Sunday, October 27, 2019
China’s $3.6 bn bailout insulates Turkey from US
Beijing’s biggest support
package ever for President Erdogan arrives at a critical time
by SPENGLER
Despite the US threat to
“obliterate and destroy” Turkey’s economy, the Turkish lira and Turkish
interest rates barely have budged in the past week (Turkish stocks, especially
banks, are down sharply, in part due to the US criminal charges against
Halkbank for aiding Iran sanctions violations). That is remarkable given the
fragility of Turkey’s currency earlier in 2019. Between February and May, the
Turkish lira fell from 5.2 to the US dollar to 6.2 in response to US sanctions,
before recovering to 5.88 to the dollar today. The Turkish central bank leaned
on Turkish banks to refrain from offering liquidity to short-sellers, but
Turkish money markets remained orderly.
What changed is China. Turkish
President Erdogan’s insolence in the face of American threats brings to mind B’rer Rabbit’s imprecation
to B’rer Fox: “Please don’t throw me in the briar patch.” The relevant foliage
in this case is bamboo.
[IMAGE 1]
Bloomberg
News reported Aug. 9, “China’s central bank transferred $1 billion
worth of funds to Turkey in June, Beijing’s biggest support package ever for
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan delivered at a critical time in an election
month. The inflow marks the first time Turkey received such a substantial
amount under the lira-yuan swap agreement with Beijing that dates back to 2012,
according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter who asked not to be
named because the information isn’t public.”
China’s direct investment in
Turkey also has surged this year, as Nikkei reported
Aug. 22:
China is coming to Turkey’s
aid during its economic crisis with $3.6 billion in funding for infrastructure
projects, leveraging Ankara’s conflict with Washington to expand its Belt and
Road Initiative in the key country that links Asia with Europe.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip
Erdogan said Aug. 11 that his country was preparing to trade through national
currencies with partners like China, bypassing the US dollar. The US placed
additional tariffs on Turkey the next day as a feud simmered over the
imprisonment of a US pastor accused of being involved in the 2016 coup attempt
against the Turkish leader.
The lira then hit about 7 per dollar,
a drop of more than 40% since the beginning of the year. Spurned by one of the
world’s economic giants, Erdogan naturally turned to another, China, for
much-needed financial backup.
American policymakers should
have their eyes checked for cataracts; they appear unable to keep the whole of
the world map in view. This was eminently predictable. In August 2018 I warned
in Asia Times that “China will buy Turkey on the cheap.”
China has had its issues with
Turkey’s volatile and ambitious leader, to be sure. Turkey in the past styled
itself the protector of China’s Uyghur minority, some 15 million Muslims who
speak a dialect of Turkish and live mainly in China’s Xinjiang Province. China
reportedly has incarcerated between 1 and 2 million Uyghurs in “re-education
camps” where they are forced to learn Chinese culture to the detriment of their
Islamic identity. Erdogan in the past had accused China of “genocide” against
the Uyghurs. After the Chinese bailout, however, Erdogan
declared that the Uyghurs are “living happily” in China.
Turkey has changed from Ataturk
to Rent-A-Turk. China likes to keep its friends close and its enemies closer.
China built the Great Wall to repel Turkic invasions, among others, and warred
with nomadic peoples on its borders for centuries. Now Beijing believes that
its $2 trillion Belt and Road Initiative will assimilate the Turkic peoples of
Central Asia into its sphere of economic influence. The Turkic countries seem
eager to sign up.
The Azerbaijan news site Trend
reported Oct. 15:
The Cooperation Council of
Turkic Speaking States (CCTS-Turkic Council) will strengthen in the coming
period and will become an important center of power in the world, Professor
Naciye Selin Senocak, the head of the cultural diplomacy department at the
Institute for European Studies in Brussels and head of the center for
Diplomatic and Strategic Studies (CEDS) in Paris, told Trend.
Senocak said that the 7th CCTS
Summit in Baku is a significant event and undoubtedly will go down in history.
The Turkish professor noted that the Turkic World covers a vast territory, from
the Adriatic Sea to China, where about 300 million Turks live. Senocak said
that the decision made by Uzbekistan to join the CCTS, as well as opening a
representative office of the Council in the center of Europe-Hungary, indicate
the importance and the growing role of this structure.
“In the new world order, where
the control axis is shifting to Asia, CCTS will play an important role,” the
Turkish professor noted. The representative of the Institute for European
Studies added that CCTS will continue to develop and strengthen economically,
politically and socially with the help of the One Belt One Road initiative,
which will include other Eurasian countries.
