by Hall Gardner
The issue raised here is that the Trump-Pence administration suspended legislation that was intended to require transparency in the supply chain for “conflict minerals”18 in April 2017. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) had implemented the Conflict Mineral Rule of 2010 so that companies and consumers knew that they were not contributing to illegal activities in purchasing “conflict minerals” either from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) or from those countries adjoining the DRC. The minerals found in this region (worth an estimated $24 trillion) include diamonds, gold, copper, cobalt, and zinc, plus tin, tungsten, and tantalum (the 3TGs). The regions also possess coltan, which is used in mobile phones and other electronic gadgets, as well as cassiterite, used in food packaging. The countries involved include Angola, Burundi, the Central African Republic, the Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, South Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia.19
Yet under the Trump-Pence administration, the SEC has ruled that it will no longer enforce key parts of the Conflict Mineral Rule. US corporations will no longer be required to conduct a diligence review or an audit regarding sourcing of conflict minerals.20 In addition to the change in SEC rules—which could set the grounds for renewed conflict over conflict minerals—the Trump-Pence administration is also hoping to reduce the US contribution to UN Peacekeeping—even if renewed conflicts could ultimately hurt both US political and economic interests and actually make it harder for US businesses to invest. The UN Organization Stabilization Mission in DRC (MONUSCO) is the world's largest UN Peacekeeping operation, with about 18,750 uniformed personnel.21
In effect, the Trump-Pence administration efforts in late March 2017 to cut the MONUSCO Peacekeeping operation down to only three thousand personnel could open the Congo to new conflicts and exploitation by rival mining industries and additionally exacerbate tensions in other countries in Africa. It was MONUSCO that had fought the M23 rebel group, the largest rebel force in the Congo. The Congolese government itself has spoken out against the potential reversal of this rule.22 UN Peacekeepers are still necessary, as the conflict is not altogether resolved, particularly in the eastern areas of Congo, where some forty to fifty conflicting rebel groups have been financed by extracting resources with the backing of external states and major corporations. It is true that MONUSCO and other UN Peacekeepers have been accused of sexual abuses, due to improper vetting of individuals involved in the peacekeeping operations. UN Peacekeeping operations have also been accused ineffectiveness; yet such ineffectiveness can be attributed to lack of resources and lack of clear political mandates, plus the need to more carefully vet the political purposes of the countries involved and the need to work more closely with the local population.23 UN Peacekeeping is run on a shoestring budget: UN Peacekeeping has had its successes and failures, but it is not necessarily worse than NATO or EU peacekeeping, which often interact with the United Nations and have had different kinds of weaknesses.24
This rivalry in Africa to obtain access strategic minerals in the Congo region that are needed for the new global communications economy, and for other purposes, could well forewarn of an even more perverse global conflict ahead—one that could use nuclear weaponry if the major and regional powers cannot soon reach accords on the differences that divide them in their own quest for energy and other strategic resources across the planet.
TRUMP AND GLOBAL WARMING
In addition to his efforts to cut UN Peacekeeping costs, Trump has called global climate change a “hoax” created by and for the Chinese to undercut American business.25 One of Trump's first acts as president was to sign decrees to cut the funding of the following US governmental agencies: the Environmental and Natural Resources Division of the Department of Justice; the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy; and the Office of Fossil Energy. In his first G7 meeting on the subject at the end of May 2017, Trump opposed the views of the six major industrial democracies: Germany, France, Italy, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Japan. Of positive note, Trump did agree to “promote multilateralism” in the G7 communique.26 On the negative side, Trump appeared more concerned with the German trade surplus than with global climate change. A few days later, Trump dropped out of the Paris COP 21 Accords on global environmental issues. Ironically, he claimed that he made his decision against the Paris COP 21 because he was elected by the people of Pittsburgh (which is in the heart of the coal mining and steel industry region of Pennsylvania) and “not by Paris”; yet the mayor of Pittsburgh then tweeted: “Pittsburgh stands with the world & will follow [the] Paris Agreement.”27 Fortunately, American states and cities have declared that they will actively support the goals of the Paris Agreement; for example, in July 2017, the California legislature stated its plans to extend its COP 21 commitments to 2030.28
The risk here is that a lack of US support for the COP21 will tend to undermine global cooperation in the struggle against global climate change and carbon pollution in general, which is choking urban areas throughout the world and poisoning the environment. Although not perfect, the COP21 represents an important environmental accord reached in Paris, in which the two major polluters of the planet, the United States and China, finally reached an agreement that brings together most of the countries in the world into cooperation. The Paris environmental accord needs complete interstate and interregional cooperation and implementation if it is to succeed.
