Tag: Americas

America’s Looming Conflict: Red Judges vs. Blue Governors

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He added a note of grim realism: “And I know there are misinterpretations of our Constitution. We’ve all lived with that.”
It was a calibrated answer, indicating distaste for my hypothetical without completely ruling it out. And at this point, how could he — or any Democratic governor — foreclose the possibility that a rogue judge might precipitate that kind of clash?
Pritzker, 58, made plain in our conversation that he is not looking for war with the federal judiciary. Yet in many respects war has come to him and other blue state governors, as a cohort of conservative legal activists on the federal bench flex their new power with rulings that strain constitutional credibility.
Their decisions are attacking the blue state way of life: Stripping back gun regulations, threatening abortion rights and weakening federal policies on environmental regulation and civil rights that align with the values of America’s center-left cities and suburbs. Those communities make up much of the country, but their political power is concentrated in a relatively small number of densely developed states.
It does not seem far-fetched to imagine that the leader of one of those states, with a population and economy the scale of a midsize nation, might eventually say: Enough.
I asked to speak with Pritzker after a Texas-based district court judge, Matthew Kacsmaryk, issued a ruling halting the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of mifepristone, a drug used to terminate pregnancy. It was a brazen ideological decision by a judge with a record of espousing far-right views.
Several politicians have called for the mifepristone ruling to be ignored, though none are governors. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) denounced it as the fruit of “conservatives’ dangerous and undemocratic takeover of our country’s institutions”; he and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) urged the Biden administration not to enforce the decision, which has largely been stayed so far.
Rep. Nancy Mace, a South Carolina Republican, endorsed the same idea, saying that there was “no basis” for the ruling and warning her party that it was on the wrong side of the country on abortion.

Should higher courts allow the decision to take effect, it would represent a drastic escalation of the judicial rollback of abortion rights. It would go beyond the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, which abolished the federal right to abortion, by hindering access to abortion even in states where the procedure is legal.
Pritzker responded by declaring that the ruling had no force in Illinois. That was a statement of legal reality, however, rather than the declaration of a constitutional crisis.
Illinois is involved in separate federal litigation in Washington state, where the state attorney general, Bob Ferguson, is suing to loosen FDA restrictions on mifepristone. The suit was devised in part as a tool for countering the Texas case: Ferguson told NPR earlier this year that it could help shield states like his from the immediate impact of an extreme ruling in Texas.
That tactic worked. When the Texas decision came down, the judge in Washington ruled that the availability of mifepristone could not be restricted in the coalition of states suing to loosen access.
This is a chaotic state of affairs that tests the coherence of the federal system. It is likely to get worse in the future, as the gulf in values widens between the majority of voters who favor abortion rights, gun control and other center-left policies, and an elite faction of judges who do not.
In our conversation, Pritzker called this a crisis inflicted by former President Donald Trump, whose judicial appointees “are just finding any which way they can to effectuate their policies rather than follow the law.”
The solution, Pritzker argued, was for Democrats to “appoint rational judges” and gradually grind away the impact of Trump’s appointments. For now, he said states like his should explore every legal tactic imaginable to protect themselves from reckless judicial fiats.
The Washington state litigation on mifepristone was one such tool. When far-right groups file lawsuits before conservative-leaning courts with an eye toward changing national policy, blue states can launch competing litigation on the same subjects to engineer legal deadlock.
That could be a frenzied process just to preserve elements of the status quo.
“We’re all going to have to live with the craziness that is the leftover effect of Donald Trump being in office for four years,” Pritzker conceded.
I told him I wasn’t sure people in a state like his were prepared to live with “the craziness” indefinitely. Democrats cannot restore the pre-Trump texture of the judiciary without winning a bunch of presidential and Senate elections in a row and then hoping for some well-timed judicial vacancies, particularly on the Supreme Court.
Pritzker initially thought I was suggesting voters would grow dejected and stop turning out to support Democrats. Quite the opposite, I clarified — I think voters will get volcanically angry.
“I think that’s what people are doing,” he agreed, “and their reaction is at the ballot box and their reaction is in the streets.”
Pritzker cited an election this month for control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court: In a “50-50 state,” the liberal-leaning candidate won by a landslide in a campaign in that hinged in part on abortion.
There are democratic correctives to an out-of-control judiciary, in other words, short of an all-out battle against the bench. It is possible that the task of winning several consecutive national elections for the Democratic Party, and overhauling the judiciary in the process, may not be an unappealing challenge for Pritzker, who is widely seen as a future presidential candidate.
Yet there is still the problem of the present.
In many instances, like the mifepristone case, blue states will have legal backup options to try before a governor would have to yield to an extreme district judge. But counting on relief from higher courts is hardly a satisfying strategy for Blue America, under the circumstances.
The moment may come sooner or later when a strong-willed governor in a major blue state will run out of stays and appeals and injunctions and be left to implement an intolerable, ideological decision in a state with contrary social values and political priorities.
The voters of that state will probably view the judiciary with distrust or worse if current polling trends hold. They will probably see the decision — it could be on abortion or LGBTQ rights or voting rights or guns — as an act of radicalism by distant figures in black robes.
Within living memory, there were governors who responded to conditions very much like that by siding with the voters, defying the courts and insisting that their decisions could not be put into effect. They were not blue state progressives but Southern racists; they managed to obstruct desegregation for years and shape the course of American racial politics to this day.
It is not too hard to conjure the mental image of a 21st Century, blue state George Wallace, standing in the schoolhouse door to defend an entirely different set of social values.
Consider the Supreme Court decision last year voiding a New York gun regulation, in force since 1911, that required people to show “proper cause” for seeking to carry handguns outside the home in order to obtain a license to do so.
Let’s say that ruling had come down when the governor of New York was not Kathy Hochul, a conventional Democrat, but rather a politician with more rigid convictions and an appetite for risk and combat — someone who has already expressed support for ignoring certain kinds of judicial rulings, like a Gov. Ocasio-Cortez.
Let’s say that when the Supreme Court ruled that a century-old handgun restriction was suddenly unconstitutional, that governor responded: The court’s analysis is noted, but our local gun laws are deeply rooted and it would not be practical to change the way we do licensing at this time.
What would happen then?
Would the president nationalize New York’s firearm licensing bureaucracy? Or threaten the governor with arrest? Or send in federal forces, like Eisenhower deploying the 101st Airborne to help desegregate Arkansas public schools?
The answer might depend on which party controls the White House, a political reality that speaks to how frayed the constitutional order already is.
A Republican administration might seek swift punishment for Gov. Ocasio-Cortez. Would a Justice Department overseen by President Biden or President Harris — or President Pritzker — do the same?
If not, what then?
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

