected the citizen from the worst excesses of predatory capitalism. It created free trade agreements that allowed trillions of corporate dollars to be transferred to offshore accounts to avoid taxation and jobs to flee to sweatshops in China and the global south where workers live in conditions that replicate slavery. Social service programs and public services were slashed or privatized. Mass culture, including schools and the press, indoctrinated an increasingly desperate population to take part in the global reality show of capitalism, a “war of all against all.”

What we were never told was that the game was fixed. We were always condemned to lose. Our cities were deindustrialized and fell into decay. Wages declined. Our working class became impoverished. Endless war became, cynically, a lucrative business. And the world’s wealth was seized by a tiny group of global oligarchs. Kleptocracies, such as the one now installed in Washington, brazenly stole from the people. Democratic idealism became a joke. We are now knit together, as Mishra writes, only “by commerce and technology,” forces that Hannah Arendt called “negative solidarity.”

...

The terrorist attacks in Paris or London were driven by the same ressentiment, Mishra points out, as that which led Timothy McVey to bomb the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168, including 19 children, and injuring 684. And when the American was imprisoned in Florence, Colo., the prisoner in the adjacent cell was Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, the mastermind of the first attack on the World Trade Center, in 1993. After McVey was executed, Yousef commented, “I never have [known] anyone in my life who has so similar a personality to my own as his.”

Mishra writes, “Malignant zealots have emerged in the very heart of the democratic West after a decade of political and economic tumult; the simple explanatory paradigm set in stone soon after the attacks of 9/11—Islam-inspired terrorism versus modernity—lies in ruins.” The United States, aside from suffering periodic mass killings in schools, malls and movie theaters, has seen homegrown terrorists strike the Boston Marathon, a South Carolina church, Tennessee military facilities, a Texas Army base and elsewhere.

“The modern West can no longer be distinguished from its apparent enemies,” Mishra notes. The hagiography of the U.S. Navy sniper Chris Kyle—who had a tattoo of a red Crusader cross and called the Iraq War a battle against “savage, desperate evil”—in Clint Eastwood’s movie “American Sniper” celebrates the binary worldview adopted by jihadists who deify their suicide bombers.

...

Donald Trump, given the political, economic and cultural destruction carried out by neoliberalism, is not an aberration. He is the result of a market society and capitalist democracy that has ceased to function. An angry and alienated underclass, now making up as much as half the population of the United States, is entranced by electronic hallucinations that take the place of literacy. These Americans take a perverse and almost diabolical delight in demagogues such as Trump that express contempt for and openly flout the traditional rules and rituals of a power structure that preys upon them.

Mishra finds a similar situation in his own country, India. “In their indifference to the common good, single-minded pursuit of private happiness, and narcissistic identification with an apparently ruthless strongman and uninhibited loudmouth, [Indian Prime Minister Narendra] Modi’s angry voters mirror many electorates around the world—people gratified rather than appalled by trash-talk and the slaughter of old conventions,” he writes. “The new horizons of individual desire and fear opened up by the neoliberal world economy do not favour democracy or human rights.”

...

Philosopher George Santayana foresaw that America’s obsessive individualistic culture of competition and mimicry would eventually incite “a lava-wave of primitive blindness and violence.” The inability to be self-critical and self-aware, coupled with the cult of the self, would lead to a collective suicide. Cultural historian Carl Schorske in “Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture” wrote that Europe’s descent into fascism was inevitable once it cut the “cord of consciousness.” And, with the rise of Trump, it is clear the “cord of consciousness” has also been severed in the twilight days of the American empire. Once we no longer acknowledge or understand our own capacity for evil, once we no longer know ourselves, we become monsters who devour others and finally devour ourselves.

“Totalitarianism with its tens of millions of victims was identified as a malevolent reaction to the benevolent Enlightenment tradition of rationalism, humanism, universalism and liberal democracy—a tradition seen as an unproblematic norm,” Mishra writes. “It was clearly too disconcerting to acknowledge that totalitarian politics crystallized the ideological currents (scientific racism, jingoistic nationalism, imperialism, technicism, aestheticized politics, utopianism, social engineering and the violent struggle for existence) flowing through all of Europe in the late nineteenth century.”

Mishra knows what happens when people are discarded onto the dung heap of history. He knows what endless wars, waged in the name of democracy and Western civilization, engender among their victims. He knows what drives people, whether they are at a Trump rally or a radical mosque in Pakistan, to lust after violence. History informs the present. We are afflicted by what writer Albert Camus called “autointoxication, the malignant secretion of one’s preconceived impotence inside the enclosure of the self.” And until this “autointoxication” is addressed, the rage and violence, at home and abroad, will expand as we stumble toward a global apocalypse. The self-alienation of humankind, Walter Benjamin warned, “has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.”

The conflicts in Egypt, Libya, Mali, Syria and many other places, Mishra notes, are fueled by “extreme weather events, the emptying of rivers and seas of their fish stocks, or the desertification of entire regions on the planet.” The refugees being driven by their homelands’ chaos into Europe are creating political instability there. And as we sleepwalk into the future, the steady deterioration of the ecosystem will ultimately lead to total systems collapse. Mishra warns that “the two ways in which humankind can self-destruct—civil war on a global scale, or destruction of the natural environment—are rapidly converging.” Our elites, oblivious to the dangers ahead, blinded by their own hubris and greed, are ferrying us, like Charon, to the land of the dead.