Erdogan’s long-term problem is
that there aren’t enough Turks in Turkey. Turkey’s Kurdish citizens continue to
have three or four children while ethnic Turks have fewer than two. By the
early 2040s, most of Turkey’s young people will come from Kurdish-speaking
homes. The Kurdish-majority Southeast threatens to break away.
In 2016, I reviewed Turkey’s
2015 census data in Asia Times. It shows that the demographic scissors between
Kurds and Turks continue to widen. Despite Erdogan’s exhortations on behalf of
Turkish fertility, the baby bust in Turkish-majority provinces continues while
Kurds sustain one of the world’s highest birth rates. Even worse, the marriage
rate outside of the Kurdish Southeast of the country has collapsed, portending
even lower fertility in the future.
According to Turkstat, the
official statistics agencies, the Turkish provinces with the lowest fertility
rates all cluster in the north and northwest of the country, where women on
average have only 1.5 children. The southeastern provinces show fertility rates
ranging between 3.2 and 4.2 children per female.
[IMAGE 2]
Even more alarming are
Turkey’s marriage statistics as reported by Turkstat. Between 2001 and 2015,
the number of marriages in Istanbul, the country’s largest city, fell by more
than 30%, and by more than 40% in the capital Ankara. Most of the northern and
northwestern provinces report a decline of more than half in the number of
marriages. Not only are Turkish women refusing to have children; they are
refusing to get married. The plunge in the marriage rate among ethnic Turks
makes a further sharp decline in fertility inevitable.
[IMAGE 3]
Erdogan fears the Kurdish role
in Turkey’s Northeast as a magnet for Turkey’s own restive Kurds, and wants to
pre-empt the expansion of Turkish self-rule from its base in neighboring Iraq.
That is the object of his ethnic cleansing campaign against Syria’s Kurds. In
the long run, Erdogan hopes to lead a coalition of Turkic countries within the
greater Chinese sphere of influence.
That doesn’t mean that Erdogan
is a strong horse. He’s a draught horse, hitched to a Chinese wagon.
Russia replaces US as Mideast power broker
American troops pelted with
tomatoes as they abandon former Kurdish allies in NE Syria
ALISON TAHMIZIAN
MEUSE, BEIRUT
Less than 48 hours after US
troops were pelted with tomatoes and stones as they abandoned their former
Kurdish allies in northeastern Syria, Russia has moved in as the region’s new
referee.
Russian President Vladimir
Putin, after marathon six-hour talks with his Turkish counterpart, secured an
agreement to halt a Turkish invasion of the border area – instead offering
joint patrols with his forces in specific border towns.
Turkish Foreign Minister
Mevlut Cavusoglu acknowledged the joint patrols would not apply to the Syrian
city of Qamishli, where Syria’s armed forces have maintained an airbase
throughout the war.
Kurdish YPG/YPJ
forces are to withdraw 30 kilometers from the Turkish border in the span
of one week – thus cleaving them from their sister group the PKK in Turkey.
The Moscow-sanctioned patrols,
however, will only be allowed ten kilometers deep into Syria, in keeping with
Moscow’s guiding principle of sovereignty.
“In general, stable and
long-term stabilization in Syria can only be reached if the country’s
sovereignty and territorial integrity are adhered to,” Putin said Tuesday, in
comments published by Russia’s Tass news agency.
“Most importantly, our Turkish
partners share this approach,” he added.
The US presence in Syria is
now essentially limited to a base in the far east of the Syrian desert, even as
US President Donald Trump has mused about leaving a number of troops in eastern
Syria to seize oil fields.
Turkey backs down
Prior to the meeting with
Putin in the southern Russian resort Sochi, Erdogan emphasized
that “Turkey does not have an eye on any country’s territory” — calling
such an accusation an “insult.”
Turkey last year backed
a military
incursion into the northern Syrian city of Afrin, sending its largely
Kurdish and minority Yazidi community fleeing under artillery fire, and then
bussed in defeated Arab rebels and their families to settle in their homes.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad,
during a visit to the front lines in the northwestern province of Idlib on
Tuesday, said the Turkish leader was the number one threat of the day.
“Erdogan (…) is a thief
who steals wheat, petroleum, and factories, and now he is trying to steal land,”
Syria’s state news agency quoted Assad as saying.
Idlib is dominated by a
former Al-Qaeda affiliate, whose leader has worked to remain in the good
graces of Turkey – publicly backing Ankara’s operation against Kurdish forces
further east.