April 18, 2023
Why America’s EV chargers keep breaking

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Swap the word “gasoline” for “electricity,” and this is a realistic description of what happens every day at electric-vehicle charging stations across the United States. The high-tech, high-speed highway fueling system that America is building to power its EVs and replace the gas station is riddled with glitches that are proving difficult to stamp out.
Individually, they are hiccups, but collectively, their consequences could be profound.
“It adds to the non-EV driver’s view of the world that EV charging is painful,” said Bill Ferro, a software expert and founder of EVSession, an EV charger analytics firm. “People feeling that it’s a risk to buy an EV because the fast-charging infrastructure stinks is going to slow down EV adoption.”
The problems are experienced by those who use fast chargers on the go and who aren’t driving Teslas. Studies and innumerable anecdotes describe the strange stumbles they encounter: a blank screen, a broken plug, a credit card payment that fails, sessions that abort without warning, electric current that flows fast this moment and slowly the next.
Behind the snafus are a daunting set of structural problems. They are tied to the peculiar way that EV chargers have evolved, and the fact that wires and batteries are way more complicated than what happens at the gas station.
“It’s a harder problem than pumping fuel from one reservoir into another,” Ferro said.
The problems are persisting even as billions of dollars pour into the charging sector from the federal and state governments, network operators and automakers.
Several recent studies of the charging system have found discouraging results.

Last year, researchers visited every public fast charger in the San Francisco Bay Area and found that almost 23 percent of them had “unresponsive or unavailable screens, payment system failures, charge initiation failures, network failures, or broken connectors.” And in a survey of EV drivers, the auto consultancy J.D. Power found the public charging network “plagued with non-functioning stations.” One in five sessions failed to deliver a charge. Almost three-quarters of those failures involved a station that malfunctioned or was offline.
Realizing the urgency of a fix, a variety of public and private players are trying out solutions.
The Biden administration, for example, set standards for “uptime,” or the percentage of time a charger is operational. California is launching a major inquiry into how to improve the customer experience. Automaker Ford Motor Co. last year deployed its own squad of station auditors. The largest public network, Electrify America, is replacing a fifth of its stations with newer models.
But many of these actions work at the edges of a black hole.
No one can define what it means for an EV driver to have a satisfactory charging experience. No underlying data exists. As hundreds of thousands of Americans buy EVs and start traveling the highways, this lack of a yardstick means that no one is accountable. Without accountability, problems are likely to persist.
The concern for industry is that the swelling ranks of EV drivers will tell their friends that highway charging is a little buggy, a little annoying — just enough of a hindrance that those millions of friends hold off from going electric, while the planet steadily warms.
Government steps in
Difficulties with EV fueling aren’t encountered everywhere. But they’re common in areas where the government is spending the most money and has staked its claim on improving the charging experience.
Home charging generally goes off without a hitch. The same goes for other “slow,” or Level 2, chargers that are sprinkled at workplaces and in parking lots and fill the battery by sipping on electrons for hours.
The bugs are most common with fast chargers, known as direct-current fast chargers, or DCFC. These are the charging solution when a driver is on the go and needs to refill the battery in 15 or 30 minutes.
These super-outlets exist near highway stops, in urban cores and at suburban crossroads. Building a network of them is the top priority of the Biden administration as it spends $7.5 billion for EV-charging infrastructure that Congress approved in the bipartisan infrastructure law. The first funding round is intended to blanket the country with DCFC chargers at 50-mile intervals along major highways.
Besides just building the stations, the government’s goal has been to create high standards, including better customer satisfaction.
The Federal Highway Administration, which is administering the program, said it “intends to incentivize charging station operators to improve reliability not just for chargers purchased with [government] funds but for all charging stations in the country.”

A driver charging his car at a Tesla Supercharger station in Miami last year.
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Rebecca Blackwell/AP Photo
The irony is that a reliable, national charging network with high customer satisfaction already exists. It’s called the Supercharger network, built and run by Tesla Inc.
Users and experts are in wide agreement that Tesla has generally solved the problems that dog other networks. Its drivers plug in, pay and charge with few fails. Superchargers were exclusively for Tesla drivers until last month, when Tesla started opening parts of the network to other EV models.
Tesla also pioneered and excels at other practices that competing networks struggle to match — and that gas stations can’t do at all.
For example, punch in a destination on the Tesla app or the dashboard screen, and you get a route of Superchargers to stop at, with reliable information on which plugs are working and whether or not they are currently occupied.
A prime reason for Tesla’s success, experts say, is that Tesla owns and controls the entire ecosystem and all of its data. It built the cars, runs the chargers and manages the payments. If something breaks at the station, it’s Tesla’s job to repair it. There’s zero doubt who’s responsible.
The reason other, non-Tesla networks are having such troubles is that the public charging system has a lot more actors. They include a panoply of automakers, charging network operators, route-finding tools and now the government.
None has stepped up to take Tesla’s level of responsibility, and it’s not clear anyone will.
“Who’s owning this experience for me?” said Matt Teske, the founder and CEO of Chargeway, a EV-network software platform, putting himself in the position of an EV driver. “The answer is no one.”
A product not for customers
One reason today’s charging stations don’t work very well is their strange evolution as a consumer product.
Like EVs themselves, charging stations first arrived on the roads not because customers sought them out, but because regulators required them.
In the early 2000s, the California Air Resources Board demanded that automakers sell EVs to participate in the state’s auto market. Charging stations followed a parallel path.
One of today’s leading networks, EVgo Inc., was born from a 2012 legal settlement between NRG Energy Inc. and the California Public Utility Commission to resolve the electricity-market power crisis of the early 2000s. Another, Electrify America, is an entity that automaker Volkswagen AG was forced to create in 2016 as a penalty for cheating on its diesel emissions.
Tasked with satisfying regulators — and not customers — these companies saved money with a particular set of solutions.
“It was treated like it was really simple,” Teske said.
The charging station wouldn’t work like a gas station, with an employee in a nearby kiosk. Instead, it would operate without human intervention, like an ATM or a vending machine, but one that sells high-voltage electricity instead of Cokes.
But, unlike the ATM or vending box, the charging station wouldn’t get the full customer treatment. It wouldn’t be located under an awning, or be particularly well-lit or observed by security cameras. Instead, the electric car would be treated more like, well, a car. Stations were sited out in the elements, in the middle or at the edges of a parking lots, far from watchful eyes and easy targets for vandals.
Finally, the early networks didn’t offer the option of paying by credit card, although Electrify America was required to. Charging networks preferred to avoid the fees and complexity of Visa or Mastercard. Rather, payments would go to the network directly through a membership card.
What goes wrong
In the early days, none of these decisions much mattered. Early EV buyers were true believers who shrugged off the inconvenience of a dark parking lot or a frustrating charging session.
But as EVs not called Tesla have started to sell in earnest, the cost-trimming decisions of yesteryear have contributed to today’s outbreak of snafus.
A charging station, it turns out, is vastly more complicated and breakable than a vending machine.
“If you’re looking for a checklist of what could go wrong,” Teske said, “it’s a long list.”
Inside the kiosk’s metal shell sit sophisticated power electronics. It sends dangerous levels of electric current through a heavy-duty cable and to a connector, which can be easily disabled with a wad of gum. The video screen — crucial for communicating information to the driver, like the prices and how long a charging session will last — can be defaced or broken. Any number of problems can befall a driver trying to tap, insert or swipe a payment card.
And then there’s the computer code.
“It’s all software, at the end of the day,” said Ken Tennyson, the director of quality and conformance at Electrify America, which has 800 or so stations around the United States.
The recipient of the cash from an ATM or the Snickers from a vending machine is a human hand. The recipient of the electrons from a charging session is an electric vehicle — or better put, an ever-changing, ever-widening array of electric vehicles, each of which communicates with the charging station with its own version of software.
While software protocols exist for the charging industry, “adherence to those standards is not perfect, and the standards themselves are not perfect,” Tennyson said.

