Reviewing Trump’s erratic policies: Climate wins, trade losses – Andrew Kenny

Key topics:.Trump's tariffs risk weakening global economies, including America's.His climate stance counters global panic, but his trade policies are reckless.EU's push for 'green energy' in Africa ignores better, cleaner options like nuclear..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here..Support South Africa's bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here..If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By Andrew Kenny*.In just under two months, President Trump has helped to save the world from one destructive folly but threatened it with another. He seems incoherent to the point of insanity..Some people say that his mad plans, such as evacuating all the Palestinians out of Gaza, are not meant to be taken literally but are just intended to break up the policy logjam of the past and provoke radically new policy thinking. Yes, well, … Are his fits of ignorance, such as not knowing that Lesotho existed, part of a similar strategy? The trouble is I doubt he has any real strategy at all, or any clear ideology. He seems to rely entirely on instinct, which is sometimes right and sometimes spectacularly wrong. He is spectacularly wrong on trade and tariffs, and, although I am not an economist, I am frightened..My father suffered under the Great Depression of the 1930s and then faced death against its logical outcome, Adolf Hitler. My father was a Scottish seaman born in 1912. Although he was a qualified merchant navy officer in the early 1930s, the only job he could first get was as a night watchman in a Glasgow warehouse. Finally he got a posting on a ship. The only country to break out of the Depression was Nazi Germany, which primed the pump of its economy by massive spending on armaments, building up huge debt but restoring full employment. All the other developed countries languished under massive unemployment for almost ten years. Finally German debt got so huge that the only way out of it was war, with conquest and plunder. Hitler wanted war anyway, and in 1939 he got it. My father faced his U-boats on the Atlantic Ocean, bringing grain from Canada to Liverpool..The Depression followed the Stock Market Crash of 1929 but was not caused by it. The crash was caused by excessive silliness, which I'm afraid will always happen as long as humans run the economy. Absurd expectations built up a huge bubble, which burst on 29 October 1929. What should have been done about it? Nothing. The reserve bank should have kept sensible money supply. That's all. Bad companies would have died, good ones survived. In a year or two, the economy would have recovered, would have been better than ever. Instead the US imposed draconian trade tariffs on imports. Other countries did the same. The world economy ground to a halt – except in Germany when Hitler took over..Draconian tariffs.Trump is now imposing draconian tariffs against all and sundry, against enemies and, more worryingly, against friends. Against Canada! He is beginning to treat the EU as the enemy. I am no fan of the EU, and would have voted for Brexit, but the EU consists of highly civilised, advanced democracies. They don't deserve to be scolded and beaten with tariffs..If I could ever make a request to President Trump, it would be this, "Please sir, study the Great Depression." But it seems he doesn't study anything. In recent weeks, stock markets in the West have plummeted. The shares of Tesla, Elon Musk's company, have fallen by 45% since last December. I heard Trump dismissing this fall, saying that in the long term his tariffs would make the American economy stronger than ever. They won't. They will make it much weaker, and will take down other economies with it. Trump's advisors must know this. Why don't they stop his madness?.Read more: 🔒 Trump's trade chaos: Disruption over prosperity.Of course, Trump has such erratic behaviour that he could suddenly flip-flop, reduce the tariffs (using some bit of sophistry, which he is good at) and restore free trade. I hope so. I really do. It is impossible to exaggerate the benefits of free trade to everyone. The more people, the more countries are trading freely with each other, the richer everyone becomes..Trump's greatest triumph – by far – has been his ending of America's part in the stupid, destructive, anti-science mania of dangerous climate change, and his enthusiastic promotion of oil and gas in the US. I am afraid I am a stuck record here but my slight training in physics and engineering is more than enough to show me that rising CO2 is not causing dangerous climate change, in fact is not causing any climate change at all. CO2, a weak greenhouse gas, causes warming up to a certain concentration (150ppm) and no more above it. But in the history of our planet it seems that CO2 has never been below 150ppm. Therefore, as the graphs of CO2 and global temperatures over hundreds of millions of years show, CO2 has never had any effect on the climate..Clouds (cumulus clouds) have a major effect. The more clouds, the cooler the world; the fewer clouds the warmer. In the 10,000 years before 1850 AD, temperatures rose and fell while CO2 remained steady at about 280ppm. Most of the warm periods then were warmer than now, with CO2 now at about 440ppm. Humans, by burning coal, oil and gas, have done the world a big favour by increasing CO2 in the air. CO2 is a wonderful, natural, safe, life-giving gas upon which plants depend. They are now doing much better than a hundred years ago. Crops are improving and the world is greening, thanks to CO2. Attempts to reduce CO2 will harm the environment, the world economy and all the people. Net zero, the goal of zero CO2 emissions, is evil ignorance..Paris Climate Accord.All the science in the paragraph above is well known to all proper climate scientists, and is indeed the product of their research, observation and data. Yet when Trump, in his first term, in 2017, pulled out of the Paris Climate Accord, he gave none of the scientific reasons why the accord was nonsense. He simply said that it was damaging to America's economic interests and that even if all countries complied with the Paris Accord the reduction in global temperatures would only be two tenths of a degree by 2100 (actually there would be no reduction at all). Why didn't he give the proper science? He had plenty of scientific advisors who could have explained it exactly, including Professor William Happer, one of the world's leading physicists with expert knowledge on atmospheric science..Why didn't Trump use Happer's expertise? The answer it seems is that he was too lazy to do so. He couldn't be bothered. He