The status of Idlib and its 3
million residents – half of whom have been displaced multiple times during the
conflict – was likely a key topic of discussion at the Sochi meeting.
Erdogan takes parting Syria
shots as Russians deploy
Following their talks, Erdogan
and Putin agreed to continue their efforts to find a political solution in
Syria – not through the UN but via the Russian-backed Astana process.
China and US in trillion-dollar tech war
Huawei conflict and the
windfall from 5G will set the scene in Sino-American relations
GORDON WATTS
There is no point in Huawei
googling it as the answer is the problem.
For China’s high-tech
juggernaut, finding a long-term fix to a nearly US$1-trillion
conundrum will be crucial to its operational model.
In the first five months of
2019, the poster child of the “Made in China 2025” program
sold 100 million smartphones. Last year, it shifted 206 million handsets
and raked in $52.5 billion in revenue with nearly half shipped to overseas
markets.
But that was before
it was placed on a blacklist in the United States after being
branded a “national security threat,” stripping the group of Google
software and services.
“We can continue to use the
Android platform since it is open-source,” Joy Tan, the head of media relations
at Huawei, told the Financial Times last week. “But we
cannot use the services that help apps run on it.”
Google has the app market sewn
up tighter
than its global search business. Without it, the Shenzhen-based company has
nothing more than a high-priced telephone for foreign customers.
Since May, Huawei has been
trying to seal the cracks after being blocked from access to its American
suppliers. While it has filled the semiconductor, or chip, shortfall with
domestic shipments, there is literally nothing the privately-owned firm can do
in the short-term about the Google dilemma.
“The company is facing a
live-or-die moment,” Ren Zhengfei, the founder of the business and a former
People’s Liberation Army officer, said in a memo, during the summer.
“If you cannot do the job,
then make way for our tank to roll … And if you want to come on the
battlefield, you can tie a rope around the ‘tank’ to pull it along, everyone
needs this sort of determination,” he added, underscoring the military
metaphors.
Within this toxic environment,
the US and China are
locked in a technological battle, which will eclipse the
trade conflict and possibly set the scene for a new economic Cold War.
Beijing is committed to
winning the race by investing
billions of state-backed dollars into technology and science research.
Private funding is also immense.
For the first nine months of
2019, spending jumped 10.6% compared to the same period 12 months ago, the
National Bureau of Statistics reported on Thursday.
Last year, China’s overall
funding for research and development surged by 11.8% year-on-year to 1.97
trillion yuan ($275 billion). Significantly, that was the third consecutive
double-digit annual rise and at the forefront was technology.
In March, a government study
revealed that Beijing would increase science and technology spending by 13% to
354.3 billion yuan ($52.88 billion) in 2019, despite the economy showing signs
of stress.
Nothing, it appears, will
derail the “MiC 2025” project and the plan for at least 70% of related
high-tech materials and products, such as semiconductors, to be made
domestically by 2030.
“‘Made
in China 2025,’ seeks to make China dominant in global high-tech
manufacturing. The program aims to use government subsidies, mobilize
state-owned enterprises, and pursue intellectual property acquisition to catch
up with – and then surpass – Western technological prowess in advanced
industries,” James McBride and Andrew Chatzky, of the New York-based
think tank, the
Council on Foreign Relations, said in a report earlier this year.
Worldwide leader
Enter Huawei again, and its
role as the worldwide leader in 5G infrastructure.
More than 20 times quicker
than existing 4G, these ultra-fast networks will power ‘smart’ manufacturing
and the AI-linked factories of the future, as well as the Internet of Things.
So far, Huawei has
sold 200,000 5G base stations and signed deals across the globe
despite perceived links with President Xi Jinping’s government and
China’s military establishment.
“The leader of 5G stands to
gain hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue over the next decade, with
widespread job creation across the wireless technology sector,” the
Defense Innovation Board, a group of American business leaders and
academics, stated in a 2019 study for the US Department of Defense.
“The country that owns 5G will
own many of these innovations and set the standards for the rest of the world.
That country is not likely to be the United States [as] China has taken the
lead in 5G development through a series of aggressive investment[s],” the
report, co-authored by Milo Medin, the vice-president of wireless services at
Google, added.
Now, you can google that.
