Trump Dump: Foreign Policy (Thread I)

[mr friendly guy]

Recessions are defined by GDP numbers. Its literally in the definition, ie 2 quarters of negative growth. If you don't mean the usually accepted definition of recession when you say "recession", what exactly do you mean?

I think the point he's trying to make is that it's all well and good to say GDP is going up, everything is fine but what does that matter if the populace of a country aren't actually benefiting from it or the society is failing to function. I mean hell, the GDP of the US is growing but there's a city of 100 thousand people in Michigan who are being told to pay for tap water that is literally poisonous because the city administrators moved to a 'cheaper' water source. And having debt collectors sent after them if they don't. What benefit do any of those people get from an increasing GDP?

Rising GDP might be good for an economy but there is more to a country than its economy, and the value of everything can't necessarily be reduced to a dollar figure.

Well I did ask him to clarify what he meant. Instead he spat the dummy.

[Highlord Laan]

You knew full damned well what he meant, you just wanted him to pander to you pedantry.

He's also entirely correct. The GDP is up, yay, recession over! Well, for the likes of Wall Street, political scum, corporate shit molds, and people that keep the majority of their money in offshore accounts. For people that actually work for a living and rely on a steady pay check to live? Not so much.

But it'll all be fine and trickle down as Saint Reagan promised. The republicans said so.

[mr friendly guy]

You knew full damned well what he meant, you just wanted him to pander to you pedantry.

You caught me out with your mindreading powers mate. That was totally what I wanted to do. Crikey, foiled again.

He's also entirely correct. The GDP is up, yay, recession over! Well, for the likes of Wall Street, political scum, corporate shit molds, and people that keep the majority of their money in offshore accounts. For people that actually work for a living and rely on a steady pay check to live? Not so much.

Its shit in Greece. Its shit in the US for a not insignificant part of the population. But this isn't the same throughout all of Europe. He lives in Finland, a country with a strong welfare state, a country which is trialling basic wage, publicly funded healthcare and has one of the highest GDP / capita. I haven't heard of any economic crisis specific to Finland which amounts a similar situation to Japan's "lost decade", so naturally that description piqued my interest.

Now let me try my mindreading powers. Your life is shit, your financial situation sucks, so you want to lash out and pick a fight over people who might not be in the same situation and characterise them as Wall Street, political scum yadda yadda blah blah. How did I do?

[Tvpnbb]

Huh? According to IMF numbers Finland in 2016 is around 9% larger than it was in 2006 GDP wise. It grew in 2015 and 2016, and out of that 10 year period it experienced shrinkage in 4 of those 10 years. Not stellar but hardly as bad as your described.
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo ... D&grp=0&a=

And look at the 2007 and 2008 figures - the number is still below those. And those figures are in "current prices", which I think means they are not adjusted for inflation or changes in purchasing power. Finnish real GDP definitely did not grow by like 20% between 2006 and 2007, which would be the case if you took those numbers literally.

This is the best figure I could find:
https://www.google.com/publicdata/explo ... &ind=false
It shows that as of 2015 at least, Finnish GDP per capita adjusted to purchasing power was considerably lower that it was at it's peak.

[mr friendly guy]

Huh? According to IMF numbers Finland in 2016 is around 9% larger than it was in 2006 GDP wise. It grew in 2015 and 2016, and out of that 10 year period it experienced shrinkage in 4 of those 10 years. Not stellar but hardly as bad as your described.
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo ... D&grp=0&a=

And look at the 2007 and 2008 figures - the number is still below those. And those figures are in "current prices", which I think means they are not adjusted for inflation or changes in purchasing power. Finnish real GDP definitely did not grow by like 20% between 2006 and 2007, which would be the case if you took those numbers literally.

This is the best figure I could find:
https://www.google.com/publicdata/explo ... &ind=false
It shows that as of 2015 at least, Finnish GDP per capita adjusted to purchasing power was considerably lower that it was at it's peak.