Trump appears to have based his decision to drop out of the Paris COP 21 Accords, at least in part, on reports by the right-wing Heritage Foundation and NERA Consulting. The Heritage Foundation report presented a negative assessment of the impact of those accords on American society. According to the report, the Paris COP 21 accord will supposedly result in: (1) An overall average shortfall of nearly 400,000 jobs; (2) An average manufacturing shortfall of over 200,000 jobs; (3) A total income loss of more than $20,000 for a family of four; (4) An aggregate gross domestic product (GDP) loss of over $2.5 trillion; and (5) Increases in household electricity expenditures between 13 percent and 20 percent. The NERA Consulting report argued that “meeting the Obama administration's requirements in the Paris Accord would cost the U.S. economy nearly $3 trillion over the next several decades. So that by 2040, our economy would lose 6.5 million industrial sector jobs—including 3.1 million manufacturing sector jobs.”29 Yet these studies make worst-case assumptions that tend to inflate the cost of meeting US targets under the Paris Accord while largely ignoring the economic benefits to US businesses from building and operating renewable energy projects.30
By contrast with the Heritage Foundation and NERA Consulting reports, a number of major multinational corporations strongly support investment in alternative energy. More than 360 major American corporations—including DuPont, General Mills, Levi Strauss, Nike, and Starbucks—have supported the Paris accord. These major corporations signed a statement called “Business Supports a Low Carbon USA,” which urged President Trump to honor the US commitments to the COP 21. These major companies declared that “failure to build a low-carbon economy puts American prosperity at risk,” and that the “right action now will create jobs and boost US competitiveness.”31 One pro–alternative energy study by the International Renewable Energy Agency argued that renewable energy could generate over 24 million jobs worldwide by 2030. And that if environmental and human health externalities are priced into the global energy mix over time, the renewable energy transition would result in net savings.32
Once president, Trump moved immediately in an antediluvian pro–fossil fuels direction by issuing five executive orders that would start the process of developing the Keystone and Dakota Access Pipelines, which had been blocked by environmentalists and the Obama administration. Trump likewise signed executive actions intended to facilitate the process of obtaining permits for manufacturing projects and to speed environmental reviews for infrastructure projects, while removing a moratorium on coal-mining leases on federal lands. He also began to undermine a number of
Obama-era efforts to prevent coal-mining debris from being dumped into nearby waters.33 It should not be surprising that the coal industry has been one of the major contributors to the Republican Party over many years. And in 2016, Trump and other politicians in the Republican Party received 97 percent out of a total of $13,461,828 of coal-mining contributions to the election campaign.34
Yet Trump's own economic adviser, Gary Cohn, has downplayed coal and argued that the United States could export natural gas as “a cleaner fuel” and by investing in wind and solar energy. Cohn was quoted as saying that the country “can be a manufacturing powerhouse and still be environmentally friendly.”35 And both Trump's daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, were said to have pressed Trump to support the COP 21.36 Coal mining accounts for less than 75,000 US jobs.37 Fossil fuel generation employment accounts for only 22 percent of total electric power generation employment and supports 187,117 workers across coal, oil, and natural gas generation technologies.
As promised during his campaign, Trump hopes to create a mere 28,000 to 29,000 jobs in the process of producing up to $36 billion annually in increased energy production.38 Yet the sustainable energy sector already employs far more than the coal or oil or gas industries. Renewable energy—including wind, solar, and biofuels—accounts for more than 650,000 US jobs. Roughly 2.2 million Americans are employed, full- or part-time, in the area of energy efficiency products and services, while almost 1.4 million energy efficiency jobs are in the construction industry. Sustainable energies currently support hundreds of thousands of manufacturing and construction jobs around the country: Wind energy employs 101,738. Solar energy employed 300,192 American jobs in 2015 and grew to 373,807 in 2016, or 43 percent of the electric power generation workforce—more than the fossil fuel and nuclear energy industries. Employment in the US solar industry “grew 12 times as fast as overall job creation in the US economy, and surpassed those in oil and gas extraction (187,200) or coal mining (67,929).”39 The US Department of Energy has stated that three million Americans worked in the clean energy sector in 2016—a number that would be threatened by a Paris pullout.40
There are weaknesses to the COP 21, but Trump is not concerned with them. One of the weaknesses of the COP 21 is not at all the costs of the accord that Trump points out. One problem is that the COP 21 emissions targets are not legally binding and thus there is no guarantee that all countries will be able to curb carbon dioxide emissions soon enough to prevent significant environmental damage. The next concern with the Paris COP 21 Accord is that the agreement does not directly oppose subsidies for fossil fuel industries—even if that is the heart of the problem of global climate change.
