Donald Trump makes a historic mistake

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2017/06/04/commentary/world-commentary/donald-trump-makes-historic-mistake/?utm_source=Daily+News+Updates&utm_campaign=f28f81e5bc-Sunday_email_updates05_06_2017&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c5a6080d40-f28f81e5bc-333371537#.WTTt-TfhXIU

Worldwide, the race is on to see who can go green the fastest, and America just lost

by Laurence Tubiana  Jun 4, 2017

• PARIS – President Donald Trump has announced that the United States will no longer participate in the 2015 Paris climate agreement, the landmark United Nations treaty that many of us worked so hard to achieve. Trump is making a mistake that will have grave repercussions for his own country, and for the world.

Trump claims that he will try to renegotiate the deal reached in Paris, or craft a new one. But leaders from around the world have already hailed the agreement as a breakthrough for the fight against climate change, a victory for international cooperation and a boon to the global economy. That remains true today.

Among the many challenges we face today, climate change is unique in its global scale. It affects every element of life on this planet — from ecosystems and food production to cities and industrial supply chains. Viewing climate change as strictly an “environmental” problem misses the point entirely.

We might charitably assume that Trump simply does not understand the implications of his decision. And yet, regardless of what Trump thinks, we know that he is surrounded by advisers who know very well what is at stake.

On the campaign trail, Trump promised to create jobs and protect American workers from the ravages of the world. And he signed off his tweet announcing that he had made a decision on the Paris accord with the words, “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

But Trump’s decision undermines every one of these goals, and it goes against the wishes of a vast majority of Americans, including many of his own supporters. By turning his back on the Paris Agreement, he is increasing Americans’ exposure to the devastating effects of climate change — many of which they are already experiencing. Moreover, he is undercutting jobs in the thriving renewable energy and electric vehicle sectors, which are increasingly employing the very workers he purports to represent.

More broadly, Trump has diminished America itself, and abdicated its global leadership role. When I was a member of the French government participating in a global tour to build consensus for climate action — an effort that eventually culminated in the Paris Agreement — I experienced firsthand what American leadership can achieve. It is tragic to watch that force for good be subverted by denial and myopia.

By burying their heads in the sand, Trump and his advisers must be hoping that reality will simply go away. They have somehow concluded that America will be spared from the droughts already destroying farms in California’s Central Valley, the rising sea levels already flooding coastal cities, the storms and wildfires routinely ravaging vast swaths of the American countryside, and the water- and food-supply disruptions that threaten us all.

Other parties to the Paris Agreement have responded to Trump’s decision with strength, thus proving the resilience of the agreement itself. The rest of the world will be sad to see an America that has been left behind, owing to Trump’s decision. But we will not wait; in fact, we are already moving on.

The world’s response will be clear at the Group of 20 meeting in Germany this July. Already, Europe, China, India, Canada, and Pacific Rim and South American countries have recommitted to the goals of the Paris Agreement. These countries understand the dangers of climate change, as do ExxonMobil’s global shareholders, who recently rejected that company’s attempts to ignore the impact of climate change on its business.

By placing America in the company of the only two countries that have not joined the Paris Agreement — Syria and Nicaragua — Trump’s decision is at odds with the global atmosphere of cooperation. The world’s major economies are reaching new agreements every day to collaborate on research and development, infrastructure investment and industrial strategy. They are working together to achieve a low carbon economy, and to make 2020 the year that global greenhouse gas emissions will have peaked.

European leaders are already meeting with their Indian and Chinese counterparts to find areas where they can cooperate on developing clean energy and green infrastructure. Massive investments will be made in these areas, and the European Central Bank, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and many other institutions are devising mechanisms to finance them. Likewise, sovereign wealth funds with immense clout in the global financial system are redirecting their investments toward the green economy.

Even the most optimistic among us did not predict that the old fossil-fuel paradigm would change so quickly. But Europe is phasing out coal-fueled energy production. And India, China and South Korea are rapidly shifting their investments away from coal and toward renewable energy sources.

Worldwide, the competition is about “who can go green the fastest.” New industries are springing up, at scale, in areas ranging from electrification and smart-grid design to electric vehicles, green construction and recycling technologies, and organic chemicals. The renewable energy revolution, now spreading at an unprecedented rate, is already transforming entire sectors, not least transportation. In all of these sectors around the world, the excitement and growth potential is palpable.

