We’ve seen the @WhiteHouse video about the #ParisAccord. We disagree – so we’ve changed it. #MakeThePlanetGreatAgain. pic.twitter.com/8A92MBwe6c
— France Diplomacy🇫🇷 (@francediplo_EN) June 2, 2017
While preparing to turn Brits into Europe’s untouchables, Theresa May spoke to President Trump and expressed her “disappointment” that he had just binned the Paris Climate Accord. Meanwhike, the leaders of France, Germany and Italy warned the US President that the Paris Agreement could not be renegotiated.
French President Emmanuel Macron recorded this speech in a language which the problem child running the US could understand:
We all share the same responsibility: make our planet great again. pic.twitter.com/IIWmLEtmxj
— Emmanuel Macron (@EmmanuelMacron) June 1, 2017
European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker also explained the situation during a discussion in German:
Of the “mincing no words” school of thought: @JunckerEU on @POTUS/Paris. “Not everything in int’l agreements is fake news.” –> pic.twitter.com/1IC73eXkWx
— Hallie Jackson (@HallieJackson) May 31, 2017
Meanwhile, weak-and-wobbly Theresa May probably felt that she could not afford to upset President Trump. What if that could damage trade relations with the UK’s second biggest trading partner after the EU? After all, who else would trade with the UK after the ‘hard Brexit’ from the EU that she has been advocating?
Of course, there’s always scope for arms deals with Saudi Arabia. During Wednesday evening’s leaders’ debate, when challenged by Green Party co-leader Caroline Lucas about why the UK was selling arms to countries on the UK’s Human Rights watchlist, Amber Rudd (substituting for the debate-allergic Theresa May) observed that these were good for industry.
As the saying goes, beggars can’t be choosers – “people with no other options must be content with what is offered“. And yes, thanks to David Cameron’s need to solve a problem within the Conservative Party and fend off the threat to it from UKIP, the UK is now set to have no other option but to sacrifice any moral principles it may once have had. It’s not exactly the best starting point for negotiating with the EU … .
Rabindranath Tagore first became concerned about man’s impact on the environment after seeing an oil spill at sea on his way to Japan in 1916. This was decades before an environmental movement emerged in the West. Over 100 years later, President Trump still fails to get it – unlike the leaders of almost every other country in the planet, except Syria and Nicaragua. President Trump’s short term aim of creating a few jobs in the US coal industry in places like Pittsburgh somehow became a higher priority.
And yet the two biggest drivers of the migration of which President Trump and Theresa May are so fearful are war and climate change. As former US Vice-President Al Gore pointed out recently, climate change helped cause Brexit. The civil war in Syria followed the worst drought there for 900 years, which forced 1.5 million people to move from the countryside to the cities. Then popular nationalists started to use psychological operations techniques to play with people’s fears.
Following the announcement by President Trump to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk resigned from his involvement in the presidential councils.
Am departing presidential councils. Climate change is real. Leaving Paris is not good for America or the world.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 1, 2017
In a speech at Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy in Berlin a couple of years ago, he had noted that: “Today’s refugee problem is perhaps a small indication of what the future will be like if we do not take action with respect to climate change,” stated Musk during the recent speech. “Today, the challenge is in terms of millions of people, but in the future, based on what the scientific consensus is, the problem will be in the hundreds of millions and much more severe.”