Trump's Next Best Seller

Order your advance copy now and get the "pre-impeachment" introductory price.

Back to the 50s - Unless We're Very, Very Lucky

Imagine you wake up Monday morning to find that, overnight, our society has fallen back to the 50s. You pick up your cell phone, no signal. The TV is out. If you're lucky you've still got electricity, for now, and will discover there's no internet. It's gone.

You might still head to the office but you'll probably just be sent home.  No computers coupled with rotating power outages. And, please, don't use the staff washroom down the hall. The water is out.

Lucky you, you've got a full tank of gas. That's some comfort as you pass lines of drivers queuing up at service stations where the pumps have stopped working. Best head to the grocery store to stock up on food and beverages but, by the time you get there, the place is swarming with a horde of desperate shoppers turned looters. All the ATM machines are also down and the bank can't access any records of what you own or what you owe. You'll just use your debit card. No, it doesn't work either. What about your credit card? Ditto. You don't have any credit.

It's a blessing the TV is out so you won't have to hear about the loss of life, especially the plane crashes.

This all sounds really far fetched and yet it could happen to us at any time. It's called "the cascade" or the Kessler Effect or the Kessler Syndrome.  Now, 40 years after NASA scientist, Donald Kessler, identified this devastating cascade as a matter of mathematical certainty, a question of when, not if, the world is beginning to take his warning seriously.

When Hell Freezes Over

Steve Bell, The Guardian

Donald Trump is calling off his state visit to Britain.

The US president said he did not want to come if there were large-scale protests and his remarks in effect put the visit on hold for some time.

The call was made in recent weeks, according to a Downing Street adviser who was in the room. The statement surprised May, according to those present.

Apparently the Great Orange Bloat wants to wait until the British people are in a more receptive mood to appreciate his greatness. My guess? He'll be impeached first.

Comey Bites Back

"Lordy, I Hope There are Tapes"

According to former FBI Director, James Comey, Donald Trump lied.

In his testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, Comey wasted no time dropping the "L" word.


• James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, testified that President Trump and others in his administration had lied when they said agents had lost confidence in Mr. Comey.

• “Lordy, I hope there are tapes,” Mr. Comey said, referring to Mr. Trump’s suggestion that he may have recorded their conversations.

Mr. Comey said Mr. Trump lied to the American public when he said that the F.B.I. was in disarray and that agents had lost confidence in Mr. Comey.Continue reading the main story

“Those were lies, plain and simple,” Mr. Comey said in brief opening remarks.

Mr. Trump made that claim when he fired Mr. Comey last month. Mr. Comey said he was confused and concerned by Mr. Trump’s changing explanation for why he fired him.

Mr. Comey learned of his firing from the news media. He offered a heartfelt farewell to his former employees.

“I am so sorry I didn’t get to say goodbye to you publicly,” Mr. Comey said.

The Emerging Consensus - the U.S. Has Chosen to Become a "Has Been."

For decades many Americans were fond of chants praising, well, themselves. "We're Number One, We're Number One," or the always popular, "U.S.A., U.S.A., U.S.A." It was a great way to mask the reality that, among the advanced nations, America was usually well down the list on so many things from infant mortality to health care outcomes to domestic violence and murder rates, inequality, incarceration rates and on and on and on.

America's allies tended to stand by bemused at these shabby expressions of American exceptionalism and triumphalism. We knew better but were too polite to call our cousins out on their hyper-patriotic delusions.

We stood, on the sidelines where possible, and watched with some concern as America evolved into today's permanent warfare state. See here, and here, and here. At the same time we saw that war after war, year upon year, decade following decade, this massive military force, completely unlike anything previously known to man, failed to deliver any meaningful victories. The last "wins" were in Grenada and Panama.

We also watched with muted concern as America's democracy faltered and yielded to oligarchy, rule by elites, America's new aristocracy. See here, and here, and here.

It's disconcerting when your team captain breaks a hip. It makes you rethink the situation, re-assess your options. Over the past month Donald Trump has put his nation's allies, America's team, in this very spot.

Even Canada's foreign minister, Christia Freeland, says Canada can no longer rely on the United States in the face of threats from Russian adventurism to Islamist terrorism.

In a major speech setting the table for Wednesday’s release of a new blueprint for Canada’s military, Ms. Freeland did not mention U.S. President Donald Trump’s America First foreign policy, but she said many Americans cast their votes to “shrug off the burden of world leadership.”

“The fact that our friend and ally has come to question the very worth of its mantle of global leadership puts in sharp focus for the rest of us to set our own clear and sovereign course,” she told the House of Commons Tuesday. “To say this is not controversial: it is a fact.”

Freeland's remarks echo what is increasingly being said across the pond in Western Europe and across that bigger pond, in South and Southeast Asia and Asia Pacific.

In a Der Spiegel editorial the august German news magazine notes that Trump has brought America, Europe and the trans-Atlantic consensus to a turning point in history that it describes as "an epochal shift."