If use GDP nominal because when you compare which economy is larger than any other (something that I am interested in), GDP nominal is what we usually use. However I can use PPP , and GDP PPP Per capita since that's what you're interested in. PPP will incorporate purchasing power, and the figures for Finland in 2016 for GDP PPP are comparable to its 2016 GDP nominal without the fluctuations. In other words, its gone up consistently, and slowly without the rollercoaster movements its GDP / nominal did. Or from your POV, it didn't have that high peak in 2007/08 which it hasn't caught up with yet.

http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo ... C&grp=0&a=
As I said, its performance is hardly stellar but doesn't seem so disastrous.

Point 2. Finland adopted the Euro in 1999, so it already using the Euro during 2007 /08. One of the reasons 2007 is higher compared to the rest in GDP nominal terms could be accounted for by the fact that Euro was appreciating during that period (since we convert its economy in Euro to USD for comparison with other economies, so if the Euro is high, its economy looks bigger in nominal terms).
http://www.x-rates.com/average/?from=EU ... &year=2007
http://www.x-rates.com/average/?from=EU ... &year=2008
and by 2010 had weakened http://www.x-rates.com/average/?from=EU ... &year=2010 and by 2016 its much weaker than it was in 2007 / 08 http://www.x-rates.com/average/?from=EU ... &year=2016

[Tvpnbb]

If use GDP nominal because when you compare which economy is larger than any other (something that I am interested in), GDP nominal is what we usually use. However I can use PPP , and GDP PPP Per capita since that's what you're interested in. PPP will incorporate purchasing power, and the figures for Finland in 2016 for GDP PPP are comparable to its 2016 GDP nominal without the fluctuations. In other words, its gone up consistently, and slowly without the rollercoaster movements its GDP / nominal did. Or from your POV, it didn't have that high peak in 2007/08 which it hasn't caught up with yet.

http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo ... C&grp=0&a=
As I said, its performance is hardly stellar but doesn't seem so disastrous.

My problem wasn't with PPP/Nominal it was with current international dollar, which in this figure which you cite is not adjusted for inflation - you may notice that in the other chart you gave(http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo ... D&grp=0&a= ) it clearly shows that in constant prices(e.g. adjusted for inflation) Finnish GDP contracted in 2012 and 2013, yet in current prices it shows a GDP increase, and that is due to inflation.

Here's also the nominal GDP per capita in constant prices
https://www.google.com/publicdata/explo ... &ind=false

As to you point 2, here's a table that shows, among other things, Finnish GDP measured in constant (2010)prices and in euros, showing that there was a large decrease from the peak GDP regardless of exchange rates.
http://tilastokeskus.fi/til/vtp/2016/vt ... 01_en.html
Although it is true that by the end of 2016 Finnish GDP was indeed larger than in 2006, but only slightly, and also the Finnish population has grown somewhat, so the GDP per capita is actually probably a bit smaller, or at least it was at the end of last year.

OK, this is not a terrible performance (e.g. Greece), but still technically pretty much a "lost decade".

[mr friendly guy]

I think we both agree Finland's performance isn't terrible and isn't great. I will concede that GDP / capita is worse in real terms. I would consider Finland's performance as bad as HDS described ie 10 years of recession which made me think of Japanese style lost decade where they would go into recession, snap out, and shortly after go back in. As to whether you can consider it a sufficient to call it a lost decade, it certainly is not as bad as Japan's lost decade where Japan's GDP ended up much smaller after the decade, not slightly more like Finlands. But as I said at the beginning, its performance is hardly stellar, it just didn't seem quite as bad as the pessimistic picture described.

[Thanas]

Merkel is throwing some shade at Trump.

[Napoleon the Clown]

You know, I suddenly wonder if translations of Trump's babbling attempt to clean things up to make what he says not come across as a shit translation or if they try to stay true to his particular... linguistic style. And how often people end up concluding that the translations were done by an imbecile, until they realize that Trump really is less linguistically gifted (or more, from a certain point of view) than Dubya.

Pew Research indicates that Trump is even less popular abroad than he is in the US, and has harmed the international image of the US. The article is pretty long, so I'll mention some highlights:

37 countries were polled, and among them the only nations that showed increases in positive perception were Israel and Russia.

Reasons for the dislike toward Trump are both his character and his policies, with the Mexico wall being disliked by 76% of those polled on average and Mexico having a 94% rate of disapproval. His stance on trade agreements is also quite unpopular.