Lebanese army prepares to step in as nation revolts
The Lebanese military
positions itself as protector of a nationwide protest movement that has taken
aim at every political party, including Hezbollah
ALISON TAHMIZIAN MEUSE
The leadership of the Lebanese
armed forces was carefully gauging a nationwide protest movement on Tuesday —
as ruling political factions scrambled to contain a massive eruption of
discontent.
A video showing Lebanese
soldiers forcefully stopping dozens of young men on mopeds – purported
supporters of the Shiite party Hezbollah and its ally Amal – from attacking
protesters in central Beirut late Monday night, went viral on social media,
spreading from mobile phones to the airwaves.
Hezbollah quickly refuted any
link to the group, seen waving their party flags and heard shouting expletives
against the uprising in a thuggish display more characteristic of Amal (which
also denied participation).
But the confrontation was
quickly characterized as a critical intervention on behalf of the
overwhelmingly peaceful movement, earning the praise of television presenters,
social media influencers, and even a DJ playing music for the protesters.
The army had earlier pledged
to protect the protesters, who have taken to the streets in the geographic
bastions of every major Lebanese political faction in the country and likely
have topped one million in total – or a quarter of the population of
the country.
“There was always going to be
a key test: what would the [army] do if elements – including Hezbollah –
decided to take provocative street actions,” said Aram Nerguizian, a specialist
on civil-military relations in Arab states at the Carnegie Middle East Center.
The composition of, and
support for the Lebanese army, cuts across sectarian lines, and it is seen as a
clean institution in comparison to the corrupt political class. It also enjoys
the backing of the United States.
“There is little doubt that
the [army] may be called upon to act in favor of civil peace again, and
decisively,” said Nerguizian.
The army is already deeply
involved in managing and monitoring the situation, with “all operational units
currently involved in internal stability operations.”
Beyond Nasrallah
Hezbollah leader Hassan
Nasrallah, whose group represents the most powerful armed force in the country,
on Saturday gave a televised speech expressing empathy with the protesters, but
also arguing early elections would be futile and that the current government
should remain.
“Should we swap some names for
others? At the end of the day it will still be the same political forces behind
them,” he said.
Instead, he called on his
allies to enact swift reforms and respond in a significant way to the protests.
His party, he warned, does not seek to get involved, but will do so if
necessary.
“If we take that decision to
take to the streets, the country will take a different direction,” Nasrallah
said. “We are a big party and our movement is not insignificant.”
“Hopefully this time does not
come,” he said.
The current protests broke out
on Thursday when mostly young and poor Lebanese – angry at new taxes on
gasoline and the free internet calling service Whatsapp, the nation’s default
phone plan – shut down key intersections in and around the capital.
Demonstrators burned tires,
couches, and anything they could find, bringing the country to a standstill by
Friday – and compelling schools, banks and businesses to shut their doors in
the face of a mushrooming movement.
By the weekend, hundreds of
thousands of people of all economic and religious backgrounds had taken to the
streets of Beirut and cities across the country, from Tripoli in the north to
Nabatiyeh in the south, calling for the departure of their ruling political
dynasties and an end to endemic corruption.
The last time Lebanon saw
protests of this scale was in 2005 when hundreds of thousands demanded an end
to Syrian occupation. But that was a highly polarized movement, according
to Karim Makdisi, director of the Pubic Policy and International Affairs
program at American University in Beirut.
“There was no Shiite
representation to speak of, or that mattered … and it was very much centered on
Beirut,” he told Asia Times.
Nasrallah’s words, while read
as a warning by many, may represent an acknowledgment by the powerful leader
that he may not be able to keep his own supporters home indefinitely, Makdisi
said.
“This may get beyond even
Hassan Nasrallah … Or we may be close to this point, and he’s read it well.”
“He’s telling those in power:
‘Look, I may not be able to control my people much longer,’” Makdisi added.
All of them
On Saturday night in Baalbek,
under the gaze of Nasrallah’s image, a small but spirited demonstration of
several hundred people called for the “fall of the regime.”
“My daughter is in a private
school because we have no good public schools. My nephew has special needs and
there is no school for him in Baalbek,” said Diana Felaha, 33, whose husband
held their young daughter on his shoulders.
Asked whether any party was
clear of responsibility for the situation of the country, she told Asia Times
emphatically: “No, no, no.”
“The whole system needs to
change from its roots: the parliamentarians, the ministers, everyone. We don’t
want a sectarian system.”
“All of them means all of
them,” said another demonstrator, Mohammed Arafat, borrowing a protest phrase
referencing political leaders that were previously untouchable.