The rift with Trump is just the latest in a long string of foreign policy failures that Merkel has suffered during the 12 years of her tenure. Putin's Russia is once again seen as an adversarial power, civil war continues in Ukraine, Turkey is on the path to a dictatorship, the United Kingdom is leaving the European Union, Hungary and Poland are taking a step back, Greece is endangering the euro -- and now even the U.S. is turning into a problem child. Germany is running out of partners. The chancellor should treat the ones that remain with care.
...

In her speech last Sunday in Munich, Merkel at least drew the correct consequences: "We Europeans," she said, "must really take our fate into our own hands." Perhaps she was referring to Trump's demand that Germany boost defense spending. But the European project won't be saved with tanks and warships.

If Angela Merkel really wants to do something to stop the erosion of the EU and to save the Paris Agreement, she must form an axis with French President Emmanuel Macron -- one that is based on personal trust. Macron's proposals for united European financial policy might be ambitious, and they might cost the Germans a lot of money. But the chancellor should embrace them nonetheless. Helmut Kohl invested billions in European unity -- and it has been nothing but beneficial to us Germans.

It's gotten so bad that Trump's minions - Tillerson, Mattis and McMaster - are now racking up frequent flier points circling the globe non-stop to try to persuade an increasingly skeptical world that Trump isn't the complete asshole that they all know he is.

The silver lining is that Trump may have offered America's allies an out, a way to retire from America's Foreign Legion.  The starting point is the Middle East and South Asia where America has started wars it cannot hope to finish. Trump is now trying to cajole NATO allies to go back into Afghanistan. This is a great time to graciously decline. If America wants to fight "forever wars" that's on them. There is much good that can be done elsewhere so why squander our soldiers' lives on such a pathetic military adventure?

We all know that, when confronted by a bully, the only way out is to stand up to him. America is pulling up the drawbridge. Let's find other partners, the reliable kind.

New Zealand - Where Rex Tillerson Goes to Get Fingered.

Fortunately for U.S. state secretary, Rex Tillerson, his visit to Wellington was a mere 8-hour drive by event.

As Tillerson's motorcade proceeded to the New Zealand parliament building, crowds of locals turned out in the cold and wet to greet Rex with the Kiwi middle finger salute.

Fairfax Media reported that the US media contingent were surprised by the hostile reception from members of the public.

Tracy Watkins(@tracy_watkins)

US media travelling with Sec of State Rex Tillerson surprised by the number of people flipping the bird at his motorcade in Wellington.

June 6, 2017

“I’ve never seen so many people flip the bird at an American motorcade as I saw today,” the New York Times’ Washington correspondent, Gardiner Harris, told Stuff.co.nz.

About 200 protesters with the climate change action group 350 Aotearoa were gathered outside Parliament to “unwelcome” Tillerson, following president Donald Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris accord.

Greenpeace New Zealand referred to Tillerson as Trump’s “henchman”.

Tillerson didn't get a much warmer greeting from New Zealand's prime minister either.  

At a press conference, Bill English said: “New Zealanders have for a long time not liked various presidents of the US and disagreed with their views about our anti-nuke policies for 30 years – but that doesn’t prevent us confirming our shared values and cooperating with them on security and defence.”


English later told news media that he and Tillerson “discussed our disagreement over the withdrawal from the Paris agreement”. According to Stuff’s report, Tillerson stood by Trump’s decision to exit the deal that he said did not serve US interests.

James Shaw said later in parliament that New Zealand had a “proud history” of standing up to the US over nuclear weapons: “Today we should stick up for the climate.”

Earth Overshoot Day 2017

Think of it as an environmental equivalent of the "nuclear clock."

Earth Overshoot Day marks the date each year on which we, mankind, have squeezed more from nature than our planet, Spaceship Earth, our one and only biosphere, can produce in an entire year.

Earth Overshoot Day 2017 will fall on August 2nd. And how is that relevant to anything?

Last year we didn't hit overshoot until August 8th. Here's a handy video from last year that explains where we're at, where we're heading and why it matters.



Last year Overshoot arrived on August 8th. This year we've reached Overshoot on August 2nd. We've moved that calendar up by almost a week in just one year.

We're literally exhausting the planet faster and faster, year by year.  Year by year the human population grows, we passed 7.5 billion about a month ago, and our per capita consumption usually increases. There are more of us and each of us demands more. It's not a one-way street either. We demand more, we consume more but we also give back more. We give back more waste - more pollution, more devastation and we're giving that back far faster than nature, our ecological bedpan,  can handle it.

All this excess consumption doesn't come free. Most other life forms that inhabit the planet are picking up our tab.  The World Wildlife Fund, in conjunction with the London Zoological Society and other NGOs, produces the Living Planet Report, that assesses how non-human life is holding up. Hint - not good, not at all good.  Here's the introduction to last year's Living Planet Report. Brace yourself.

Global wildlife populations face a plunge of more than two-thirds during the 50-year period ending in 2020 as a result of human activities, according to WWF’s Living Planet Report 2016. The report, produced every two years in collaboration with the Zoological Society of London, shows how people are overpowering the planet for the first time in Earth’s history.