The general opinion on the American people is above 50%, but the view of the country itself is not favoring very well.

It looks like there's about five pages of info, and this is just page 1 highlights. It's readily apparent that electing Trump did not increase America's standing with the world, despite the Republican delusion that Obama made the US a laughing-stock across the globe.

[Thanas]

This image is all you need to know.

And some analysis.

[Gandalf]

Australia going up by six points makes sense. Trump excites a lot of our own right wing nuts. "Make Australia Great Again" is becoming weirdly popular as a saying.

[Flagg]

Australia going up by six points makes sense. Trump excites a lot of our own right wing nuts. "Make Australia Great Again" is becoming weirdly popular as a saying.

Again?! That's a strong statement.

[Gandalf]

Australia going up by six points makes sense. Trump excites a lot of our own right wing nuts. "Make Australia Great Again" is becoming weirdly popular as a saying.

Again?! That's a strong statement.

Hey, the place worked fine until the British showed up. However, I doubt the right wing are referring to that.

[Thanas]

Ah I see the dreams of the Greater Australian Prosperity Zone rear their ugly heads again.

[FaxModem1]

The Telegraph

Time magazine asks Trump Organization to remove fake covers from president's golf clubhouses
A framed fake Time Magazine cover hanging in the Champions Sports Bar & Grill at the Trump National Doral Miami, in Dora, Florida on June 24, 2017
A framed fake Time Magazine cover hanging in the Champions Sports Bar & Grill at the Trump National Doral Miami, in Doral, Florida on June 24, 2017 CREDIT: THE WASHINGTON POST VIA GETTY IMAGES
Barney Henderson, new york
28 JUNE 2017 • 8:41AM
Time magazine has asked the Trump Organisation to remove a framed front cover featuring Donald Trump from several of its golf clubs after it was proven to be fake.

ADVERTISING

The cover, showing a presidential Mr Trump with his arms folded and steely-eyed, was framed and hung on the walls of at least four Trump courses in the US, Ireland and Scotland.

Dated March 1, 2009, the cover reads “Donald Trump: The ‘Apprentice’ is a television smash!”, with another headline stating: “TRUMP IS HITTING ON ALL FRONTS . . . EVEN TV!”

Paid content
Market Prediction: Gold Headed for Historic Move
Market Prediction: Gold Headed for Historic Move
Harry Dent
The Watch Brand Everyone is Raving About
The Watch Brand Everyone is Raving About
Brathwait
Recommended by
The fake Time magazine cover with other framed covers at the Trump National Doral Miami Golf Shop
The fake Time magazine cover with other framed covers at the Trump National Doral Miami Golf Shop CREDIT: THE WASHINGTON POST VIA GETTY IMAGES
However, the Washington Post established that there was no March 1, 2009, issue of Time Magazine and Mr Trump did not feature on the cover at any time in 2009.

The Time issue dated March 2, 2009 featured Kate Winslet on the front following her Oscars success.

A framed fake Time Magazine cover hanging at the Trump National Doral Miami Golf Shop, in Doral, Florida on June 24, 2017
A framed fake Time Magazine cover hanging at the Trump National Doral Miami Golf Shop, in Doral, Florida on June 24, 2017 CREDIT: THE WASHINGTON POST VIA GETTY IMAGES
Time confirmed that the cover was a fake and stated it had requested the Trump Organisation stops using it.

The framed fake Trump cover was hung in two prominent positions at Mr Trump’s golf resort in Doral, Florida and in the member’s dining room at the Trump National Golf Club near Washington DC.

Donald Trump views developments to his luxury golf resort during a visit to the Menie estate in Aberdeenshire
Donald Trump views developments to his luxury golf resort during a visit to the Menie estate in Aberdeenshire CREDIT: PA
It was at the same course that a plaque was unveiled overlooking the Potomac River, setting out the bloody details of a Civil War battle apparently fought on the spot. However, historians say no such event ever took place.

The fake Trump Time cover also reportedly hangs at his exclusive Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach and had previously been on the wall at his club in Doonbeg, western Ireland.