A person pays with a credit card at an electric vehicle charging station.
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Olelole/iStock
Some of these software problems are the growing pains that come with any young and high-tech industry that hasn’t worked out the kinks. This one, however, is complicated by the sheer number of systems involved.
A satisfying charging session is an orchestra. The charging station, the network operator, the vehicle and the payments all work together seamlessly. But today, the orchestra is out of tune.
These disjunctions create problems that to the driver are inexplicable.
For example, the kilowatts delivered at any particular moment during a charging session — the rough equivalent of the amount of gasoline tumbling out of a pump — can fluctuate up and down without explanation. This is often due to faulty communication between the station’s electronics and the car’s, as they try to speak the same software language but fail.
All these handoffs also make it hard for networks to emulate Tesla’s navigational prowess. Tesla competitors, like General Motors Co.’s Bolt or Ford’s Lightning F-150, might be able to tell you that the next station is working and has room — or it might not. Software incompatibility makes things janky.
“It’s hard because people are bundling all the pieces together and there’s not one owner of the process,” said Ferro of EVSession.
A solution, of sorts
To improve reliability amid this confusion, industry and governments have turned to a measurement of dubious value.
That metric is uptime. Applied to machinery or systems, uptime is a simple measurement. It is the amount of time in a given period that a machine is operational, stated as a percentage.
Uptime is a binary. A machine is either up, or it’s down. A charging station is considered “up” if its operator pings it and gets a positive response. But that narrow definition can collapse with an experience as complex as charging.
Uptime “doesn’t measure whether the connector is broken, or there’s payment-processing issues, or the parking space is ICE’d,” said Loren McDonald, an independent EV-charging analyst. ICE refers to a EV-charging parking space being occupied by an internal-combustion engine vehicle, another bane of EV drivers.
The metric fails, McDonald added, because it doesn’t answer the key question: “Can I charge or not?”
“Uptime doesn’t capture that,” he said.
Nonetheless, uptime has become the foundation on which federal and state governments are measuring performance as they dole out billions of public dollars.
For example, the Biden administration decreed last year that charging stations receiving federal money from the bipartisan infrastructure law must achieve better than 97 percent uptime.
It’s not alone in that target range. Colorado, New York and Vermont have adopted a 97 percent standard for their charger funding, while the state of Maine has adopted a lower 95 percent. Some electric utilities, like Louisville Gas & Electric in Kentucky and Consolidated Edison in New York, have aimed for as high as 99 percent.
Narrow as it is, the federal standard is at least a start. “It’s really helpful to have that federal guidance out there,” said Jesse Way, a clean transportation policy advisor at Nescaum, a nonprofit association of air-quality agencies in the Northeast.
Whether a 97 percent uptime is rigorous or not depends on whom you ask.
Tennyson of Electrify America considers it quite rigorous because it leaves a charging station with little room for error. A breakdown requires repairs that can consume days. In a year, he said, “You don’t have a tolerance for more than two or three failures.”
The reverse is argued by McDonald, the EV analyst. He points out that 97 percent uptime means three percent downtime. In the course of a year, that’s downtime of 11 days.
“Which is a really low bar if you ask me,” he said. “Could you imagine Amazon Web Services” — Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud product for businesses — “being down 11 days a year?”
A data void
One reason the Biden administration may have seized the narrow solution of uptime to solve the broad problems of EV-charger reliability is that no other options exist.
“The uptime calculation does not address all categories of failure or ways that chargers may fail to provide a satisfying customer experience,” the Federal Highway Administration conceded in guidance it released to states earlier this year.
Why not do better? “Insufficient data are available,” FHWA said.
That lack of data is a key gap, experts say. No independent, third-party source of charging data exists in the U.S. today. If a charging network claims to achieve 97 percent uptime — and many do — there’s no way to check out the claim.
That’s a worry for states that are entrusted with spending millions of dollars of federal money to build charging networks. The feds require them to achieve 97 percent uptime. But Teske, of the company Chargeway, pointed out that states who are vetting the companies to build those networks are “taking the sellers at their word.”
Solutions may be coming, but they will take time.
As part of the bipartisan infrastructure bill, the Biden administration gained the authority to gather data from the charging stations it funds. States are required to start sending data along a year from now. That information will, FHWA says, become “a national database and analytics platform” with “a public-facing dashboard.”
A major structural solution may be in the works in California.
Last year, California lawmakers passed a bill that requires new record-keeping and reporting standards for charging stations that get state money. The rules, to be drafted by the California Energy Commission, are due by 2024. They could eventually be copied by the numerous of states that align themselves with California’s transportation emissions policies.
“It’s very complicated, we don’t have all the answers,” said Patty Monahan, a CEC commissioner, at a Bloomberg New Energy Finance conference earlier this year. “This is a huge inquiry.”
In the meantime, the gritted teeth of those using highway fast chargers are unlikely to relax anytime soon. The next wave of EV adoption will, in part, continue to be a story of inert plugs and frowning drivers, posted on Instagram for all to see.
“I see this is a problem for the next five years,” said Ferro, the EV charging expert. “Either Tesla will take over the entire charging network of the U.S., or everyone else will get their act together, or a little bit of both.”
A version of this report first ran in E&E News’ Energywire. Get access to more comprehensive and in-depth reporting on the energy transition, natural resources, climate change and more in E&E News.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