According to the report, global populations of mammals, birds, fish, amphibians and reptiles have already declined by 58 per cent between 1970 and 2012, the most recent year with available data. At this trajectory, the decline could reach 67 per cent by 2020.

We are indeed "overpowering the planet" and our pursuit of perpetual exponential growth has reached the point where it not only imperils mankind but most other species of terrestrial and marine life. We're eating their lunch (and breakfast and dinner) and they don't have any choice but to die off and go extinct. Yeah, humankind. We're Number One.

This probably a good point to have David Suzuki explore the perpetual exponential growth all of our politicians, the current gang, the Trudeau government included, are obsessively chasing.

Our political caste aren't chasing growth. They're stampeding us over a cliff. The vanishing wildlife is our miners' canary and it's laying in the bottom of its cage, dead. That canary does the miners no good unless they notice that it's dead. Our politicians, Justin Trudeau and Dame Cathy, his enviromin, are looking the other way.

By the way, if you need some help making sense of Overshoot, here's a handy graph that reveals the future we're carving out for ourselves.

We're roughly at the point depicted by that vertical arrow beside the word "Overshoot." The red line, our consumption and our population, is still increasing but the Earth's carrying capacity is already beginning its decline. What you see beyond that Overshoot mark is collapse.

What collapse? Nonsense. I'm still going to work, still earning a paycheque. The store shelves are still full, plenty of stuff to buy. The economy, GDP, is still growing and next year it'll be bigger still. All true but you're not looking at the canary.

You're not looking at the decline in wildlife, the Great Die Off, of terrestrial and marine animals. You're not seeing what space station crews can see with the naked eye - the deforestation, the desertification (loss of once arable land and its transformation into desert). You're not seeing the algae blooms spreading across our rivers and lakes. You're not seeing how our industrial fishing fleets are collapsing one fish stock after another as they "fish down the food chain." You're not seeing the aquifers that are being drained to prop up our agricultural production. You're not seeing any of this. What you're seeing is a pretty prime minister promising greater things, ever more stuff, tomorrow.

What is most infuriating is that while the pols in Ottawa and our provincial legislatures fiddle and the Earth consumes itself, Canadians still have choices that are slipping through our fingers unheeded by our political caste. Canada is one of just a handful of nations that clings to a small and fragile ecological surplus which is owed entirely to our huge landmass and our relatively small population. We still have options but we'll be relieved of that burden before long mainly because we would prefer not to trouble our gentle minds with visions of dead canaries.

-

Oh yeah, climate change? Yeah, that's still a thing too.

Says Canada's Top Bitumen Booster

It's good to know that all the bullshit isn't coming from Donald Trump. Trudeau, Canada's prime bitumen booster, knows how to lay it on pretty thick - and with a straight face.

The Guardian Wants a Travel Ban to Keep Britain Safe - from Trump

In today's editorial, The Guardian is calling on prime minister Theresa May to rescind her state visit invitation to Donald Trump.


Mrs May had no good answer when asked whether the police cuts have undermined counter-terrorism. She refused to be drawn into condemning Donald Trump’s shameful criticism of London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, whose response to the weekend’s attack has been exemplary.

Unlike other world leaders, Mrs May has made an art of avoiding public confrontation with the US president. But – in the words of her initial response to the London Bridge attack – enough is enough. She should make clear to Mr Trump how offensive and unhelpful his extraordinary intervention was, and rescind the invitation that has been extended to him for a state visit later this year.

With Britain's general elections just days away, The Guardian criticized May for slashing funding for police services and prison staff.

On policing, Mrs May has stressed that the most critical question is whether the police have the right powers, not numbers or resources, to combat terrorism. How convenient. Since she became home secretary in 2010, the number of frontline officers has fallen by almost 20,000, and the number of firearms officers by more than a thousand. These were not cuts reluctantly overseen by Mrs May; on the contrary, she enthusiastically embraced them, accusing the Police Federation of “crying wolf”about their impacts on frontline policing.

The immediate police response – and the heroism of officers at the frontline – is by far the most visible aspect of the police’s role in counter-terrorism. But no less important is the invisible role of neighbourhood policing in intelligence-gathering. Police officers on the regular beat can build up trusted relationships within the community they serve, acting as its eyes and ears. Cuts to police numbers cannot but impact on the capability of the police to fulfil this vital role. But days before a general election, Mrs May sticks to her line that they are not a problem, thus appearing to put her embattled personal reputation before national security.

Policing is not the only area in which austerity risks our security. The number of prison officers has fallen by a third since 2010, and many prisons are now operating at 150% of capacity. Prisons have not only become far more dangerous places as a result, with violence and drug-dealing increasingly common. They have also become schools for Islamist extremists, and prison governors lack the resources and the capability to respond. This makes a nonsense of the prime minister’s suggestion of longer sentences for those convicted of terrorist offences. Without investing significant resources into prisons, this could be entirely counterproductive.

I'm guessing that The Guardian will be endorsing Jeremy Corbyn and Labour in the elections. Veteran columnist, Polly Toynbee, says Britain will be better off without May.

Remember, she chose to put herself through this election. Soaring 20 points ahead, she broke her word to grab the chance of a landslide.
...