View image on Twitter
View image on Twitter
Follow
DAWIT SOLOMON @DAWITSOLOMON12
The copy of Time magazine was hung up in at least 5 of Trump’s clubs Filling the entire cover was a photo of Trump.but all are phony .
7:13 PM - 27 Jun 2017
20 20 Retweets 12 12 likes
Twitter Ads info and privacy
Employees at the Trump Turnberry course said it had been hung at the resort's The Duel in the Sun pub.

Mr Trump was criticised for a speech in January at the solemn setting of the CIA memorial wall, in which he lambasted the media and boasted that he held the record for the number of Time magazine covers.

"So a reporter for Time magazine - and I have been on their cover, like, 14 or 15 times," Mr Trump said.

U.S. President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach is seen from West Palm Beach
US president Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach is seen from West Palm Beach CREDIT: REUTERS
"I think we have the all-time record in the history of Time Magazine. Like, if Tom Brady is on the cover, it’s one time, because he won the Super Bowl or something, right? I’ve been on it for 15 times this year. I don’t think that’s a record, Mike, that can ever be broken. Do you agree with that? What do you think?"

Time later clarified that the president had been on 11 covers in total at the time, while Richard Nixon had graced it on 55 occasions.

Donald Trump gestures as he stands in front of the Turnberry hotel during the Women's British Open golf championship at the Turnberry golf club in Turnberry, Scotland, Britain July 30, 2015
Donald Trump gestures as he stands in front of the Turnberry hotel during the Women's British Open golf championship at the Turnberry golf club in Turnberry, Scotland, Britain July 30, 2015 CREDIT: REUTERS
There was no response from the Trump Organization to the use of the fake Time cover.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a White House spokesman, told the Washington Post: “We couldn’t comment on the decor at Trump Golf clubs one way or another.”

A Democratic representative mocked Mr Trump by creating his own fake Time cover:

View image on Twitter
View image on Twitter
Follow
Gerry Connolly ✔ @GerryConnolly
Wow, my first cover of Time. Asked my staff to frame this and hang it in all four of my offices. @realDonaldTrump https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... 437ae2e943 …
4:11 PM - 27 Jun 2017
5,278 5,278 Retweets 19,533 19,533 likes
Twitter Ads info and privacy

So, to sum up, Trump has fake magazine covers of himself at his clubs, and Time has asked him to remove them.

[Thanas]

“At what point do they start laughing at us as a country? … We don’t want other leaders and other countries laughing at us any more. And they won’t be. They won’t be.” - Donald Trump

Yeah how is that working out for you Donnie?

[Gandalf]

Ah I see the dreams of the Greater Australian Prosperity Zone rear their ugly heads again.

Yeah, things here are pretty ugly in that regards. Also, census results came out a few days ago, showing that most of Australia's immigration population comes from Asia as opposed to Europe. The politically powerful baby boomer population in Australia were born and raised under varying levels of the White Australia Policy, and as a result they're terrified and dragging the right wing parties further right.

[Joe Momma]

You know, I suddenly wonder if translations of Trump's babbling attempt to clean things up to make what he says not come across as a shit translation or if they try to stay true to his particular... linguistic style. And how often people end up concluding that the translations were done by an imbecile, until they realize that Trump really is less linguistically gifted (or more, from a certain point of view) than Dubya.

This article features several translators talking about that dilemma. Translators are finding themselves caught between the Scylla and Charybdis of reshaping the narrative to something more coherent and thus violating an ethical duty to keep the translation as true to the original as possible or doing a direct translation and having people think the translator is at fault for presenting a rambling incoherent mess. The article does note that this is becoming less of a problem at least for some audiences as people get more accustomed to Trump's "idiosyncrasies".

[FaxModem1]

Politico

Russia escalates spy games after years of U.S. neglect
Lawmakers and intelligence officials say that the United States missed opportunities to crack down on Russian espionage efforts.
By ALI WATKINS 06/01/2017 05:12 AM EDT Updated 06/01/2017 08:07 AM EDT
A pro-Russian separatist fighter stationed at Donetsk's Sergey Prokofiev international airport looks through a pair of binoculars in October, 2014.
Officials say the Kremlin is waging a quiet effort to map the United States’ telecommunications infrastructure, perhaps preparing for an opportunity to disrupt it. | Getty
POLITICO MAGAZINE
In the throes of the 2016 campaign, the FBI found itself with an escalating problem: Russian diplomats, whose travel was supposed to be tracked by the State Department, were going missing.