April 12, 2023
Ireland: America’s homeland of presidents

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“When I stepped off Air Force One at Shannon a few days ago, and saw Ireland, beautiful and green, and felt again the warmth of her people, something deep inside began to stir,” waxed Ronald Reagan in 1984. “Who knows but that scientists will one day explain the complex genetic process by which generations seem to transfer, across time and even oceans, their fondest memories.”
Reagan — whose paternal great-grandfather was Irish Catholic, though he himself was not — was hardly the most Irish-identified of U.S. presidents, though many seem to forget the rest of their DNA map when deplaning on the Emerald Isle.
None other than the nation’s first African American president, Barack Obama, reminisced about his roots in the Kearney family of Moneygall while hoisting a Guinness in the local pub back in 2011.
Bill Clinton also claimed Irish ancestry, though without specific documentation. Nonetheless, his role in securing peace in Northern Ireland made him a true kinsman to those in Belfast and Dublin and beyond. His 1998 visit, designed to cement the peace process, is widely considered the most triumphant moment of his presidency.
Clinton was also following in the footsteps of his own great role model, John F. Kennedy, the first Catholic president, who journeyed to Limerick at the height of his global celebrity.
“This is not the land of my birth, but it is the land for which I hold the greatest affection,” Kennedy cooed, to the swooning delight of nuns and publicans alike.
Now comes Joe Biden, whose roots in a working-class Irish Catholic family are the core of his political identity, his badge and shield. Not for nothing is he prone to long discourses on the wit and wisdom of his Grandpa Finnegan.
“Ambrose Finnegan,” he called out toward the ceiling when, as vice president, he hosted then-British Prime Minister David Cameron. His granddad had taught him not to trust WASP politicians.

But he seemed to remember himself and quickly added, “Things have changed.”

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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

April 12, 2023
‘Your future is America’s future’: Biden reaffirms Northern Ireland ties

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“Where barbed wire one sliced up the city, today we find a cathedral of learning built of glass that lets the [light shine] in and out,” Biden said. The agreement “just has a profound impact for someone who has come back to see it. It’s an incredible testament to the power and the possibilities of peace.”
Northern Ireland has been unable to form a government for nearly a year under rules that require its main pro-British party — the Democratic Unionist Party — to share power with Irish nationalist party Sinn Fein. The DUP is also holding out against a proposal aimed at settling post-Brexit trade concerns between Northern Ireland and Ireland.
But Biden made only glancing mention of the standoff, emphasizing the importance of democratic institutions and urging all parties in Northern Ireland to work together.
“For politics, no matter what divides us, if we look hard enough, there’s always areas that’s going to bring us together,” Biden said.
Northern Ireland has prospered overall since the agreement, Biden noted, even as critics say that it’s failing. Its gross domestic product has doubled, an initial number Biden said he expects to triple if growth stays on track as American businesses continue investing in the region. The president also nodded, as he often does, to Irish arts and culture, which has produced world-renowned poetry, movies and television shows in recent years.
Much of that growth has been driven by young people, Biden added, who will push Northern Ireland forward in widening fields like cyber and clean energy. The president also announced that later this year, Joe Kennedy III, the U.S. special envoy to Northern Ireland for Economic Affairs, will lead a trade delegation of American companies to Northern Ireland.
“It’s up to us to keep this going,” he said, pledging to “sustain the peace, unleash this incredible economic opportunity, which is just beginning … Your history is our history. But even more important, your future is America’s future.”
Biden has studiously avoided any thorny political territory during his stint in Northern Ireland, saying only that he was “going to listen” to party leaders during a private meeting ahead of his speech.

The president earlier on Wednesday also ignored questions about the potential for a trade deal sought by the U.K., and officials said they did not expect him to address the issue during a meeting with British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.
Still, those political tensions have trailed Biden throughout what has largely been billed as a personal trip to reconnect with his ancestral roots.
Amanda Sloat, the National Security Council’s senior director for Europe, faced several questions on Wednesday about whether Biden’s pride in his Irish background signaled a dislike for the U.K.
“It’s simply untrue,” she said. “President Biden obviously is a very proud Irish American, he is proud of those Irish roots, but he is also a strong supporter of our bilateral relationship with the U.K.”
Sloat added that the Biden administration was working “in lockstep” with the U.K. on a variety of global challenges.
Perhaps aware of the scrutiny of his allegiances, Biden during his speech at Ulster University made uncharacteristically little mention of his Irish heritage. Instead, he kicked off the speech with a different anecdote about his family history, reminding the crowd that “Biden is English too.”
Following the speech, the president traveled to the Irish Republic for the first time since he traced his lineage through the countryside as vice president in 2016.
Myah Ward contributed to this report.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

April 12, 2023
Biden’s Northern Ireland ultimatum looks doomed to fail

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LONDON — Joe Biden is not someone known for his subtlety.
His gaffe-prone nature — which saw him last week confuse the New Zealand rugby team with British forces from the Irish War of Independence — leaves little in the way of nuance.
But he is also a sentimental man from a long gone era of Washington, who specializes in a type of homespun, aw-shucks affability that would be seen as naff in a younger president.