The fearsome terror attacks of recent weeks might have been expected to rally people round their leader, but instead they leave her challenged. Why did she cut 20,000 police and reduce the firearms force at a time of rising risk? No use now calling for draconian powers or tougher sentences when she neither demanded them in the Home Office nor put them in her manifesto.

These “do something” gestures come without the nobler thoughts a leader needs to summon at a time of national heartbreak. “Enough is enough” is as inept and vacuous a response as “Brexit means Brexit”. Of course she is not to blame for outrages so fiendishly hard to prevent, but she can’t pin it on “far too much tolerance of extremism” either. What tolerance? Hers in those Home Office years? Might she be over-tolerant of the Saudis, in refusing to publish a report into their sponsorship of Wahhabist extremism, and overeager to visit them to sell arms?

Don't Pay Any Attention to "Ol' Dummy" Just Because He's President

Just how screwed up is the Trump White House?

The morning brief from Foreign Policy illustrates the nightmarish environment that the adults in the Trump administration have to contend with from the likes of Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller to their verbally incontinent commander in chief.

Trump keeps setting diplomatic dumpster fires that defense secretary James Mattis and state secretary Rex Tillerson have to try to put out. Then they have to wait for the next time the Cheeto Benito opens his mouth.  And, while they're busy travelling the world on damage control missions, back at home they're getting subverted by Trump's own, in-house insurgency.



We’re here. We promise. Two top U.S. officials spent the weekend attempting to reassure Asian allies of Washington’s commitment, despite president Trump’s harsh words for friends and scuttling agreements in the region and in Europe. In separate speeches in Singapore and Australia, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson insisted that despite Trump’s “America First” rhetoric, allies should pay more attention to their actions than the president’s words.

“What a crummy world, if we all retreat inside our own borders,” Mattis told regional leaders in Singapore. “Like it or not, we are part of the world.” In Australia on Monday, Tillerson told reporters, "I hope the fact that we are here demonstrates that is certainly not this administration's view or intention to somehow put at arm's length the other important allies and partners in the world.”

State of confusion. Still, allies are worried. "We are still trying to figure out his (Trump's) policy in our region,” Malaysian Defense Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said over the weekend. "I would like to know very clearly what are the true intentions of the new administration." Several countries in the region are forming their own alliances, unsure of what might come next in Trump’s world.

Tough talk for Beijing. Despite Trump’s recent praise for China’s leadership, Mattis slammed Beijing’s construction of bases and man-made islands in the South China Sea, citing “China’s blatant disregard for international law and its contempt for other nations’ interest its effort to dismiss non-adversarial resolution of issues.” He added that the U.S. opposes “militarizing artificial islands and enforcing excessive maritime claims unsupported by international law. We cannot and will not accept unilateral, coercive changes to the status quo.”

Chinese officials shot back at Mattis’ comments, displeased with the criticism.

Tillerson doubled down on Mattis’ comments, saying Washington would not allow China to use its economic power to "buy its way out of other problems, whether it's militarizing islands in the South China Sea or failing to put appropriate pressure on North Korea". In Singapore, regional leaders pressed Washington to continue its freedom of navigation operations in the South China Sea, to keep pressure on China.

Promises, promises, words. But what effect will assurances from Trump’s cabinet officials have when the president remains impulsive, prone to Twitter outbursts that undermine his own policies, and remains close to nationalist advisors like Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller?

The power of that faction was evident during Trump’s coalition-rattling speech at NATO headquarters last month, when Trump belittled European allies and refused to support Article 5, the alliance’s mutual defense agreement. The president’s cabinet had signed off on what they thought was going to be a fence-mending speech praising the alliance, but without warning Trump tossed that speech out and with the support of Bannon and Miller, delivered a blistering address that shocked both allies as well as Mattis, Tillerson, and national security advisor Lt Gen. H.R. McMaster.

Politico’s Susan Glasser writes that the three believed the president would reaffirm Article 5, but when “Trump started talking...the president’s national security team realized their boss had made a decision with major consequences – without consulting or even informing them in advance of the change. ‘They had the right speech and it was cleared through McMaster,’ said a source briefed by National Security Council officials in the immediate aftermath of the NATO meeting. ‘As late as that same morning, it was the right one.’”

Still, McMaster delivered a speech over the weekend saying everything is great, and the president had a successful trip to Europe. 

...

Palace intrigue. White House advisor Steve Bannon's parallel National Security Council has ceased to exist, the Daily Beast reports. Bannon had set up a body he called the Strategic Initiatives Group (SIG) shortly after the Trump administration was sworn in but insiders say the SIG, intended to generate policy ideas, quickly fell prey to a lack of budget and power conflicts between Bannon's Trump's son-in-law and White House advisor Jared Kushner. The demise of the SIG has also left controversial White House advisor Sebastian Gorka with little to do, according to the Beast, with one administration insider saying "He has no discernible or real impact on policy making, period."

Bunker. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has hunkered down on the seventh floor with access to him tightly controlled by a couple of close aides, according to Politico. Even confidantes such as former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice have reportedly had difficulty getting in touch with Tillerson, as aides screen his calls even from intimates like Rice. Tillerson has grown especially reliant on two aides, Margaret Peterlin and Brian Hook, both of whom critics say have cut him off from advice and contacts that could help the secretary improve his performance.

