The head of the UN environment program said Tuesday the United States is likely to live up to the Paris climate deal despite President Donald Trump’s planned pullout, because “all the big American companies” are working toward greener operations.

UN officials are increasingly citing the role of companies in the fight against climate change.

“There is one question that I get more often than any other question wherever I go on the planet and it is a very simple one. It is: ‘What about Donald Trump?'” Solheim told a panel in Geneva by videoconference from Nairobi.

“In all likelihood, the United States of America will live up to its Paris commitment, not because of the White House, but because of the private sector,” he said. “All the big American companies are dedicated to go in the green direction.”

But UNEP said countries and industries still need to do more to meet targets to cut greenhouse gas emissions that experts say contribute to global warming. The report criticizes coal-fired electricity plants being built in emerging economies, and insists that investment in renewable energies will pay for itself — and even make money — over the long term.

The Paris accord aims to cap global temperature increases to 2 degrees Celsius (35.6 Fahrenheit) by the year 2100 compared to average world temperatures at the start of the industrial era — and even hopes to limit the increase to 1.5 degrees C.

UNEP says trends suggest that even if current national commitments are met, a temperature increase of 3 degrees Celsius by the end of the century is “very likely — meaning that governments need to deliver much stronger pledges when they are revised in 2020.”

“Should the United States follow through with its stated intention to leave the Paris agreement in 2020, the picture could become even bleaker,” UNEP said.

Lead author John Christensen of UN Environment noted some US states like California were “acting independently of what the White House decides.” He said Trump’s bid to peel back constraints on the coal industry won’t mark a major shift because “it simply doesn’t pay off.”

He also said the US targets in the Paris accord, as agreed by the Obama administration, were “not that ambitious in the first place.”

But Christensen told the Geneva panel that the Trump administration’s impact on efforts could affect “negotiation dynamics” with other countries and embolden “what I call ‘noise-makers:’ they are the ones that are opposed to the basic idea” of fighting climate change.

Bob Ward, an expert on climate change policy at the London School of Economics, agreed that the coal industry is “unlikely to be revived in the United States because it is being displaced by cleaner and cheaper sources of energy.”

“Many countries now recognize that the transition to a low-carbon economy will generate sustainable growth and development, with lower poverty and higher living standards,” he said. “High-carbon economies look increasingly uncompetitive.”

A new round of UN climate talks known as COP 23 starts in Bonn, Germany, on Monday, when countries will take stock of their achievements and prepare more ambitious national goals.

On the positive, UNEP highlighted “rapidly expanding mitigation action” and says carbon-dioxide emissions have remained stable since 2014, thanks partly to renewable energy use in China and India. It cautioned that other greenhouse gases like methane continue to rise, however.

UNEP has trumpeted solar and wind energy, efficient appliances and cars, and efforts to preserve forests. Solheim cited tests this week on the world’s first solar-powered railroad in Australia and the launch of a hydrogen-run subway system in northern China.

“We are at the watershed moment: We have stopped the rise in CO2 (carbon dioxide) emissions — there is every reason to believe we can bring them down,” Solheim said. “The train is on the right track, but our duty is to speed it up.”

(Source: AP)

Just 38 percent of Americans approve of Donald Trump’s performance as president, making the former businessman the least popular modern president at this stage of his tenure, according to a new poll.

More than half of respondents, 58 percent, disapprove of Trump’s job performance in the NBC News/Wall Street Journal Poll released on Sunday.

The poll showed that Trump’s approval rating fell five percentage points since September to reach the lowest point of his presidency.

Similar polls found former President George W. Bush had 88 percent approval at this stage in his term, former President Barack Obama had 51 percent and former President Bill Clinton had 47 percent.

Trump has largely lost support among independent adults and white adults without a college degree.

The respondents cited the president’s handling of the NFL players’ protests, his failure to introduce health care reforms and his response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico as the reasons why they put Trump in a negative light.

“This is his worst showing of his young presidency so far,” Democratic pollster Fred Yang of Hart Research Associates, who co-conducted the survey, told NBC News.

Trump is doing fairly better on the economy, with 42 percent of respondents approving and 37 percent disapproving of him in that regard.

Another poll has found that a majority of Americans believed that politics in the US have hit a “dangerous low point” under Trump.