His lack of subtlety was on show in Belfast last week as he issued a thinly veiled ultimatum to the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) — return to Northern Ireland’s power sharing arrangements or risk losing billions of dollars in U.S. business investment.
The DUP — a unionist party that does not take kindly to lectures from American presidents — is refusing to sit in Stormont, the Northern Ireland Assembly, due to its anger with the post-Brexit Northern Ireland protocol, which has created trade friction between the region and the rest of the U.K.
The DUP is also refusing to support the U.K.-EU Windsor Framework, which aims to fix the economic problems created by the protocol, despite hopes it would see the party reconvene the Northern Irish Assembly.
The president on Wednesday urged Northern Irish leaders to “unleash this incredible economic opportunity, which is just beginning.”
However, American business groups paint a far more complex and nuanced view of future foreign investment into Northern Ireland than offered up by Biden.
Biden told a Belfast crowd on Wednesday there were “scores of major American corporations wanting to come here” to invest, but that a suspended Stormont was acting as a block on that activity.
One U.S. business figure, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Biden’s flighty rhetoric was “exaggerated” and that many businesses would be looking beyond the state of the regional assembly to make their investment decisions.
The president spoke as if Ulster would be rewarded with floods of American greenbacks if the DUP reverses its intransigence, predicting that Northern Ireland’s gross domestic product (GDP) would soon be triple its 1998 level. Its GDP is currently around double the size of when the Good Friday Agreement was struck in 1998.
Emanuel Adam, executive director of BritishAmerican Business, said this sounded like a “magic figure” unless Biden “knows something we don’t know about.”
DUP MP Ian Paisley Jr. told POLITICO that U.S. politicians for “too long” have “promised some economic El Dorado or bonanza if you only do what we say politically … but that bonanza has never arrived and people are not naive enough here to believe it ever will.”
“A presidential visit is always welcome, but the glitter on top is not an economic driver,” he said.
Joe Biden addresses a crowd of thousands on April 14, 2023 in Ballina, Ireland | Charles McQuillan/Getty Images
Facing both ways
The British government is hoping the Windsor Framework will ease economic tensions in Northern Ireland and create politically stable conditions for inward foreign direct investment.
The framework removes many checks on goods going from Great Britain to Northern Ireland and has begun to slowly create a more collaborative relationship between London and Brussels on a number of fronts — two elements which have been warmly welcomed across the Atlantic.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has said Northern Ireland is in a “special” position of having access to the EU’s single market, to avoid a hard border with the Republic of Ireland, and the U.K.’s internal market.
“That’s like the world’s most exciting economic zone,” Sunak said in February.
Jake Colvin, head of Washington’s National Foreign Trade Council business group, said U.S. firms wanted to see “confidence that the frictions over the protocol have indeed been resolved.”
“Businesses will look to mechanisms like the Windsor Framework to provide stability,” he said.
Marjorie Chorlins, senior vice president for Europe at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said the Windsor Framework was “very important” for U.S. businesses and that “certainty about the relationship between the U.K. and the EU is critical.”
She said a reconvened Stormont would mean more legislative stability on issues like skills and healthcare, but added that there were a whole range of other broader U.K. wide economic factors that will play a major part in investment decisions.
This is particularly salient in a week where official figures showed the U.K.’s GDP flatlining and predictions that Britain will be the worst economic performer in the G20 this year.
“We want to see a return to robust growth and prosperity for the U.K. broadly and are eager to work with government at all levels,” Chorlins said.
“Political and economic instability in the U.K. has been a challenge for businesses of all sizes.”
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has said Northern Ireland is in a “special” position of having access to the EU’s single market | Pool photo by Paul Faith/Getty Images
Her words underline just how much global reputational damage last year’s carousel of prime ministers caused for the U.K., with Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey recently warning of a “hangover effect” from Liz Truss’ premiership and the broader Westminster psychodrama of 2022.
America’s Northern Ireland envoy Joe Kennedy, grandson of Robert Kennedy, accompanied the president last week and has been charged with drumming up U.S. corporate interest in Northern Ireland.
Kennedy said Northern Ireland is already “the number-one foreign investment location for proximity and market access.”
Northern Ireland has been home to £1.5 billion of American investment in the past decade and had the second-most FDI projects per capita out of all U.K. regions in 2021.
Claire Hanna, Westminster MP for the nationalist SDLP, believes reconvening Stormont would “signal a seriousness that there isn’t going to be anymore mucking around.”
“It’s also about the signal that the restoration of Stormont sends — that these are the accepted trading arrangements,” she said.
Hanna says the DUP’s willingness to “demonize the two biggest trading blocs in the world — the U.S. and EU” — was damaging to the country’s future economic prospects.
‘The money goes south’
At a more practical level, Biden’s ultimatum appears to carry zero weight with DUP representatives.
DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson made it clear last week that he was unmoved by Biden’s economic proclamations and gave no guarantee his party would sit in the regional assembly in the foreseeable future.
“President Biden is offering the hope of further American investment, which we always welcome,” Donaldson told POLITICO.
“But fundamental to the success of our economy is our ability to trade within our biggest market, which is of course the United Kingdom.”
A DUP official said U.S. governments had been promising extra American billions in exchange “for selling out to Sinn Féin and Dublin” since the 1990s and “when America talks about corporate investment, we get the crumbs and that investment really all ends up in the Republic [of Ireland].”
“President Biden is offering the hope of further American investment, which we always welcome,” Donaldson said | Behal/Irish Government via Getty Images
“The Americans talk big, but the money goes south,” the DUP official said.
This underscores the stark reality that challenges Northern Ireland any time it pitches for U.S. investment — the competing proposition offered by its southern neighbor with its internationally low 12.5 percent rate on corporate profits.
Emanuel Adam with BritishAmerican Business said there was a noticeable feeling in Washington that firms want to do business in Dublin.
“When [Irish Prime Minister] Leo Varadkar and his team were here recently, I could tell how confident the Irish are these days,” he said. “There are not as many questions for them as there are around the U.K.”
Biden’s economic ultimatum looks toothless from the DUP’s perspective and its resonance may be as short-lived as his trip to Belfast itself.
This story has been updated to correct an historical reference.

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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )

April 11, 2023
UK’s Truss warns of Western ‘weakness’ over China in wake of Macron visit

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LONDON — Former U.K. Prime Minister Liz Truss will take a not-so-subtle swipe at Emmanuel Macron over his attempt to build bridges with Beijing.
In a Wednesday morning speech to the Heritage Foundation think tank in Washington, D.C. Truss will argue that too many in the West have “appeased and accommodated” authoritarian regimes in China and Russia.
And she will say it is a “sign of weakness” for Western leaders to visit China and ask premier Xi Jinping for his support in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — just days after Macron’s own high-profile trip there.
While Truss — who left office after just six weeks as crisis-hit U.K. prime minister — will not mention Macron by name, her comments follow an interview with POLITICO in which the French president said Europe should resist pressure to become “America’s followers.”
Macron said: “The question Europeans need to answer … is it in our interest to accelerate [a crisis] on Taiwan? No. The worse thing would be to think that we Europeans must become followers on this topic and take our cue from the U.S. agenda and a Chinese overreaction.”
Macron has already been criticized for those comments by the IPAC group of China-skeptic lawmakers, which said Monday his remarks were “ill-judged.”
And Truss — who had a frosty relationship with Macron during her brief stint in office last year — will use her speech to urge a more aggressive stance toward both China and Russia.
“We’ve seen Vladimir Putin launching an unprovoked attack on a free and democratic neighbor, we see the Chinese building up their armaments and their arsenal and menacing the free and democratic Taiwan,” Truss will say according to pre-released remarks. “Too many in the West have appeased and accommodated these regimes.”

She will add: “Western leaders visiting President Xi to ask for his support in ending the war is a mistake — and it is a sign of weakness. Instead our energies should go into taking more measures to support Taiwan. We need to make sure Taiwan is able to defend itself.”
Relations between Macron and Truss’ successor Rishi Sunak have been notably warmer. The pair hailed a “new chapter” in U.K.-France ties in March, after concluding a deal on cross-Channel migration.