And that, kids, is the very picture of executive branch dysfunction. The big problem is that it's incurable because it begins at the very top, with Trump himself. All of this flows from that one individual's dangerously warped psyche.

For better context, read my previous post which details how Boeing and Lockheed learned to exploit Trump's mental vulnerabilities to transform him through ego-stroking from their critic into their backer. The lesson, for America's friends and foes alike, is that Trump can be quite predictably and reliably played. The man is positively Pavlovian. Americans and U.S. allies alike have good cause for concern.

The Emperor May Have No Clothes But Going Along Can Go a Long Way.

Aviation Week is not a magazine you would think of as anti-establishment - except, perhaps, when it comes to Donald Trump.

The table of contents of the May 18th edition had this eye-catching entry: "U.S. defense contractors are learning to use Trump's blowhard tendencies to their advantage."

The article, "Managing Trump," by AWST's Washington correspondent, Laura Seligman, tells how America's defense contractors have discovered the payoff in stroking Trump's ego.

President Donald Trump’s tendency to brag about his negotiating prowess has defense industry officials in a tough spot, caught between the White House and the facts on critical national security programs. But as long as they stay on his good side, the major defense contractors are learning to use the new president’s bluster to their advantage.

“Defense contractors have learned to make the unpredictable predictable again,” says Richard Aboulafia, an analyst with the Teal Group. “Once they realized this was not a negotiation but rather an opportunity to give Trump credit for things that didn’t happen or other people’s hard work, they were rewarded handsomely.”

The clearest example is Boeing’s replacement Air Force One. Despite Trump outright accusing Boeing of trying to swindle the government and then claiming credit for savings on a contract that does not even exist, the company has so far declined to contradict the White House. When asked about Trump’s conflicting messaging, Leanne Caret, chief of Boeing’s defense arm, says simply: “We are still not on contract for the presidential aircraft recapitalization program.”

It is not only Boeing—Lockheed Martin has also been in the line of fire over the controversial F-35. Trump has repeatedly slammed the program’s “out-of-control” costs and at one point threatened to replace it with Boeing’s nonstealthy F/A-18 Super Hornet. But like Boeing, Lockheed has declined to defend itself time after time, even praising Trump for his commitment to saving taxpayer dollars.

But after 100 days and counting of Trump’s tough talk, there has been no substantive negative impact on any defense contractors, says Byron Callan, an analyst with Capital Alpha Group. In fact, quite the opposite: Boeing, Raytheon and General Dynamics shares are at all-time highs; Lockheed and Northrop Grumman are within 1-2% of all-time highs. In the latest earnings calls, major defense companies raised or reiterated guidance, Callan notes.

“If it’s tough, the markets aren’t buying it,” he says. “This is theater. There has been zero evidence of a detrimental impact on cash flows, profit expectations, program wins/loses.”

The Non-Existent Boeing Contract. Praise Be President Trump.

“Boeing is building a brand-new 747 Air Force One for future presidents, but costs are out of control, more than $4 billion. Cancel order!” Trump tweeted.

Speaking to reporters at Trump Tower after the tweet, the president-elect doubled down, saying, “it’s ridiculous” that Boeing’s new Air Force One is so expensive. “I think Boeing is doing a little bit of a number,” he said. “We want Boeing to make a lot of money but not that much.”

Then in February, after several meetings with Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg, Trump bragged that he personally saved more than $1 billion on the new Air Force One. Since then the White House seems to have revised that estimate, extolling the president for capping the cost of the new aircraft “at millions below that which was agreed to by the Obama administration.”

The problem is that, as Caret said, Boeing does not yet have a production contract for Air Force One. To date, the U.S. government has only awarded the company a total of $170 million for risk reduction and other preliminary work. Contrary to the White House’s statements, the Obama administration never agreed to a final price on Air Force One.

...

So far, Boeing’s strategy seems to be working. Trump “completely reversed himself once he was given credit for an imaginary cost cut on Air Force One. All of a sudden that became a totally fine program,” says Aboulafia. “That’s where flattery comes in. . . . It’s just a question of how to manage someone who is a bit mercurial.”

On the F-35, Trump has continued his trend of taking credit for saving the taxpayer millions of dollars. This time, the savings are real—the government cut about $700 million in the latest F-35 contract—but Trump has repeatedly exaggerated his role in achieving them. “A little before I took office, there was a terrible article about the F-35 fighter jet. It was hundreds of billions of dollars over budget. It was seven years behind schedule. It was a disaster. So I called in Lockheed and I said, ‘I’m sorry, we’re going to have to bid this out to another company, namely Boeing,’” Trump said in a wide-ranging interview with the Associated Press in April. “I saved $725 million on the 90 planes.

“We went from a company that wanted more money for the planes to a company that cut. And the reason they cut—same planes, same everything—was because of me. I mean, because that’s what I do,” Trump continued.

But the truth is that the Pentagon and Lockheed have been working to cut costs on the F-35 for years. Cost information provided by the F-35 Joint Program Office shows the average unit price has been steadily decreasing since the first low-rate initial production (LRIP) lot in 2007. The Pentagon already expected to save about $600 million in the latest production lot before Trump was inaugurated.