Seventy-one percent of voters said the current political divisions were comparable to the Vietnam War era. A little more than half of the respondents thought Trump deserved “a lot” of blame for the current status.

The poll also found that dysfunction was rampant in Washington, with 70 percent deeming the Trump administration as dysfunctional and 80 percent holding a similar opinion about Congress.

Source: Presstv

The 4th conclave is on, most of the delegates have arrived and are gradually settling in. Some other delegates have already had their pre-conclave meetings.

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All participants duly invited will be informed through proper channels and time.

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We want to inform you to be rest assured that due process is being followed and not everything will and can be reported on social media for reasons we all know.

Stay tuned for updates from the conclave through our official channels.

SCACUF

Former US President John F. Kennedy was murdered in a coup d’etat by a hard-line faction of the American military and intelligence agencies with the support of Israel’s Mossad and some organized crime networks, according to an American scholar and researcher.

Dr. Kevin Barrett, a founding member of the Scientific Panel for the Investigation of 9/11, made the remarks in a phone interview with Press TV on Friday while commenting on the release of documents related to the Kennedy assassination.

On Thursday, President Donald Trump allowed the release of thousands of documents related to the assassination of Kennedy in November 1963, but delayed the publication of some “sensitive” files at the request of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

“President Trump, who has said interesting things about the JFK assassination in the past — such as the claim that Ted Cruz’s father, Rafael Cruz, may have been involved in the killing of President Kennedy — is an interesting president to decide whether to release these many, many thousands of intelligence records relating to the assassination,” Dr. Barrett said.

“And his decision has come as a bit of a surprise to many of us who thought he would just release them. He instead has chosen to withhold hundreds and hundreds of records rather than releasing them,” he stated.

“And what was really interesting was what he said when he did this. Trump said, ‘I have no choice.’ And then he said the reason for not releasing these records was that releasing them would do irreparable harm to national security,” he noted.

“These are very interesting statements to come from a president who’s talked quite loosely about the JFK assassination — which of course was an American coup d’etat — in the past,” the analyst said.

“So, Trump seems to be telling us something between the lines. He has no choice. Well, what does that mean? He certainly theoretically has the choice of just releasing everything. Or maybe if he didn’t have a choice, I guess that would mean somebody was holding a Mannlicher Carcano to his head, or possibly a more viable gun of some kind,” he said.

What harm release of complete info about JFK case could do?

“And when he said it would do irreparable harm to national security: How could a case more than 50 years ago have any bearing on today’s national security? Obviously all of the sources and methods, meaning the foreign spies and the way they were recruited, have long since passed into oblivion,” Dr. Barrett said.

“The only rational understanding of this kind of statement is that the irreparable harm to American national security that could come from a complete and full release of all of the government’s information about the JFK case would be that some of it might inadvertently reveal that President Kennedy was murdered in a coup d’etat by a hard-line faction in the American military and intelligence agencies with the private support from billionaires like H.L. Hunt, and perhaps from some organized crime networks, including Meyer Lansky’s,” he stated.

“We know about that these are the same people who tried to kill President Castro, and apparently found Kennedy an easier target,” he observed.

“And Michael Collins Piper’s book Final Judgment: The Missing Link in the JFK Assassination Conspiracy makes the case that behind the CIA, which was the most active player in the coup d’etat that overthrew Kennedy, we had the hidden hand of the Israeli Mossad by the way of the CIA’s Counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton, who was in fact an Israeli mole in the CIA. And to this day, there is a statue honoring Angleton in Tel Aviv,” the researcher said.

“These are sorts of things that Americans will learn if the truth comes out. Their faith in their government would be shaken, and that is the harm to the national security that might be done,” he added.

“But I think in the long run it would actually help American national security by helping us reestablish our democratic republic. That’s what needs to happen. We need the full truth about the JFK assassination and so many other crimes of the Deep State,” Dr. Barrett concluded.

Culled from Presstv

Nothing has so far filtered from exchanges between the French Cameroun dictator, Paul Biya and UN Secretary General.  Antonio Guterres  arived the Unity Palace yesterday the 27^th of October, 2017 from a trip to the Central African Republic.

A well-placed source hinted Cameroon Concord News that both men had an intensive conversation on the Southern Cameroons crisis, the war against the Nigerian Islamic sect, Boko Haram and the influx of refugees including the security situation in the Central African Republic.

By Sama Ernest, CCN