The diplomats, widely assumed to be intelligence operatives, would eventually turn up in odd places, often in middle-of-nowhere USA. One was found on a beach, nowhere near where he was supposed to be. In one particularly bizarre case, relayed by a U.S. intelligence official, another turned up wandering around in the middle of the desert. Interestingly, both seemed to be lingering where underground fiber-optic cables tend to run.

According to another U.S. intelligence official, “They find these guys driving around in circles in Kansas. It’s a pretty aggressive effort.”

It’s a trend that has led intelligence officials to conclude that the Kremlin is waging a quiet effort to map the United States’ telecommunications infrastructure, perhaps preparing for an opportunity to disrupt it.

“Half the time, they’re never confronted,” the official, who declined to be identified discussing intelligence matters, said of the incidents. “We assume they’re mapping our infrastructure.”

As the country — and Washington in particular — borders on near-obsession over whether affiliates of Donald Trump’s campaign colluded with the Kremlin to swing the 2016 presidential election, U.S. intelligence officials say Moscow’s espionage ground game is growing stronger and more brazen than ever.

It’s a problem that’s sparking increasing concern from the intelligence community, including the FBI. After neglecting the Russian threat for a decade, the U.S. was caught flat-footed by Moscow’s election operation. Now, officials are scrambling to figure out how to contain a sophisticated intelligence network that’s festered and strengthened at home after years’ worth of inattention.

Congress reads it. Do you?
Sign up for POLITICO Playbook and get the latest news, every morning — in your inbox.
Email
Your email…
Sign Up
By signing up you agree to receive email newsletters or alerts from POLITICO. You can unsubscribe at any time.
“We’ve definitely been ignoring Russia for the last 15 years,” another intelligence official said, calling the Kremlin “resurgent.”

POLITICO spoke with half a dozen current and former U.S. intelligence officials about Russian spy strategies. All requested anonymity to openly discuss espionage.

“They’ve just got so many bodies,” the first intelligence official said of the Russians. “It’s not about what we know [is happening]. It’s about what we don’t know.”

It’s one of the most poorly kept secrets in the intelligence community: The Russian effort is a startlingly open and aggressive one, and often falls in a complex legal gray zone.

For example, the second official said, diplomats wandering around the desert might be in violation of certain travel requirements, but it’s not necessarily illegal.

Most U.S. intelligence officials can relay stories of run-ins with Russian intelligence operatives — often moonlighting as lobbyists, diplomats and businessmen — hanging around popular Washington happy hours. It’s an open assumption that they use Capitol Hill and its public office buildings as a farming ground for potential recruits. And the presumed agents aren’t hard to spot, according to officials: An oft-traded joke is to go to one of Washington’s handful of Russian restaurants and look for the guy in a tracksuit.

As the Russians continue aggressively pushing legal boundaries in both the United States and Moscow, there’s a tangible frustration among U.S. intelligence officials and on Capitol Hill that the U.S. has consistently missed its chance to crack down on Moscow’s spy games.

For years, lawmakers from both sides of the aisle pressed a hesitant Obama White House to crack down on some of the Kremlin’s more brazen stateside maneuvers.

“There was a general feeling that this was not getting the attention it deserved,” said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee who has supported the panel’s efforts in pressing the White House to tow a harder line with the Kremlin.

Around last summer, that tension reached a fever pitch.

Lawmakers, frustrated by Russian diplomats’ repeated violation of travel rules, inserted a provision in last year’s intelligence authorization bill that would have required Russian diplomats to provide ample notice to the State Department if they planned to travel more than 50 miles from where they were based, and further, would have required the FBI to validate that travel. According to several sources involved in the discussions at that time, the administration fought desperately — and failed — to get those provisions taken out of the bill.

Around that same time, two key Democratic lawmakers informed the White House of plans to publicly finger Russia as the foreign power behind a widespread effort to manipulate the ongoing U.S. election — something no official U.S. government entity had yet done. Fearful of escalation, the administration tried to get Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Rep. Adam Schiff, then the two leading Democrats on the Senate and House intelligence committees, respectively, to back off. The California lawmakers didn’t, and they released the statement. Backed into a corner by Congress, the administration released a statement saying the same a week later.

