G7 meets as Amazon burns

Whatever you might think of the value of political talking shops like the G7, you know when they start by announcing there will be no joint communiqué at the end – for the first time in history (although last year’s was a little shaky) – because they fear in advance there will be no agreement, that things might have hit a bit of a wall.

French president Emmanuel Macron said the tradition – that at least helped give an impression of consensus among the western powers – would be abandoned at this weekend’s meeting in Biarritz because there was “a very deep crisis of democracy” with the established order under assault on several fronts.

Rachel Donadio at The Atlantic looks at the range of challenges and writes that Macron “could look at a burning building and see it as an excellent opportunity to better understand the role of oxygen in combustion. He examines the flames, he describes them well, but is it in his power to put them out?”

And appropriately enough, one of the key issues over which there is discord is climate change – a topic brought flaming to the fore as the world struggles to comprehend the potential damage that might be caused by the fires that have been raging in the Amazon rain forest of Brazil, and the extent to which the country’s relatively new president Jair Bolsonaro might be  responsible.

Ahead of emergency talks on the issue, both France and Ireland threatened to block the Mercosur trade agreement between the EU and South American nations unless Brazil takes action to curb the fires.

The dynamic at the G7 has been further complicated by the support for Bolsonaro from US president Donald Trump, and after a lunch on Saturday between Macron and Trump, the White House said that the G7 agenda was deliberately turning to “niche issues” like climate change for the purpose of embarrassing the US leader, who had wanted the meeting to be about trade.

The US president likely won’t have eased tensions with his hosts by threatening to impose tariffs on French wine.

Trump had also said he wanted the G7 to readmit Russia without apparently appreciating why they had been excluded, a move that Macron rejected as representing “a strategic mistake and a profound injustice.”

Protests, meanwhile, are expected to continue on the streets of Biarritz for the remainder of the summit.

* Watch out for a new regular feature coming soon at Northern Slant – “Code Green” will be a fortnightly column highlighting environmental issues, by NS contributor Alina Utrata in California.

US wrestles with possible recession

As President Trump cancelled a trip to Denmark because it  wouldn’t sell him Greenland and managed to get himself embroiled in a debate about whether or not he was the “King of Israel” such trivialities – once again – successfully distracted from some cautionary economic news at home and abroad.

The US budget deficit is set to top $1trillion; job creation numbers have been revised downwards by about half a million, the stock market had another wobbly week on the back of the escalating trade war with China and the president called his own chairman of the Federal Reserve an “enemy.”

While Trump continues to talk up the economy, clearly any vulnerability among his base of supporters has negative implications for his potential re-election next year – not to mention for everyone else.

Meanwhile in the race to replace the current incumbent, Democratic candidates John Hickenlooper, Jay Inslee and Seth Moulton dropped out  – the latter saying he thinks the contest is now “between [Joe] Biden [Bernie] Sanders and [Elizabeth] Warren.” But that leaves a lot of ‘others’ still to be redistributed as the field continues to shake out ahead of the third televised debate on Sept 12.

And in perhaps an interesting development on the Republican side, former Congressman Joe Walsh announced he would run a primary campaign against President Trump. He joins former Massachusetts Gov Bill Weld in challenging their party’s incumbent.

(It’s important to point out here that this Joe Walsh is not the Eagles guitarist, nor is there remotely any irony in his album titles: ‘So What’ ‘But Seriously Folks’ ‘Ordinary Average Guy’ ‘There Goes The Neighborhood’ and ‘You Can’t Argue With A Sick Mind’.)

Merkel calls Johnson’s Bluff on Border

Before heading to the G7, Prime Minister Boris Johnson visited with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and came away thinking he had “won” a thirty day period to come up with a solution to the Irish border issue.

The reporting in Britain was probably predictable.

But at least the PM appeared to get the support he was really after when he got to the G7. And meanwhile, of course, the Irish border remains the sticking point to any progress.

As Amy Davidson Sorkin writes in this week’s New Yorker, “Many Brexiteers do seem to believe that the Irish will carry the load for them; the view is that the Republic has more to lose than anyone else in Europe if there is a no-deal Brexit, and so will persuade the rest of the EU to yield to even the wildest Johnsonian demands. (Others claim to be ready and eager for no-deal.) But, by the same measure, the Irish have more to lose than anyone from a bad deal that sells out their European future. And the idea, common among Brexiteers, that Ireland is economically dependent on the UK — that it would be lost without the British — is less and less true.”

Hong Kong protests continue

Pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong joined hands on Friday to form a symbolic human chain that stretched for more than 25 miles, as the Chinese region entered a 12thweekend of disruption. On Sunday, police used water cannon against the crowd for the first time.

As the BBC reports, the demonstrations “were sparked by an extradition bill but have since morphed into broader anti-government protests.” While China told the US to “stop meddling”in Hong Kong’s affairs, former Trump adviser Steve Bannon likened the protesters to the “patriots” behind the American Revolution.

(Oh, and the Epoch Times was in the news itself this week, when its ads were banned by Facebook after an NBC investigation found that the media group had “spent more money on pro-Trump Facebook advertisements than any group other than the Trump campaign.”)

Fallout of suspicion after Russian nuclear accident

If you watched the brilliant TV series ‘Chernobyl’ recently, you’ll probably know that when monitoring stations gathering data on radiation levels go quiet it’s generally not a good thing.

The BBC reported that after a mysterious accident earlier this month, the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) “said the technical failure at those sites was then followed by a failure at two more.”

While the Kremlin said this week that a Chernobyl-style “cover up” would be impossible because of “the speed of information exchange both within the country and from abroad,” Vice reported that Russia “appears to be trying to hide details of the suspected Aug. 8 explosion of a prototype “Skyfall” cruise missile.”

And as reliable information remains scarce about that, together with the string of incidents this summer, understandably questions have now been raised about Russia’s new “floating nuclear power plant.”