preferred to go on his own instincts and whims. So while he did the right thing by pulling out of the Paris Accord, he gave an extra curse to the climate alarmists to use against climate truth-tellers. To "Denialist!" and "Flat Earther!" they could add, "You're just like Trump!" He's done the same again in his second term..Read more: 🔒 Trump's foreign aid cuts shake NGOs and philanthropists.Trump has rightly urged, although with characteristic defiance and rudeness, "Drill baby, drill!" Fossil fuels, beginning with coal in England in the 18th Century, have delivered the Western world into long life, good health, prosperous economies, clean environments and general happiness. Coal is dirty, because of the emission of sulphur and nitrogen oxides, heavy metals, dangerous organics and smoke. These can be cleaned up to a considerable degree but not entirely eliminated. Gas is much cleaner. But with all of them, their benefits hugely outweigh their costs. The "renewable" energy sources, mainly solar and wind, are a disaster for grid electricity..All around the world, wherever they have been tried, solar and wind have proved staggeringly expensive for dispatchable electricity – electricity when you want it. They have awful environmental effects. They require enormous amounts of raw materials (far more than for nuclear power) and leave toxic wastes lasting for millions of years. The Germany economy is sinking under very high energy costs, caused by the shutting down of her excellent nuclear plants, the phasing out of fossil fuels, and the large scale, very expensive move to wind and solar. The UK's industries and her economy are collapsing for similar reasons..South Africa's renewable energy program, REIPPPP, was a similar calamity, although on a much smaller scale, despite our wonderful solar resources. But all the while, we have had green Western imperialists, coming to South Africa like the colonial missionaries of old "to bring the truth to the natives". The natives are instructed to believe the climate nonsense, to reject the fossil fuels that made the Western countries so healthy and prosperous, and to change to solar and wind, which are now wrecking Europe – but not the US anymore..Investment package.Ursula von der Leyen, the dazzlingly elegant President of the European Commission, is visiting South Africa, and speaking to President Ramaphosa, who is now head of the G20 group of nations. The European Union has announced a €4.7 billion ($5.1 billion) investment package for South Africa to support green energy and vaccine production. (If the "vaccines" are proper vaccines, such as for measles, polio and smallpox, wonderful. If they are for the wretched mRNA covid "vaccines", heaven help us.)."Green energy" means solar and wind, the energy sources that are now wrecking the economy and impoverishing the people of von der Leyen's home country, Germany. Now that naughty Trump has pulled out of the ridiculous Paris Climate Accord, von der Leyen wants to assure us Africans that the nice EU is here to help us advance the Just Energy Transition (JET) – the transition from cheap, useful energy to very expensive, useless energy..The "Just Energy Transition" adds to the list of green oxymorons. "Free energy" is very expensive; "clean energy" is filthy; and now the "Just Energy Transition" is completely unjust..Read more: 🔒 The risk of a Trump recession, explained in three charts.Suppose the EU and the other green imperialists really did believe their nonsense that rising CO2 was bad. Since Africa only emits a tiny fraction of the world's CO2, surely they could just say to African countries, "We'll help you develop your countries in the same way that we developed ours, through the use of fossil fuels. The technologies are now much better and cleaner, and so it will be easier for you. We'll help you to develop your coal mines and coal power stations, your reticulation systems, your oil wells and gas fields, and all the required infrastructure. Then, when you are as prosperous and healthy as us, we'll ask you to wreck your economies by replacing fossil fuels with solar and wind, as we are doing now.".Yet they don't do it. Maybe that is because, deep in their hearts, they don't want Africa to develop at all. Maybe Trump is much kinder to Africa than the EU. Trump referred to some African country as a "shithole" and was proud to announce he'd never heard of Lesotho, but he couldn't care less whether Africa burnt a lot of fossil fuels, which it should do..Nuclear is the elephant in the room in all these discussions. Nuclear is clean, safe, economical and reliable, and emits no CO2 in operation. Why not develop nuclear power in a big way in Africa? Mumbling follows from the EU..Climate nonsense.In Business Day last Friday, there was an article headed, "SA turning to China due to US pullout". The idea was that China could now help us with JET. China! China doesn't believe a word of the climate nonsense. She is by far the world's biggest emitter of CO2 and has no intention of reducing it. She is building coal power stations as if they are going out of fashion. At the beginning of 2024, China had 94,500 MW of new coal stations under construction. This compares with a combined capacity of 45,400 MW for all Eskom's power stations, built over the last 60 years or so..China uses the electricity from its coal stations to make solar panels, which require huge amounts of energy. It then sells solar panels to green Western countries, for them to make expensive, unreliable electricity. The green countries boast of their environmental credentials as they are promoting China's coal stations and wrecking their own energy supply. Actually, the Chinese might make a good partner for SA on JET. They are blatantly cynical about the green nonsense, which we should be too..I don't think Trump is cynical about anything. He seems to believe whatever outrageous thought that trickles through his head at the moment, even though he might believe a completely contradictory thought a day later. He is so right about the climate; he is so wrong about trade. There seem to be a lot of sensible, intelligent, well-informed leaders in his Republican Party. Please, won't they tell Trump when he is talking nonsense?.Read also:.🔒 FT: Trump is making Europe great againThe Trump-Zelensky showdown – Brenthurst Foundation🔒 FT: Trump has undermined US economic exceptionalism.This article was first published by the Daily Friend and is republished with permission.Andrew Kenny* is a writer, an engineer, and a classical liberal.

Reviewing Trump’s erratic policies: Climate wins, trade losses – Andrew Kenny

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