The Obama administration’s tentativeness in the weeks leading up to Nov. 8 — especially in the high-stakes context of a presidential election — is something that still bewilders corners of the intelligence world. Some speculate that Secretary of State John Kerry, desperate for a peace deal in Syria, urged the White House to lie low. Some blame it on fear of igniting a cyberwar, and still others say it stemmed from a generalized underestimation of the Russian threat.

Blaming one factor, one of the officials said, is “oversimplified.” But the frustration — and regret — is tangible.

Underscoring all this is that the Kremlin shows none of the same reluctance at home, nor does it show any propensity to abide by the gentlemen's espionage rules that the U.S. tends to uphold, sometimes to the chagrin of its own spy corps.

“We can’t even leave the compound over there without being followed,” the first U.S. intelligence official said.

One well-publicized incident continues to agitate officials in Washington. In June of last year, a U.S. diplomat was returning to the embassy in Moscow when a guard with the FSB, the domestic Russian security service, exploded from his booth on the compound’s perimeter and assaulted him. A surveillance video shows the guard tackling the man and throwing him to the ground before the U.S. diplomat was able to drag himself inside the doors of the embassy to safety.

Hillary Clinton is pictured.
POLITICS
Clinton: I was the ‘victim’ of an assumption that I would win
By MADELINE CONWAY
The U.S. diplomat, whom POLITICO confirmed was actually a CIA officer, had done the impossible — he had lost his tails as he maneuvered in Moscow. Infuriated, the Russians sent an FSB guard the man wouldn't recognize to wait outside the embassy for his inevitable return. The officer was beaten so badly he was immediately flown out of the country for urgent medical attention.

The account was confirmed by another person familiar with the incident.

“They are far more aggressive on counterintelligence issues in Russia than we are here,” one of the officials said.

It’s these incidents that worry and frustrate the Americans. The unspoken rules of spying mean nothing to the Kremlin.

“They agree to rules, and then break them,” another U.S. official said.

Former CIA Director John Brennan made reference to this frustration in recent congressional testimony. Though he stopped short of explicitly discussing the June 2016 incident in Moscow, he told lawmakers that he had brought up the broader harassment issue to his Russian counterpart at Russian state security services last August.

“I first told him, as I had several times previously, that the continued mistreatment and harassment of U.S. diplomats in Moscow was intolerable and needed to stop,” Brennan said.

The CIA declined to comment. The FBI did not respond to an official request for comment by deadline.

Share on Facebook Share on Twitter
CORRECTION: A previous version of this story stated that the man beat up outside the Moscow embassy was a CIA agent. He was a CIA officer, not an agent.

[Thanas]

So Trump just isolated the US in Hamburg, truly putting america first and winning at diplomacy.

winning

G20 leaders' statement on climate change highlights rift with US
Joint statement points to US decision to withdraw from Paris agreement while other G20 countries see accord as ‘irreversible’

World leaders have made clear the US’s isolated stance on climate change, with 19 of the G20 countries affirming their commitment to the “irreversible” Paris climate agreement.

After lengthy negotiations that stretched well into Saturday, the final joint statement from the meeting in Hamburg notes Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris deal while stating that the world’s other major economies all still support the international effort to slow dangerous global warming.

The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, said on Saturday she “deplored” the US exit from the agreement and added that she did not share the view of Theresa May, the British prime minister, that Washington could decide to rejoin the pact.

“I think it’s very clear that we could not reach consensus, but the differences were not papered over, they were clearly stated,” Merkel told reporters at the end of the two-day meeting. “It’s absolutely clear it is not a common position.”

The communique reads: “We take note of the decision of the United States of America to withdraw from the Paris agreement,” adding: “The leaders of the other G20 members state that the Paris agreement is irreversible” and “we reaffirm our strong commitment to the Paris agreement”.

The US did successfully manage to insert text referencing fossil fuels which read: “The United States of America states it will endeavour to work closely with other countries to help them access and use fossil fuels more cleanly and efficiently.”