Trump’s vocal criticism of the F-35 program over the past months no doubt left a strong impression on Lockheed management and likely had a hand in speeding up negotiations of the most recent contract. But the bottom line is that Trump inserted himself into the negotiating process at the last second and is now taking credit for years of work by the Pentagon and Lockheed Martin.

But just like Boeing, Lockheed has refused to contradict the White House, and the company in fact praised Trump for his commitment to getting a fair deal. “We appreciate President Trump’s comments this morning on the positive progress we’ve made on the F-35 program,” a Lockheed spokeswoman said Jan. 30. “We share his commitment to delivering this critical capability for our men and women in uniform at the lowest possible cost to taxpayers.” 

I never expected a publication such as Aviation Week to ridicule a sitting president as a "blowhard" but they did and proceeded to how America's defense contractors learned to play Trump for a, well, a chump.  Trump-grade narcissism is a genuine weakness, a national vulnerability when the afflicted is the president. America's adversaries can and probably will exploit this strategic vulnerability just as America's defence contractors have revealed it.

How Oxfam Saw the G7 Leaders

This photo is worth a thousand words.

Trump Puts Trudeau Under Scrutiny

Yesterday Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris climate accord. It was a symbolic gesture but one that may have real consequences for the global consensus on fighting climate change. More tangible have been Trump's endorsement of fossil fuels, especially coal, and his decision to deliver the Environmental Protection Agency into the hands of its mortal enemy, Scott Pruitt. Add it all up and the picture out of Washington is genuinely bleak.

But what about Canada? The Tyee's Crawford Killian says it's time for Justin Trudeau to fish or cut bait:

Trump’s defection will cost Justin Trudeau and his Liberal government even more. Ever since he declared support for the Kinder Morgan expanded pipeline, while insisting he was still a climate warrior, he has embodied F. Scott Fitzgerald’s definition of a first-rate intelligence: “The ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

Trudeau has said: “No country would find 173 billion barrels of oil in the ground and just leave them there.”

This is like an opioid addict saying, “No one would find a million bucks’ worth of fentanyl in their basement, and just leave it there.” Even if the addict thought he could fund his own detox and rehab with that million bucks, he’d be deluding himself (as well as killing many of his fellow addicts).

Trump has now obliged Trudeau to fish or cut bait. Is he a climate warrior like Macron, or a shit merchant like Trump? Can he stand with the Paris accord while shipping oil out of Burrard Inlet to Asian markets? And will those markets decide to buy Chinese solar panels instead of Canadian gunk?

Trudeau would do better to promote western Canada as a single world hub of climate-fighting technology. B.C. and Alberta have a lot of smart scientists and engineers (and businesses) that would love to give China a run for its money on renewable energy resources. I doubt they find petroleum and bitumen so beautiful in themselves that no other energy sources could offer similar consolation.
Without Trump’s speech on Thursday, Justin Trudeau could have dithered on both sides of the issue at least until 2019. Now he’s really got to get his act together. Does he support the Paris accord? Or does he support Donald J. Trump? He can’t support both.

200 Kms Down, 13 Kms to Go.

In Canada we're used to icebergs calved off Arctic ice sheets, especially the Greenland Ice Sheet. They're seen migrating past Newfoundland every year and have a certain reputation for sinking large ships.

There's a new iceberg in the making, one that could dwarf anything we've seen in the northern hemisphere. It's part of the Antarctic Larsen B ice shelf and it's roughly 5,000 sq km in size. A crack about 200 km long has developed but that crack has now headed toward the sea just 13 km away. Scientists describe that giant iceberg as "hanging on by a thread."

Here's what that "crack" looks like from the air.



“The rift is nearly 200km long now, and it has turned towards the ice front, suggesting that it has only got that last piece to go – and that last section is only 13km,” said Professor Adrian Luckman, a scientist at Swansea University and leader of the UK’s Midas project – an endeavour that has been monitoring the situation at the Larsen C ice shelf.

“Like any fracture in something, the longer the fracture becomes the more pressure there is on the remaining part of it. So it is really only hanging by a thread here,” he told the Guardian.

While the iceberg will not be the biggest ever recorded – the title is held by Iceberg B-15, a mass that broke off the Ross Ice Shelf in the year 2000 and had an area the size of Jamaica – it is expected to be among the top 10.

The significance of this is not immediate. What matters is that this shows that the Antarctic ice sheet may have reached a tipping point, a point of no return, that will gradually (we hope) trigger massive sea level rise.  Closer to home, scientists concluded some time ago that the Greenland ice sheet may have passed its tipping point 20 years ago.

What Trump Actually Did Yesterday

As I inelegantly stated in my previous post, Donald Trump tore a hole in the global consensus yesterday when he pulled the United States out of the Paris climate accord.

ForeignPolicy has a much better take on the damage Trump has caused, especially to America, written by a number of individuals considered Obama's "brain trust." The essay reveals how this was a gratuitous act of stupidity for which America may pay dearly for many years to come.

If He'll Desert the Fight Against Climate Change, Why Would We Count on Him When It Comes to NATO?