For his part, Trump has opposed international governmental subsidies for the COP 21 agreement, which would mount to $100 billion for the developed countries by 2020.41 Yet, conversely, Trump does not appear to be opposed to fossil fuel subsidies to major energy companies. These latter subsidies, which are intended to lower the price of oil, coal, and gas, cost world governments around US$500–$600 billion per year.42 Of this amount, the twenty major economic powers (the G20) were responsible for the majority of the subsidies—averaging $444 billion in 2013 and 2014. Russia, the United States, Australia, Brazil, China, and the United Kingdom all had significant national subsidies for fossil fuel production. The United Kingdom has been one of the few G20 countries that has been augmenting its fossil fuel subsidies while cutting back on support for the renewable energy investments.43 How UK environmental policy might develop after Brexit remains to be seen. South Korea and Germany, and then the United States, Russia, and France, possessed the next largest sources of funding for coal. On the positive side, Japan, South Korea, and Australia have been leading the effort to try to mandate limits on coal subsidies in international discussions.44
The problem is that these G20 subsidies enforce the general trend toward high-carbon energy development and thus divert investments away from low-carbon energy alternatives, such as solar power, wind power, and hydropower, among others. President Barack Obama did demand that Congress try to eliminate fossil fuel industry subsidies, but to no avail. If the United States and other major countries do not lead, it is dubious the rest of world will act—except, perhaps, for France and China (the latter, because its major cities are literally choking in coal dust and pollution).45
With Trump and pro–fossil fuel Cabinet members in power, ExxonMobil (and other energy companies) could stand to gain as much as $1 trillion overall if the Trump administration does continue to eliminate federal environmental restrictions while also undercutting the Obama's push to develop energy alternatives to fossil fuels.46 In turn, this could press ExxonMobil to invest in the United States rather than in Russia (See chapters 3 and 5.) Trump is fighting real progress in the name of poisonous, outmoded sources of energy—when the future can create a full-employment, ecologically viable society.
More and more countries have been investing in renewables. It is estimated that global electricity production from renewable sources plus hydropower will increase by nearly 60 percent between 2011 and 2017.47 In part because of its extremely high levels of urban pollution, China has led investment in alternative non-carbon and renewable energy sources, with the United States, Japan, and Germany following. As costs continue to fall, alternative energies can provide even greater employment in housing, transport, and other needed infrastructure. Ironically, now that he has dropped the United States out of the Paris climate accord, in part to please his American First nationalist supporters and coal and shale energy producers, Trump will be handing sustainable energy innovation, including solar energy, wind power, and carbon-capture technology, over to the China and Europeans—instead of helping American firms take the lead in these very promising industries. In effect, Trump's anti-COP 21 decision will draw Europe and China closer together in political-economic, financial, and technological cooperation—which could effectively isolate the United States from the innovations of two largest economies in the world.
THE SECURITY-ECONOMIC BENEFITS OF DECENTRALIZED ALTERNATIVE ENERGY
Trump intends to reinstate heavily polluting and environmentally destructive coal and to invest in shale oil and gas. This is instead of investing in solar, wind, geothermal, and other less-polluting energies—possibilities that could also create healthier jobs—while concurrently decentralizing energy production in such a way so that the United States would be even less dependent on polluting carbon industries and overseas suppliers. Multiple decentralized energy units with different backup systems in case of supply shortage can better match local needs. This decentralized approach also results in greater energy savings and overall security than dependence on large, centralized nuclear power systems—which, when they break down, can cut power for millions of consumers all at once. In addition, in the new games of cyber-sabotage, large, centralized energy and power systems, such as nuclear power plants, could become the ultimate target that militant hackers could attempt to shut down. Or that terrorists and states may seek to destroy.
Global climate change and pollution is not a joke. Militaries throughout the world have been studying the potential security and political-economic implications of a warming planet. Global climate change has already begun create major humanitarian catastrophes due exceptionally severe weather conditions: climate-related droughts, floods, crop failures, hurricanes, and the like. These catastrophes have resulted in mass migrations and refugees—while directly or indirectly causing social suffering and conflicts. One wonders if the Trump-Pence administration might finally understand the issues involved if Manhattan (or other coastal cities such as Miami, New Orleans, London, Venice, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Sydney) begin to flood, as predicted in some catastrophic scenarios. All of this is at a time when the Earth's temperature has hit a record high level for three years in a row—with the expected melting of the Arctic and Antarctic ice caps.48 By 2045, Trump's own “Winter White House” at Mar-a-Lago could be under at least a foot of w
ater for 210 days a year because of increased tidal flooding.49 But this possibility seems to be too far in the future for Trump to think about.
The fundamental way to deal with this crucial, not-so-long existential threat is by fostering global social-ecological-aesthetic consciousness—in conjunction with the development of self-sustaining alternative-energy infrastructure. This is the true alternative to Trump's antediluvian path.
TOWARD PEACE AND DEVELOPMENT COMMUNITIES
Also as an alternative to Trump's essentially unilateralist and nationalist America First strategy, the policy approach argued in this book demands concerted multilateral efforts to formulate new international geopolitical, defense, political-economic, and environmental accords. The establishment of new regional systems dedicated to peace and development simply cannot be accomplished unilaterally or even bilaterally. Such an irenic peace and diplomacy-oriented strategy needs the support of all the major and regional actors, combined with concerted efforts to prevent “spoilers,” such as anti-state “terrorist” groups, from trying to undermine negotiated peace accords.
In this peace-oriented strategy, Washington will need to fully engage in diplomacy with the major and regional actors of the world. Global peace and human development can only be achieved by redefining the US national interest in such a way as to reach compromises not just with US allies and friends but also with American rivals, including Russia, China, and Iran. Rather than asserting presumed national interests first, as the Trump administration appears to believe, each of the actors involved in a dispute or conflict needs to make trade-offs and possible sacrifices. Each state needs to redefine or reframe national interests in such a way that all involved can eventually benefit as much as possible, so that peace, or at least a modus vivendi, can be established in a healthy and ecologically balanced global environment.