World leaders meeting in Hamburg managed to agree almost every aspect of the statement, including the potentially contentious issue of trade, but the final text was held up by the US’s contrarian approach to climate change.

In June, Trump, who has enthusiastically touted coal and oil extraction, announced his country’s exit from the Paris agreement, which aims to avoid dangerous global warming of more than 2C compared to the pre-industrial period.

The strongest proponents of the climate deal, including Merkel and the French president, Emmanuel Macron, have attempted to shore up support for the Paris deal among countries following Trump’s decision to exit the agreement. Saudi Arabia and Indonesia were reportedly considering watering down their commitment to the deal but they ended up reiterating their support at the G20 summit.

The final communique was accompanied by an agreed climate and energy plan that supports the key planks of the Paris agreement and sets goals to phase out fossil fuel subsidies and shift countries towards “affordable, reliable, sustainable and low greenhouse gas emission energy systems as soon as feasible”.

A lengthy notice period means that the US withdrawal from the Paris agreement will not take place until November 2020. The US will become the only country in the world not signed up to the landmark 2015 deal other than Nicaragua, which complained that it wasn’t strong enough, and Syria, currently mired in a bloody civil war.

Trump’s administration has sought to unravel domestic climate policies by dismantling the clean power plan, which would slash emissions from coal-fired power plants, halting new emissions standards for cars and trucks and opening up new areas of public lands and oceans to mining and drilling.

Climate change has been one of the animating causes for protesters who have clashed with police in Hamburg, resulting in more than 100 arrests. On Friday, Greenpeace erected a giant effigy of Trump, dressed in a diaper and soiling himself with oil on the globe, on the river Elbe.

Other environmental groups were more optimistic, noting that almost all of the world’s major powers were broadly behind the transition to low-carbon energy and ameliorating the impacts of climate change.

“In the end, it was a landslide victory for countries voicing support for global climate action,” said Andrew Steer, president of the World Resources Institute. “Chancellor Merkel demonstrated deft leadership in rallying 19 of the world’s largest economies to deliver an unmistakable message behind climate action.

“The direction of travel toward clean energy is loud and clear. The question remains how quickly the world will surge forward and how far behind the Trump administration will let the United States fall.”

Mohamed Adow, international climate lead at Christian Aid, said: “The US president’s weak attempts to capsize the climate movement have failed: he is now marooned on a political island of his own making, with his head buried in the sand. Meanwhile, the rest of the world is moving ahead.”

[Thanas]

[Alkaloid]

Chris Uhlmann is a prat. He's a far right climate change idealist with a frankly disturbing hard on for coal and a tendency toward pathetic, sycophantic adulation of the US. But he isn't always wrong.

[mr friendly guy]

Chris Uhlmann thinks this will lessen US leadership. Agree with that. He thinks this is bad. I have to ask, given the US led large chunks of the West and other nations into that clusterfuck in Iraq, why is that bad? But we all know this is western centric thinking, where if it happens to us or someone like us (ie similar political setup) its bad. One can hear the concern Uhlmann has with China taking a bigger leadership role. Well if they are willing to take the lead to fight climate change then so what?

If you aren't willing to show leadership on a particular issue, why should you be the leader? And more importantly, why is it bad for everyone else?

[Thanas]

Well if they are willing to take the lead to fight climate change then so what?

Because they are a dictatorship that routinely tortures and kills its own people for having the audacity to demand an end to corruption and fair elections. Anybody cheering for having a larger Chinese influence over the world is either fool, an enemy of democracy, a paid shill, a poor student of history or all of the above.

[Tribble]

Well if they are willing to take the lead to fight climate change then so what?

Because they are a dictatorship that routinely tortures and kills its own people for having the audacity to demand an end to corruption and fair elections. Anybody cheering for having a larger Chinese influence over the world is either fool, an enemy of democracy, a paid shill, a poor student of history or all of the above.

Sorry I thought you were talking about the USA for a second there, I guess its all in matter of degrees.

Ya, it really should be the USA leading the charge here. The fact that even China of all places is concerned enough about climate change that its willing to try and work towards something while the US is content to sit on its ass and do nothing is saying a lot. Not good.