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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )

April 11, 2023
Europe must resist pressure to become ‘America’s followers,’ says Macron

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ABOARD COTAM UNITÉ (FRANCE’S AIR FORCE ONE) — Europe must reduce its dependency on the United States and avoid getting dragged into a confrontation between China and the U.S. over Taiwan, French President Emmanuel Macron said in an interview on his plane back from a three-day state visit to China.
Speaking with POLITICO and two French journalists after spending around six hours with Chinese President Xi Jinping during his trip, Macron emphasized his pet theory of “strategic autonomy” for Europe, presumably led by France, to become a “third superpower.”
He said “the great risk” Europe faces is that it “gets caught up in crises that are not ours, which prevents it from building its strategic autonomy,” while flying from Beijing to Guangzhou, in southern China, aboard COTAM Unité, France’s Air Force One.
Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party have enthusiastically endorsed Macron’s concept of strategic autonomy and Chinese officials constantly refer to it in their dealings with European countries. Party leaders and theorists in Beijing are convinced the West is in decline and China is on the ascendant and that weakening the transatlantic relationship will help accelerate this trend.
“The paradox would be that, overcome with panic, we believe we are just America’s followers,” Macron said in the interview. “The question Europeans need to answer … is it in our interest to accelerate [a crisis] on Taiwan? No. The worse thing would be to think that we Europeans must become followers on this topic and take our cue from the U.S. agenda and a Chinese overreaction,” he said.
Just hours after his flight left Guangzhou headed back to Paris, China launched large military exercises around the self-ruled island of Taiwan, which China claims as its territory but the U.S. has promised to arm and defend.
Those exercises were a response to Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-Wen’s 10-day diplomatic tour of Central American countries that included a meeting with Republican U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy while she transited in California. People familiar with Macron’s thinking said he was happy Beijing had at least waited until he was out of Chinese airspace before launching the simulated “Taiwan encirclement” exercise.

Beijing has repeatedly threatened to invade in recent years and has a policy of isolating the democratic island by forcing other countries to recognize it as part of “one China.”
Taiwan talks
Macron and Xi discussed Taiwan “intensely,” according to French officials accompanying the president, who appears to have taken a more conciliatory approach than the U.S. or even the European Union.
“Stability in the Taiwan Strait is of paramount importance,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who accompanied Macron for part of his visit, said she told Xi during their meeting in Beijing last Thursday. “The threat [of] the use of force to change the status quo is unacceptable.”
Chinese President Xi Jinping and French President Emmanuel Macron in Guangdong on April 7, 2023 | Pool Photo by Jacques Witt / AFP via Getty Images
Xi responded by saying anyone who thought they could influence Beijing on Taiwan was deluded.
Macron appears to agree with that assessment.
“Europeans cannot resolve the crisis in Ukraine; how can we credibly say on Taiwan, ‘watch out, if you do something wrong we will be there’? If you really want to increase tensions that’s the way to do it,” he said.
“Europe is more willing to accept a world in which China becomes a regional hegemon,” said Yanmei Xie, a geopolitics analyst at Gavekal Dragonomics. “Some of its leaders even believe such a world order may be more advantageous to Europe.”
In his trilateral meeting with Macron and von der Leyen last Thursday in Beijing, Xi Jinping went off script on only two topics — Ukraine and Taiwan — according to someone who was present in the room.
“Xi was visibly annoyed for being held responsible for the Ukraine conflict and he downplayed his recent visit to Moscow,” this person said. “He was clearly enraged by the U.S. and very upset over Taiwan, by the Taiwanese president’s transit through the U.S. and [the fact that] foreign policy issues were being raised by Europeans.”
In this meeting, Macron and von der Leyen took similar lines on Taiwan, this person said. But Macron subsequently spent more than four hours with the Chinese leader, much of it with only translators present, and his tone was far more conciliatory than von der Leyen’s when speaking with journalists.
‘Vassals’ warning
Macron also argued that Europe had increased its dependency on the U.S. for weapons and energy and must now focus on boosting European defense industries.
He also suggested Europe should reduce its dependence on the “extraterritoriality of the U.S. dollar,” a key policy objective of both Moscow and Beijing.
Macron has long been a proponent of strategic autonomy for Europe | Ludovic Marin/AFP via Getty Images
“If the tensions between the two superpowers heat up … we won’t have the time nor the resources to finance our strategic autonomy and we will become vassals,” he said.
Russia, China, Iran and other countries have been hit by U.S. sanctions in recent years that are based on denying access to the dominant dollar-denominated global financial system. Some in Europe have complained about “weaponization” of the dollar by Washington, which forces European companies to give up business and cut ties with third countries or face crippling secondary sanctions.
While sitting in the stateroom of his A330 aircraft in a hoodie with the words “French Tech” emblazoned on the chest, Macron claimed to have already “won the ideological battle on strategic autonomy” for Europe.
He did not address the question of ongoing U.S. security guarantees for the Continent, which relies heavily on American defense assistance amid the first major land war in Europe since World War II.
As one of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and the only nuclear power in the EU, France is in a unique position militarily. However, the country has contributed far less to the defense of Ukraine against Russia’s invasion than many other countries.
As is common in France and many other European countries, the French President’s office, known as the Elysée Palace, insisted on checking and “proofreading” all the president’s quotes to be published in this article as a condition of granting the interview. This violates POLITICO’s editorial standards and policy, but we agreed to the terms in order to speak directly with the French president. POLITICO insisted that it cannot deceive its readers and would not publish anything the president did not say. The quotes in this article were all actually said by the president, but some parts of the interview in which the president spoke even more frankly about Taiwan and Europe’s strategic autonomy were cut out by the Elysée.

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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )

April 4, 2023
Why China wants Macron to drive a wedge between Europe and America

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Chinese leader Xi Jinping had one overriding message for his visiting French counterpart Emmanuel Macron this week: Don’t let Europe get sucked into playing America’s game.
Beijing is eager to avoid the EU falling further under U.S. influence, at a time when the White House is pursuing a more assertive policy to counter China’s geopolitical and military strength.
Russia’s yearlong war against Ukraine has strengthened the alliance between Europe and the U.S., shaken up global trade, reinvigorated NATO and forced governments to look at what else could suddenly go wrong in world affairs. That’s not welcome in Beijing, which still views Washington as its strategic nemesis.