Arafat, a student at the
Lebanese American University in Beirut said he had returned home to Baalbek to
witness the movement in his home city, the largest in the economically
repressed Beqaa Valley.
“Lots of my friends are here,
and they elect those politicians,” he said, referring to the leaders of Amal
and Hezbollah, the dominant political forces in the city. “They’re fed up …
it’s amazing.”
Still others stayed home.
A resident of a western Bekaa
Valley village loyal to Hezbollah said he believed the protesters, despite
their very real economic grievances, were unwittingly serving as a tool of the
United States, which he put on par with corruption in terms of responsibility
for the current crisis.
Washington has mounted
pressure on Lebanon’s financial system in recent months as part of its economic
campaign against Iran, leading to a rush to change accounts from Lebanese
currency into US dollars or to transfer money out of the country.
A Taste of the Climate Apocalypse to Come
PG&E’s rolling blackouts
probably don’t eliminate fire risk, and they actually could make responding to
fires harder. What they largely do is shift responsibility away from the
company.
Oct. 22, 1:54 p.m. EDT
At the beginning of October,
my kids’ preschool informed me that it might be closed the next day because of
rolling blackouts — a radical new effort by our local power utility in Northern
California to avoid sparking wildfires. The water company, faced with the
shutdown of its pumps, asked us to fill our bathtubs before the cutoff. On the
advice of experts, my car was backed into the driveway for a quick escape, its
hatch packed with 7 gallons of water and a go-bag including leather gloves,
breathing masks, spare clothes, headlamps and emergency food.
The National Weather Service
was predicting 55-mile-an-hour winds, with 10% humidity. It was like living
inside a ticking time bomb. And so, in a desperate attempt to avoid detonation,
the utility decided to haul almost 800,000 households backward through time
into premodernity, for days at a stretch. Around Silicon Valley, residential
areas adjacent to some of the most technologically advanced corporations in the
world — the offices of private space-exploration companies, internet search engines,
electric vehicle manufacturers — would forgo basic electricity.
The blackouts solved nothing,
of course. De-energizing the electrical grid is a bludgeon: imprecise, with
enormous potential for collateral damage as people deal with a darkened world.
It doesn’t even eliminate fire risk. What it largely does is shift
responsibility away from Pacific Gas & Electric, the state’s largest
utility company, whose faulty
transmission lines had been found to have caused some of the most
destructive wildfires on record.
In fact, cutting power can
exacerbate some fire risks. In a blackout, more people rely on home generators,
many of which have been installed without permits and might be no less faulty
than the utility’s own equipment. Detours and gridlock force more cars into
vulnerable places. (Sparks off roadways are another top cause of wildfire.) The
blackout makes it harder for the public to respond to fire emergencies even as
it does little to prevent all the other factors that cause them — from careless
barbecues to tossed-out cigarette butts to plain old arson. One of the state’s
most serious fires so far this year was ignited by
burning garbage.
But a mandatory blackout does
have one radically positive effect. By suddenly withdrawing electrical power —
the invisible lifeblood of our unsustainable economic order — PG&E has made
the apocalyptic future of the climate crisis immediate and visceral for some of
the nation’s most comfortable people. It is easy to ignore climate change in
the bosom of the developed world. But you can’t fail to notice when the lights
go out.
Only once the blackouts began
to take effect did local agencies and governments seem to begin to grasp their
rippling effects and implications. As the city of Oakland prepared to lose
power, its Police Department — already strained by understaffing and rampant
corruption — called back its off-duty officers and put its investigative units
into uniform in the hopes of managing a city in the dark. Transportation
officials prepared to close four tunnels that make up one of the Bay Area’s
major highway arteries, effectively walling off thousands of people from their
jobs in downtown Oakland and San Francisco.
As the lights went out across
the region, the economies of whole towns and small cities ground to a halt.
Grocery stores and gas stations closed, air conditioning was shut off and cell
towers faltered — even as the cellphones themselves, now many households’ only
means of communication, slowly began to lose battery power. People whose lives
depended on home medical equipment faced life-threatening emergencies, and cars
— without operating gas pumps — risked running out of fuel. My own town sat on
the edge of an arbitrary boundary. The lights stayed on, but the mood was
ominous.
And it ought to be. In the
American West, our climate will only get hotter and drier, our wildfires worse.
Every year more places are going to burn, and we will, repeatedly, be horrified
by the losses. But we should not be shocked by them. The blackouts have laid
bare the uncomfortable fact that the infrastructure we’ve built and maintained
over the course of many decades isn’t matched to the threats we face in our
rapidly unfolding climate emergency.
