When the world gets closer.

We help you see farther.

Sign up to our expressly international daily newsletter.

Already a subscriber? Log in.

You've reach your limit of free articles.

Get unlimited access to Worldcrunch

You can cancel anytime.

SUBSCRIBERS BENEFITS

Ad-free experience NEW

Exclusive international news coverage

Access to Worldcrunch archives

Monthly Access

30-day free trial, then $2.90 per month.

Annual Access BEST VALUE

$19.90 per year, save $14.90 compared to monthly billing.save $14.90.

Subscribe to Worldcrunch
eyes on the U.S.

Spotlight: Climate Change Under Donald Trump

New head of Environmental Protection Agency Scott Pruitt
New head of Environmental Protection Agency Scott Pruitt

Earlier today, U.S. President-elect Donald Trump picked Scott Pruitt, attorney general of Oklahoma, as the head of the Environmental Protection Agency. Pruitt, a New York Times investigation once revealed, has previously sent letters to government agencies that were actually drafted by energy-industry lobbyists. He has also legally challenged the Obama administration's regulation of fossil fuels. Trump's choice for the EPA is hardly unusual. As The Washington Post notes, he is the third of Trump's appointees to "have key philosophical differences with the missions of the agencies they have been tapped to run."

While many are worried about the global implications of having a U.S. president who has expressed "doubts' about humanity's role in global warming, others believe it might, and should, elicit the right reactions from other countries to make a difference. "Trump's victory is, paradoxically, great news for climate change: It will force the rest of the world to focus on technical progress and not on a fragile, unlikely and inefficient international coordination," economist Jacques Delpla writes in French business daily Les Échos.

Denouncing the "precarious naivety" of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and the absence of any sanctions against transgressors in last year's Paris Agreement, Delpla argues that Trump's stance on climate change "forces us to acknowledge that climate Malthusianism is a dead end." That, he says, leaves us with only one strategy — to "find and develop technologies and radical innovations that will bring down the cost of clean energies below that of dirty energies." Delpla calls for a global equivalent of the Manhattan Project, a program that allowed the U.S. to develop its first nuclear weapons during World War II. He says this could be done at a minimum investment — an extra 1% of GDP that could be financed by a higher tax on carbon which would, in turn, create an incentive for innovation.

As for the world's poorer countries who often have no choice but to rely on polluting energies for their development, Delpla says they should be given free access to these technologies and innovations in exchange for access to their clean-energy markets. "As far as the climate is concerned, intelligence and price mechanism are more efficient than a naive and inefficient international Malthusian coordination," he says. The only question is, who will now take the lead?

You've reached your limit of free articles.

To read the full story, start your free trial today.

Get unlimited access. Cancel anytime.

Exclusive coverage from the world's top sources, in English for the first time.

Insights from the widest range of perspectives, languages and countries.

Geopolitics

Senegal's Democratic Unrest And The Ghosts Of French Colonialism

The violence that erupted following the sentencing of opposition politician Ousmane Sonko to two years in prison left 16 people dead and 500 arrested. This reveals deep fractures in Senegalese democracy that has traces to France's colonial past.

Image of Senegalese ​Protesters celebrating Sonko being set free by the court, March 2021

Protesters celebrate Sonko being set free by the court, March 2021

Pierre Haski

-Analysis-

PARIS — For a long time, Senegal had the glowing image of one of Africa's rare democracies. The reality was more complicated than that, even in the days of the poet-president Léopold Sedar Senghor, who also had his dark side.

But for years, the country has been moving down what Senegalese intellectual Felwine Sarr describes as the "gentle slope of... the weakening and corrosion of the gains of Senegalese democracy."

This has been demonstrated once again over the last few days, with a wave of violence that has left 16 people dead, 500 arrested, the internet censored, and a tense situation with troubling consequences. The trigger? The sentencing last Thursday of opposition politician Ousmane Sonko to two years in prison, which could exclude him from the 2024 presidential elections.

Young people took to the streets when the verdict was announced, accusing the justice system of having become a political tool. Ousmane Sonko had been accused of rape but was convicted of "corruption of youth," a change that rendered the decision incomprehensible.

Keep reading...Show less

You've reached your limit of free articles.

To read the full story, start your free trial today.

Get unlimited access. Cancel anytime.

Exclusive coverage from the world's top sources, in English for the first time.

Insights from the widest range of perspectives, languages and countries.

Already a subscriber? Log in.

You've reach your limit of free articles.

Get unlimited access to Worldcrunch

You can cancel anytime.

SUBSCRIBERS BENEFITS

Ad-free experience NEW

Exclusive international news coverage

Access to Worldcrunch archives

Monthly Access

30-day free trial, then $2.90 per month.

Annual Access BEST VALUE

$19.90 per year, save $14.90 compared to monthly billing.save $14.90.

Subscribe to Worldcrunch

The latest