President Donald Trump’s recent comment about the “filthy” air quality in countries like India and China once again triggered a fake media outrage.
“Trump accused of racist slur during debate for calling India and China ‘filthy’,” UK’s Independent newspaper claimed.
The “throwaway line could end up being the most diplomatically costly of the night,” CNN complained.
President Trump made that remark while defending the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord in 2017 at the final presidential debate with Democratic candidate Joe Biden on Thursday.
“Look at China, how filthy it is. Look at Russia. Look at India. It’s filthy. The air is filthy. I walked out of the Paris Accord as we had to take out trillions of dollars and we were treated very unfairly,” he responded.
Sticking with the Obama-backed Paris agreement for the next two decades would have cost the U.S. economy “close to $3 trillion in lost GDP and 6.5 million industrial jobs, while households would have $7,000 less income,” the White House said at the time of the withdrawal. While the globalist agreement penalized the U.S., it rewarded big global polluters like India and China.
As media outlets and political pundits were busy feigning outrage, many Indians took to social media to defend President Trump’s factually correct remark.
President Trump’s remarks triggered demands for better air quality in India. “U.S. President Donald Trump’s description of India as a filthy place with polluted air has unleashed calls on social media for urgent clean-up action, particularly over New Delhi, the world’s most polluted capital,” Reuters reported.
“On Friday, air pollution in New Delhi and surrounding cities was at its worst in eight months, with the air quality index surging above 300 on a scale of 500, indicating ’emergency conditions,'” the news agency reported.
“Trump is right,” Kapil Mishra, a senior politician from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist party, said. “Our air quality is actually filthy. In Delhi, we are breathing poison. Time for all of us to come together and deal with the real reasons.”
The country’s leading newspaper, The Times of India, fact-checked the U.S. president’s remark.
“The World Health Organisation’s Air Quality database (2018) had found that the world’s seven most polluted cities in terms of annual PM2.5 levels [suspended particles in air ranging from 2.5 micrometers and below] were all in India,” the daily agreed.
Reporting domestic response to President Trump’s comment, the newspaper reported that many Indians “called for introspection and action, saying India’s air quality was indeed among the poorest in the world. For many years now, Delhi has emerged as the world’s most polluted capital while the Indo-Gangetic plains figures in reports as a region with the world’s dirtiest air.”
“Following the remarks, many tweeted screenshots of the Air Quality Index in Delhi which has risen to ‘severe’ levels in parts of the city,” BBC reported.
Many Indians “agreed that capital Delhi’s air was among the most foul in the world.”
The British broadcaster also fact-checked the validity of the comment, confirming:
In recent weeks, the city’s air quality has turned “severe”, with residents complaining of breathing difficulties.India’s dreaded pollution season has returned as levels of PM2.5 – dangerous tiny pollutants in the air – in the capital have averaged around 180-300 micrograms per cubic metre in recent weeks, 12 times higher than the WHO’s safe limits. (…)While his comments about China may not be strictly true, they have resonated with many in India.The air in several cities in northern India is especially bad in winter months – November to February – when several factors, such as farmers burning crop stubble to clear their fields, vehicular and industrial pollution, festive fireworks and low wind speed, contribute to what doctors calls is a “deadly cocktail of poisonous gases”. Despite the spikes in air pollution year after year, few concrete steps have been taken to control it.
“The spike in the air quality in recent weeks is bad news for India’s fight against coronavirus because several studies around the world have linked air pollution to higher Covid-19 case numbers and deaths,” BBC added. “And doctors and epidemiologists have warned that toxic air will only hamper India’s fight against the virus.”
India reported close to eight million Chinese coronavirus cases, with the official death toll crossing 100,000. The actual figures are regarded as much higher.
“India has a population more than four times as large as the United States, but has only conducted around one-third of the number of tests,” President Trump noted at a July press conference.
On a personal note: I am sick of Western Liberals taking offense on my behalf. Having lived for 17 years in the midst of the smog and polluted air in India’s capital, New Delhi, I can testify — or perhaps my charred lungs can — to the accuracy of President Trump’s remarks.
Far from being offended, I find it refreshing to see a world leader calling a spade a spade.
“More than 116,000 Indian infants died from air pollution in the first month of life,” a recent global environmental study showed.
Sub-Saharan Africa has a grim figure of 236,000 infant deaths, all of them being failed socialist Third World states, not First World capitalist economies.
For those on the U.S. radical left, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, blaming capitalism for ‘climate change’ are either clueless or harbor a malicious agenda. There is no greater force for conservation and a clean environment than free-market capitalism.
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