The safest way to proceed
under such circumstances — on an annual basis, every time the thermometer kicks
up and the winds begin to blow — is probably not simply to forgo the use of one
of civilization’s most elementary and essential innovations. Significantly
lowering emissions, reducing waste, managing our landscape and fortifying our
communities would all do much more to save lives. But it’s hard to imagine that
even deep-blue California will make sufficient progress on the climate-adapting
steps we’ve long been implored to take.
At least mandatory blackouts
force a glimpse into this new reality. They’re like a thin wedge opening our
minds to the fact that even here, in the heart of one of the wealthiest regions
of a state that is (we are often reminded) by itself the world’s fifth-largest
economy — one that is shepherding into existence some of the nation’s most
enlightened and aggressive climate-adaptation policies — deep and unpredictable
consequences are unavoidable. Perhaps if blackouts were mandated in your
community, your neighbors might awaken to this eerie truth as well.
At Pro-Fracking Conference, Trump Addresses Companies 'Whose Profits He Has Put Above the Health and Safety of the Planet'
Outside of Pittsburgh
conference, activists declare, "We need to step up today and protect our
water! Because without water there is no life."
Wednesday, October 23, 2019
Ahead of President Donald
Trump's speech Wednesday at a natural gas conference, climate campaigners said
Trump's trip marked a "desperate re-election scheme" to promote his
and the industry's "nightmare" fracking agenda.
The forum is the Shale Insight
conference in Pittsburgh, but it's not the first time Trump has been a keynote
speaker for the gathering.
It's the same conference,
where, in 2016 as a presidential candidate, he told the
audience, "Oh, you will like me so much," and vowed to lift
regulations to allow for more fossil fuel extraction and infrastructure.
Food & Water Action
executive director Wenonah Hauter said Trump will be "speaking to his base
today–the fracking companies whose profits he has put above
the health and safety of the planet."
"This polluting industry
sees Trump as its savior, along with an administration that
rejects science and cheers on climate destruction," Hauter continued.
"The industry has hundreds of infrastructure projects in the
works that would double down on fracking and generate more
plastics and petrochemical pollution, lock in decades of fossil fuel power
generation, and export gas overseas at local communities' expense. This
nightmare can and must be stopped."
In an op-ed published
Tuesday at Common Dreams, Hauter said the trip to the conference
"underscores his administration's vision for long-term fossil fuel
dependence, along with increased pollution and plastics production" and
called it a "preview of one part of the White House's desperate
re-election scheme."
"The gas industry has the
exact same agenda" on fossil fuels as Trump, "and it desperately
needs a Trump re-election to maintain profitability," she said.
Hauter's group wasn't alone in
voicing criticism of the event.
The People Over Petro Coalition,
which counts Food & Water Action among its two dozen members, led a protest
outside the Pittsburgh conference.
"We're marching, led by
Native leaders, to defend our water and say no to the fracking, cracking, and
plastics promoted at #ShaleInsight2019!" the group said on social media.
"It's our water, we will fight!"
Trump also used his speech at
the fracking conference to again bash the Paris climate accord—an agreement he
called "terrible."
Though the president announced in
2017 his intention to take the U.S. out of the global agreement, no
country can
actually give the U.N. formal notice of its intention to the deal
until November 4, 2019, and only after November 4, 2020 can a country formally
leave the agreement. Trump's comments Wednesday were seen as
a reiteration of his commitment to ditch the accord.
Alden Meyer, director of
strategy and policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, on Wednesday called the
expected withdrawal "irresponsible and shortsighted."
"All too many
people," said Meyer, "are already experiencing the costly and harmful
impacts of climate change in the form of rising seas, more hurricane activity,
record-breaking temperatures, and large wildfires."
"From the hearty
handshakes between the president and fossil fuel industry executives, to the
toxic masculinity exuding from the president as he heckled protesters, to
Trump's rambling description of catastrophic deregulation at the expense of our
climate and communities," said David Turnbull, strategic communications
director at Oil Change U.S., "this speech was a classic Trump dumpster
fire."
While the Trump administration
has sidelined science and pushed the expansion of fossil fuels, "Our next
president must do precisely the opposite," said Turnbull. "We need a
president who will not shake hands with industry executives, but will instead
take them to court for their crimes. We need a president who gets serious about
a just transition away from fossil fuel production, not one attempting to bring
back the past and resurrect a dirty industry."
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