This week, China’s counter-offensive stepped up a gear, turning on the charm. Xi welcomed Macron into the grandest of settings at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, along with European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen. This was in sharp contrast to China’s current efforts to keep senior American officials at arm’s length, especially since U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken called off a trip to Beijing during the spy balloon drama earlier this year.
Both American and Chinese officials know Europe’s policy toward Beijing is far from settled. That’s an opportunity, and a risk for both sides. In recent months, U.S. officials have warned of China’s willingness to send weapons to Russia and talked up the dangers of allowing Chinese tech companies unfettered access to European markets, with some success.
TikTok, which is ultimately Chinese owned, has been banned from government and administrative phones in a number of locations in Europe, including in the EU institutions in Brussels. American pressure also led the Dutch to put new export controls on sales of advanced semiconductor equipment to China.
Yet even the hawkish von der Leyen, a former German defense minister, has dismissed the notion of decoupling Europe from China’s economy altogether. From Beijing’s perspective, this is yet another significant difference from the hostile commercial environment being promoted by the U.S.
Just this week, 36 Chinese and French businesses signed new deals in front of Macron and Xi, in what Chinese state media said was a sign of “the not declining confidence in the Chinese market of European businesses.” While hardly a statement brimming with confidence, it could have been worse.
For the last couple of years European leaders have grown more skeptical of China’s trajectory, voicing dismay at Beijing’s way of handling the coronavirus pandemic, the treatment of protesters in Hong Kong and Xinjiang’s Uyghur Muslims, as well as China’s sanctions on European politicians and military threats against Taiwan.
Then, Xi and Vladimir Putin hailed a “no limits” partnership just days before Russia invaded Ukraine. While the West rolled out tough sanctions on Moscow, China became the last major economy still interested in maintaining — and expanding — trade ties with Russia. That shocked many Western officials and provoked a fierce debate in Europe over how to punish Beijing and how far to pull out of Chinese commerce.
Beijing saw Macron as the natural partner to help avoid a nosedive in EU-China relations, especially since Angela Merkel — its previous favorite — was no longer German chancellor.
Macron’s willingness to engage with anyone — including his much-criticized contacts with Putin ahead of his war on Ukraine — made him especially appealing as Beijing sought to drive a wedge between European and American strategies on China.
Xi Jinping sees Macron as the natural to Angela Merkel, his previous partner in the West who helped avoid a nosedive in EU-China relations | Ludovic Marin/AFP via Getty Images
Not taking sides
“I’m very glad we share many identical or similar views on Sino-French, Sino-EU, international and regional issues,” Xi told Macron over tea on Friday, in the southern metropolis of Guangzhou, according to Chinese state media Xinhua.
Strategic autonomy, a French foreign policy focus, is a favorite for China, which sees the notion as proof of Europe’s distance from the U.S. For his part, Macron told Xi a day earlier that France promotes “European strategic autonomy,” doesn’t like “bloc confrontation” and believes in doing its own thing. “France does not pick sides,” he said.
The French position is challenged by some in Europe who see it as an urgent task to take a tougher approach toward Beijing.
“Macron could have easily avoided the dismal picture of European and transatlantic disunity,” said Thorsten Benner, director of the Berlin-based Global Public Policy Institute. “Nobody forced Macron to show up with a huge business delegation, repeating disproven illusions of reciprocity and deluding himself about working his personal magic on Xi to get the Chinese leader to turn against Putin.”
Holger Hestermeyer, a professor of EU law at King’s College London, said Beijing will struggle to split the transatlantic alliance.
“If China wants to succeed with building a new world order, separating the EU from the U.S. — even a little bit — would be a prized goal — and mind you, probably an elusive one,” Hestermeyer said. “Right now the EU is strengthening its defenses specifically because China tried to play divide and conquer with the EU in the past.”
Xi’s focus on America was unmistakable when he veered into a topic that was a long way from Europe’s top priority, during his three-way meeting with Macron and von der Leyen. A week earlier the Biden administration had held its second Summit for Democracy, in which Russia and China were portrayed as the main threats.
“Spreading the so-called ‘democracy versus authoritarianism’ [narrative],” Xi told his European guests on Thursday, “would only bring division and confrontation to the world.”

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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )

April 4, 2023
Emmanuel Macron wants to charm China — after failing with Putin

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PARIS — French President Emmanuel Macron is jetting off on an ambitious diplomatic mission to woo Beijing away from Moscow. Officials in Washington wish him luck with that.
France hopes to dissuade China’s leader Xi Jinping from getting any cozier with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and wants the Chinese instead to play a mediation role over the war in Ukraine.
However, it is unclear what leverage Macron has — and the backdrop to his three-day trip starting Tuesday isn’t easy. Europe continues to reel from the impact of cutting off trade ties to Russia and geopolitical tensions are ratcheting up between China and the U.S., the world’s two biggest economies.

