As part of his plan to "make America great again" and "put American workers first" I can see where the US President's coming from. A White House adviser noted that one of the "secondary benefits" to leaving was in disappointing the EU's leaders. It has also trained the spotlight on the biggest CO2 emitter, China, belching out 30 per cent of the global total (versus the US's 15 per cent), followed by the EU's 9 per cent and India's 7 per cent.
China's been playing a tricky balancing act with its old-economy businesses, trying to wean them off generous state-backed loans, trim excess capacity, while keeping hundreds of thousands gainfully employed. It remains, nevertheless, one of the biggest users of all sorts of commodities and therefore a key buyer of these from countries across the world. In its quest to ensure stable and steady supplies, it has gone several steps further and bought vast tracts of land on other continents.