The world received an unwelcome but important message yesterday. Don't rely on the United States of America when the chips are down.

That post-war trans-Atlantic consensus that has served Europe and North America for the past seventy years? NATO? America was always seen to be the cornerstone of that arrangement.

In Donald Trump's feeble but deeply twisted mind, the Paris climate accord was just another case of the world playing the U.S. for a sucker. The deal, like every treaty, pact or agreement to which America is party, has to be renegotiated. Washington wants a better deal. Americans are winners.

Trump is dining at the table of American exceptionalism. He subscribes to the notion of the United States as the "world's indispensable nation." It fuels his megalomania that's always tinged with just a whiff of sadism.

The thing is that America's elevated standing in the world has always stood on a foundation of confidence. America's core allies have always believed that the U.S. could be relied upon. Every post-war president until Trump worked diligently to nurture that confidence. "Until Trump."

At Brussels, NATO headquarters, the alliance leaders were anxious to hear Trump affirm Article 5, the "attack on one is an attack on all" provision of the Atlantic Charter, the very essence of the alliance. They needed to hear Trump acknowledge Article 5 because the silly bastard has previously mused that America might not answer that call in the future. America, the one country in the history of NATO that has invoked Article 5 to summon its allies to the war in Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11. Instead,Trump said nothing.

We know that Trump is a lying, chiseling bastard from his well-earned reputation in property development and the long trail of tradesmen he would routinely stiff. Cheating those who were foolish enough to trust him was Trump's way of topping up his profits. Maybe Trump sees the rest of the world as America's gullible tradesmen.

We know, or have every reason to assume, that Trump intends to play us for suckers. It's time we acted accordingly. A good start might be to spurn Trump's demands for NATO troops for Afghanistan.  America's not "under attack" any more, the essential condition of Article 5.  America had no plan to win when it went into Afghanistan in 2001. It has no plan to win today, 15 years later. Why should we jump back into that bathwater?

Angela Merkel is right. America is no longer our "reliable partner." In the first four months of his presidency Donald Trump has put paid to that notion, the essential confidence that has sustained the West's relationship with Washington for the past seventy years.

America has forfeit any claim on us to support its hapless war in Afghanistan. Let's tell Trump, "not this time."

A Bit of Advice for Trump from Vincente Fox

Former Mexican presidente, Vincente Fox, has put together a helpful message to America's presidente, Donald J. Trump.

It's Official. Trump Nixes Paris Climate Accord.

Everybody was right. Trump has decided the United States will withdraw from the Paris climate accord.


“In order to fulfill my solemn duty to protect America and its citizens, the United States will withdraw from the Paris climate accord," Trump said, adding that the U.S. would immediately begin negotiations to re-enter the Paris accord or an entirely new agreement "on terms that are fair to the U.S.”

Maybe George Bush Was Onto Something

Remember how, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, then president George w. Bush told the world that, in the fight against terrorism, "you're either with us or you're with the terrorists"? Bush overplayed his hand on that one. Many nations, most in fact, managed to sit out Bush's wars without end in Afghanistan and Iraq while not siding with the terrorists either. It just wasn't their fight.

There is a different fight underway now that has nothing to do with al Qaeda or ISIS, one that affects us all - every nation, every human being - our global civilization. It makes all the terrorism of the past 25 years look almost inconsequential and it's so dangerous that it threatens us and most life on Earth with extinction.

It's the fight against climate change, the fight for a survivable future for our young people and the generations to follow them. It's a fight where you truly are with humanity or against humanity.

Because it's a fight that demands of every nation and every individual positive action, it's a fight that you can't sit out. There is no neutrality in this fight. I wish that wasn't true. I wish there was a way to sit out this one but I can't see how there could be.

We know where the United States of Trump stands. That much was clear when Trump delivered America's Environmental Protection Agency into the hands of its mortal enemy, Scott Pruitt.

Now we've got this Paris climate accord which is really a lot less significant than it seems. In a way it's a lot like that "Purity Ball" thing they do in the States where father and daughter get all dressed up, go to a formal ball at which the daughter vows to her dad that she won't give it up before marriage and old dad pledges that he'll damn well see to that. What's that they say about the road to Hell being paved with good intentions?

Trump is expected to pull America out of the Paris accord today but, so what? Would it be better if Trump said the U.S. would stay in the deal but carried on with his environmental rampage anyway? Hey, we've got a prime minister who says we're committed to the Paris deal and he'll prove it by facilitating the expansion, extraction and export of western bitumen to world markets.

Maybe that's the difference between Trump and Trudeau. Trump won't pretend. He'll be up front about it while Trudeau tells us that the path to a green future for Canada involves massive exports of the highest-carbon ersatz oil to be had. That sure sounds like one of those purity oaths to me.

So where does that leave us whether we're American or Canadian? As I said earlier, this is an issue where you're either with civilization, mankind itself, or against it.

In Canada we've had some real success stories but they're mainly at the provincial and municipal levels. Municipal and some provincial governments are trying to take us in the right direction but Ottawa? They're going even faster in the other direction. The feds can't see Canada as something other than a petro-state just as they can't see a political economy other than neoliberal.

So before you go ballistic on Trump today, take a hard look at what's going on in our own backyard.