The French president wants to play a more personal card with his Chinese counterpart, after drawing fierce criticism for hours of fruitless phone calls with Putin last year — an effort that failed to stop Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Macron is expected to spend several hours in discussions with Xi, and the trip includes a visit to a city that holds personal value for the Chinese president.
“You can count with one hand the number of world leaders who could have an in-depth discussion with Xi,” said an Elysée advisor who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
But while expectations in France of a breakthrough are moderate, the view among other Western officials is even bleaker.
Given Macron’s failed attempts at playing a center-stage role in resolving conflicts, such as stopping the war in Ukraine or salvaging the Iran nuclear deal, there are doubts in the U.S. and elsewhere that this trip will deliver major results.
The White House has little expectation that Macron will achieve a breakthrough, according to three administration officials not authorized to speak publicly about private conversations. Xi is unlikely to act on Macron’s requests or curtail any of China’s assertive moves in the Pacific, the officials said.
White House aides ruefully recalled Macron’s failed attempts to insert himself as a peacemaker with Putin on the eve of the invasion more than a year ago and anticipate more of the same this time.
There is also some concern in the Biden administration about France’s potential coziness with China at a time when tensions between Washington and Beijing are at their highest in decades, even though the White House is supportive of the trip, the three officials said. There is no ill will toward Macron’s efforts in Beijing, they stressed.
But what might further complicate Macron’s endeavors is an emerging feud between the European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who is traveling with the president, and the Chinese.
Last Thursday, President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen delivered a keynote address on EU-China relations at the European Policy Centre in Brussels | Valeria Mongelli/AFP via Getty Images
In a high-profile speech on EU-China relations Thursday, von der Leyen urged EU countries to “de-risk” from overdependency on China. She also implied that the EU could terminate the pursuit of a landmark trade deal with China, which was clinched in 2020 but subsequently stalled. Her remarks sparked swift blowback from Chinese diplomats. Fu Cong, China’s ambassador to the European Union, said Friday he was “a little bit disappointed.”
“That speech contained a lot of misrepresentation and misinterpretation of Chinese policies and the Chinese positions,” Fu told state-owned broadcaster CGTN.
The Europeans’ visit will also be scrutinized from a human rights perspective given China’s authoritarian pivot and alleged human rights abuses across the nation.
“President Macron and von der Leyen should not sweep the Chinese government’s deepening authoritarianism under the rug during their visit to Beijing,” said Bénédicte Jeannerod, France director at Human Rights Watch. “They should use their public appearances with Xi Jinping to express strong concerns over widespread rights abuses across China, heightened oppression in Hong Kong and Tibet, and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang.”
Macron’s playbook
Speaking ahead of the visit to Beijing, the French leader said his aim was to “try and involve China as much as possible to put pressure on Russia” on topics such as nuclear weapons.
But will Macron’s charm work on Putin’s “best friend” Xi?
China has sought to position itself as a neutral party on the conflict, even as it has burnished its ties with the nation, importing energy from Russia at a discount. Despite massive international pressure on Moscow, Xi decided to make the Kremlin his first destination for a state visit after he secured a norm-breaking third term as Chinese leader. Meanwhile, POLITICO and other media have reported that the Chinese have made shipments of assault weapons and body armor to Russia.
Western European leaders that were cozy with Moscow just before the war started are now calling for engagement with China, including Macron himself. Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez was in China just days before Macron’s arrival, saying that the world “must listen to its voice” on Russia and Ukraine.
During his visit, which aides have been discussing since at least November last year, Macron will spend several hours with Xi in Beijing, and accompany him to the city of Guangzhou. The Chinese leader’s father, Xi Zhongxun used to work there as Guangdong province governor.
“Altogether the president will spend six to seven hours in discussions with the Chinese leader. The fact that he will be the first French president to visit Guangzhou is also a personal touch, since President Xi’s father used to be a party leader there,” said the Elysee official cited earlier.
The French are hoping the time Macron spends privately with Xi will help win Chinese support on issues such as stopping Russian attacks on civilian infrastructure in Ukraine or halting the illegal transfer of Ukrainian children.
It’s also expected that Macron will try to test Xi’s reaction to Russia’s threat to host nuclear missiles in Belarus, a decision that flies in the face of China’s non-proliferation stance, barely a month after Beijing revealed its 12-point plan for resolving the conflict in Ukraine.
Despite massive international pressure on Moscow, Xi decided to make the Kremlin his first destination for a state visit after he secured a norm-breaking third term as Chinese leader | Greg Baker/AFP via Getty Images
“It’s absolutely fundamental to have moments of private encounters,” said Sylvie Bermann, France’s former ambassador to China. “Diplomacy is about playing the long game …With China, I don’t think it is easy to strike up relationships as Westerners. But maybe it means that we’ll be able to talk when the time comes.”
Despite the show of goodwill however, the French president will not hold back from sending “some messages” to Beijing on supporting Russia, particularly when it comes to arms deliveries, a senior French official said.
“We aren’t going to threaten, but send some warnings: The Chinese need to understand that [sending weapons] would have consequences for Europe, for us … We need to remind them of our security interests.” The official said Macron would steer clear of threatening sanctions.
Antoine Bondaz, China specialist at Paris’ Foundation for Strategic Research, questioned the emphasis on trying to bond with Xi. “That’s not how things work in China. It’s not France’s ‘small fry’ president, who spends two hours walking with Xi who will change things, China only understands the balance of power,” he said. “Maybe it works with Putin, who has spent over 400 hours with Xi in the last ten years, but Macron doesn’t know Xi.”
EU unity on show as trade takes center stage
Trade will also feature high on Macron’s priorities as he brings with him a large delegation of business leaders including representatives from EDF, Alstom, Veolia and the aerospace giant Airbus. According to an Elysée official speaking on condition of anonymity, a potential deal with European plane maker Airbus may be in the works, which would come after China ordered 300 planes for €30 billion in 2019.
Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire and Foreign Affairs Minister Catherine Colonna are also traveling with the president.
With the EU facing an emerging trade war between China and the U.S., the presence of von der Leyen, will add yet another layer of complexity to the mix. The French president said in March that he had “suggested to von der Leyen that she accompany him to China” so they could speak “with a unified voice.”
“I don’t have a European mandate, as France has its independent diplomacy — but I’m attached to European coordination,” he said.
A joint trip with the EU head sets him apart from Olaf Scholz, the German Chancellor whom French officials criticized in private for hurrying to China for a day trip with Xi last year, focusing more on German rather than EU interests.
With von der Leyen by his side, Macron may well hope to be seen as the EU’s leading voice. In the U.S., the French president had tried that tactic and obtained some concessions on America’s green subsidies plan for the bloc.
In China, that card may be harder to play.
Clea Caulcutt reported in Paris, Stuart Lau in Brussels and Jonathan Lemire in Washington.

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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )

April 1, 2023
‘My kids are being poisoned’: How aviators escaped America’s war on lead

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Public health experts routinely say there’s no safe level of lead because even miniscule amounts of the neurotoxin can disrupt development. In 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lowered the threshold for when toddlers are considered to have elevated levels of lead in their blood.
A study by Cincinnati Children’s Hospital researchers in 2006 found that exposure to just over 1 microgram per deciliter of lead in the blood can increase a child’s odds of developing attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
Babies and toddlers are especially vulnerable. Their brains are rapidly developing as they crawl or suck on their hands, behaviors that increase exposure. For that reason, EPA prioritized eliminating lead emissions from cars shortly after the agency was established. A 1975 requirement for cars to be built with catalytic converters to control multiple emissions sounded the death knell for lead, which damages the technology.

From America and Europe to India and China, bans on leaded automobile fuel had gone into effect by the turn of the century. The final U.S. ban in 1996 was a public health success. Since then, the amount of lead in Americans’ blood has fallen more than 96 percent.
But EPA carved out an exception for the high-octane leaded gasoline made for small airplanes. The loophole for aviation gas has meant years of lead poisoning in San Jose and other communities of color near the thousands of small airports in rural pockets across the country.
Safety has been at the center of industry arguments for sticking with leaded gasoline until a 100-octane lead-free fuel is brought to market. Adding lead to gasoline boosts octane levels. That prevents airplane engines from misfiring. A major misfire can rip an engine apart midflight.
The diversity and complexity of the $247 billion U.S. general aviation sector, with its 200,000 aircraft, is part of why it’s hard to regulate. Lead in aviation fuel predates World War II. Many aviation experts credit the resulting turbocharged engine performance with giving Allied planes the upper hand in dogfights against Hitler’s Luftwaffe.
Regardless of age or type, every general aircraft can fly on 100-octane leaded gasoline, also called “avgas.” And that’s reinforced the position long held by the industry that developing a “drop-in” 100-octane, lead-free fuel is preferable to anything else — the silver bullet, and nothing short of it.

“I’m not defending lead in any way. We are all supportive of removing it as quickly as we can,” said Jim Coon, senior vice president of government affairs at the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association. “But if it were easy, it would have been done by now.”

But there’s little evidence that resolving the lead issue in smaller planes has been a high priority either for the aviation industry or its regulators.
Eliminating any amount of lead emissions could bring significant public health gains at a time when piston-engine aircraft are the largest source of airborne lead in the United States, according to EPA. Public health advocates including the Physicians for Social Responsibility that have petitioned EPA to eliminate sources of lead exposure have pushed the agency to target aviation fuel.
Aviation experts who contributed to a recent report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine called for a “multi-faceted approach.” It could mean combining lower-octane unleaded fuels with engine modifications for aircraft that typically use higher-octane gas.
Almost three-quarters of general aircraft doesn’t require 100-octane fuel to fly safely. The remaining one-third that flies on the higher-octane fuel accounts for the lion’s share of flying hours — and are responsible for most of the lead pollution.
“What we are urging is don’t wait for the perfect solution to come along,” said Bernard Robertson, a former vice president of engineering at DaimlerChrysler, who sat on the committee that authored the report. “There are all these other things that could be done in the meantime to get us on the road toward getting rid of lead.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

February 20, 2023