The big story everyone is chasing, is whether US President Trump is a Russian stooge. Wrong. That is all a smoke screen. Trump is actually a Chinese stooge. He is clearly out to make China great again. Just look at the facts.
Trump took office promising to fix the US trade imbalance with China, and what is the first thing he did? He threw away a US-designed free-trade deal with 11 other Pacific nations — a pact whose members make up 40 percent of global GDP.
The Trans-Pacific Partnership was based largely on US economic interests, benefiting the country’s fastest-growing technologies and agribusinesses, and had more labor, environmental and human rights standards than any trade agreement ever. And it excluded China. It was the US’ baby, shaping the future of trade in Asia.
Imagine if Trump were negotiating with China now as not only the US president, but also as head of a 12-nation trading bloc based on US values and interests. That is called l-e-v-e-r-a-g-e, and Trump just threw it away ... because he promised to in the campaign — without, I would bet, ever reading the TPP. What a chump! I can still hear the clinking of champagne glasses in Beijing.
Now more Asian nations are falling in line with China’s regional trading association — the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership — which has no serious environmental, intellectual property, human trafficking or labor standards like the TPP.
A Peterson Institute study said the TPP would “increase annual real incomes in the United States by US$131 billion” by 2030, without changing total US employment levels. Goodbye to that.
However, Trump took his Make China Great campaign to a new level on Tuesday by rejecting the science on climate change and tossing out all of former US president Barack Obama’s plans to shrink US dependence on coal-fired power. Trump also wants to weaken existing mileage requirements for US-made vehicles. Stupid.
OK, Mr President, let us assume for a second that climate change is a hoax. Do you believe in math? There are 7.5 billion people on the planet and there will be 8.5 billion by 2030, according to the UN population bureau — and most will want to drive like us, eat protein like us and live in houses like us.
And if they do, we will eat up, burn up, smoke up and choke up the planet — and devour our fisheries, coral reefs, rivers and forests — at a pace we have never seen before. Major cities in India and China already cannot breathe; wait for when there are another billion people.
That means that clean power, clean water, clean air, clean transportation and energy-efficient buildings will have to be the next great global industry, whether or not there is climate change. The demand will be huge.
So what is China doing? Its new five-year plan is a rush to electric cars, batteries, nuclear, wind, solar and energy efficiency — and a cap-and-trade system for carbon. Trump’s plan? More coal and oil. Hello? How can the US be great if we do not dominate the next great global industry — clean power?
The US state leading in clean energy innovations is California, which also has the highest vehicle emissions standards and the strictest building efficiency codes. Result: California alone has far more advanced energy jobs than there are coal miners in the US, and the pay is better and the work is healthier.
In January last year, CNNMoney reported that nationally, the US “solar industry workforce is bigger than that of oil and gas construction, and nearly three times the size of the entire coal mining workforce.”
“More than half the electric vehicles sold in the US are sold in California,” Energy Innovation chief executive Hal Harvey said. “If there are two jurisdictions hell-bent on transformation, it is China and California. There have been 200 million electric vehicles sold in China already. They are called electric bicycles, which cost about US$400 — quiet, not contributing to congestion or pollution, and affordable.”
China is loving this: It is doubling down on clean energy — because it has to and it wants to leapfrog the US on technology — and the US is doubling down on coal, squandering the US’ lead in technology.
If you liked buying your oil from Saudi Arabia, you will love buying your electric cars, solar panels, efficiency software and batteries from China.
Finally, Trump wants to slash the US Department of State and foreign aid budgets, and make it harder for people to immigrate to the US, particularly for Muslims. This opens the way for China to expand its influence across the developing world, and signals the smartest math and science students in the world to start their start-ups overseas and not in the US.
NBC News reported last week that applications from foreign students, notably from China, India and the Middle East, “are down this year at nearly 40 percent of schools that answered a recent survey by the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers.”
So you tell me that Trump is not a Chinese agent. The only other explanation is that he is ignorant and unread — that he has never studied the issues or connected the dots between them — so Big Coal and Big Oil easily manipulated him into being their chump, who just tweeted out their talking points to win votes here and there — without any thought to grand strategy. Surely that could not be true?
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