It is a shame that Trump has decided to shirk America’s global responsibility and turn his back on these developments. His decision is a blow to so many people — including a great many Americans — who have worked hard to be a successful part of the new economy.

Still, Trump cannot take all of America with him. State- and city-level climate action is sweeping across the U.S., increasing in scale and ambition. Trump’s historic mistake represents an obstacle to that collective action; but it can hardly stop it. Just as Chinese companies are now training U.S. coal workers to build wind farms, the rest of the world will continue to work together, and build the markets and workforce of the future.

Shame of unpaid debt a key reason for farmer suicides, finds study

The RBI-commissioned study listed faulty crop choices and aspirational consumption patterns as other major factors for farmer suicides

http://www.livemint.com/Politics/8CRq8MTmfi2alHPhp2kG4O/Shame-of-debt-steep-costs-driving-farmers-to-suicide-RBIc.html 

New Delhi: Shame arising out of inability to repay loans taken from relatives and acquaintances is a key reason for farmers resorting to suicide, a study commissioned by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) found.

The study titled “Lives in debt: narratives of agrarian distress and farmer suicides”, conducted by researchers at Shiv Nadar University and published in the latest issue of Economic and Political Weekly, listed faulty crop choices, rising input costs, and aspirational consumption patterns as other major factors driving suicides, following field investigations in two of the most suicide-prone districts in India—Yavatmal in Maharashtra and Sangrur in Punjab.

The findings come at a time when a farm debt waiver in Uttar Pradesh has sparked demand for similar relief in these two states. In Punjab, despite a record harvest, farmer suicides have continued.

Despite formal credit to farmers growing tenfold between 2001 and 2012, commercial banks have “deepened” credit instead of “widening” it, making loans more accessible to farmers with large landholdings, the study said, adding that “it (the surge in formal credit) was insufficient to rule out the predominance of non-institutional sources”.

Citing data from the National Crime Records Bureau, the study observed that close to 270,000 farmers have committed suicide in the past 15 years, and despite wide differences in cropping patterns and access to irrigation, the crisis in farming is strikingly similar in districts like Yavatmal (rain-fed cotton belt) and Sangrur (irrigated region growing three crops in a year).

In Yavatmal, the survey showed that small and marginal farmers (owning less than 2 hectares) who lacked non-farm sources of income were most likely to commit suicide.

“The shame associated with one’s inability to repay is immense in a village society and it is all the more acute if money is borrowed from relatives,” the study observed.

In Sangrur, the study found that most families where a farmer suicide took place had outstanding debts over Rs200,000. Many families were indebted to traders and commission agents and had exhausted all formal credit channels, the study found.

It further said that crop choices in these districts were not in tune with the agro-climatic features of the region. Cultivation of Bt cotton in Yavatmal where rainfall is unpredictable and growing rice in Sangrur where water tables are depleting has put farmers under considerable stress, according to the study.

The researchers observed that a Bt cotton farmer is barely able to meet the rising costs of cultivation, let alone generate a profit sufficient to sustain the household. In Punjab, a highly input-intensive farming and low support prices that did not keep pace with production costs have meant little surplus left with farmers to repay loans.

While consumption expenditure of small farmers usually exceeds their income from farming, the mismatch is higher in Punjab, the study said, adding the state tops in purchase of consumer durables often financed by loans form non-institutional sources.

Due to massive defaults caused by repeated crop failures, “the most frightening point emerging from the field study is the exhausting of informal sources of credit” leading to a situation where moneylenders prefer buying out assets of farmers than mortgaging them, the study said.

It suggested several interventions, including discouraging loans to crops not suited to the ecology of a region, restructuring of loans into smaller instalments, and introduction of cashless loan components to avoid diversion of loans towards consumption expenditure, as possible measures to curb suicides.

Criticising the pitifully low public expenditure on agriculture (less than 1% of the GDP), the study said “an economy driven by jobless growth, compulsive migration” (from rural India) creates new “serfs” in informal services and construction, “while existing rural and agrarian problems remain unresolved”.