A new report reveals an uncomfortable truth about the countries pressuring President Donald Trump to take climate change more seriously: They’re collectively funneling billions of dollars into propping up oil, gas, and coal. Released by a coalition of advocacy groups led by Oil Change International, the report shows the G20 countries gave an annual average of $71.8 billion to finance fossil fuel projects from 2013-2015, compared with $18.7 billion per year for renewable energy projects. That’s about four times more public financing for fossil fuels than clean energy sources.

Much of this money comes from countries that have explicitly called for more action on climate change. Germany vowed to confront Trump at the G20 over his refusal to work with other countries to fight global warming, but Germany still gives more money to the fossil fuel industry ($3.5 billion) than the renewable industry ($2.4 billion), according to the report.

All this is happening despite G20 countries’ pledge in 2009 to phase out fossil fuel subsidies by 2020. The countries estimated that eliminating subsidies would reduce greenhouse gas emissions worldwide by 10 percent; other groups have predicted much bigger reductions.

Collectively, the G20 countries are spending less on dirty energy subsidies than they used to. In 2009, for instance, it was estimated that the countries spent a combined $300 billion annually. An earlier report led by Oil Change International showed the countries spent a combined $88 billion in 2013 on finding new fossil fuel reserves, while this year’s report says they averaged $13.5 billion from 2013-2015.

Still, the report’s authors say their findings show countries still have a long way to go to put their money where their mouths are. Until they do, Trump has a potent argument to justify his refusal to cooperate with the Paris agreement and other global climate change efforts.

In an op-ed for The New York Times, Bill Clinton’s former pollster promises Democrats the key to victory: a rightward shift. While the debate over what direction Democrats should take will rage all the way to 2020, Penn’s column is notable for its bad faith, its blatant contradictions, and its misreading of liberal politics. It feels like a dispatch from a bizarre parallel universe, where abortion and LGBT rights are not under attack, where a balanced budget is still the apex of “serious” policy thinking, and where America does not suffer from grotesque wealth inequality:

After years of leftward drift by the Democrats culminated in Republican control of the House under Speaker Newt Gingrich, President Bill Clinton moved the party back to the center in 1995 by supporting a balanced budget, welfare reform, a crime bill that called for providing 100,000 new police officers and a step-by-step approach to broadening health care. Mr. Clinton won a resounding re-election victory in 1996 and Democrats were back.

This passage neatly illustrates the dangers of thinking in politics in simple, electoral terms. Penn ignores the real-world outcome here: welfare reform resulted in an increase in deep poverty, and broken-windows policing entrenched institutionalized racism. But Bill Clinton won, so who cares? It also sidesteps the primary reason Gingrich & Co. stormed to power in 1994: Clinton’s aborted attempt to pass a universal health insurance program, which is now a mainstay of the Democratic Party platform.

Penn’s confused thinking is evident elsewhere. Take this passage:

There are plenty of good issues Democrats should be championing. They need to reject socialist ideas and adopt an agenda of renewed growth, greater protection for American workers and a return to fiscal responsibility. While the old brick-and-mortar economy is being regulated to death, the new tech-driven economy has been given a pass to flout labor laws with unregulated, low-paying gig jobs, to concentrate vast profits and to decimate retailing. Rural areas have been left without adequate broadband and with shrinking opportunities. The opioid crisis has spiraled out of control, killing tens of thousands, while pardons have been given to so-called nonviolent drug offenders.

Reject socialist ideas—but protect workers! Protect workers—but stop regulating companies to death! Expand broadband and solve the opioid crisis—but never, never forget fiscal responsibility!

Penn also addresses the party’s approach to the working class. According to Penn, Democrats alienated this group by shifting leftward on trade, immigration, and policing. There is a simple test for determining what is a serious political opinion in 2017 and what is not, and it is this: Does the writer understand that the working class is not all white? In Penn’s case the answer appears to be “no.”

Furthermore, issues like trans rights—Penn singles out the bathroom debate as a culture war flashpoint—aren’t electoral death for Democrats. In North Carolina, Roy Cooper unseated Pat McCrory due largely to McCrory’s unpopular support of the so-called “bathroom bill.”

But Penn is used to being wrong. After working for Bill Clinton, he worked for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign—she lost, of course, to Barack Obama, who ran to her left at the time and is mostly absent from Penn’s version of history, despite uniting the party’s factions and winning the general election twice. (Penn concludes with an ode to “can-do Democrats in the mold of John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton”—not Obama.) He also worked for Tony Blair, that paragon of centrist war-mongering virtue; Blair recently covered himself in glory by calling for a similar return to the center, just before Labour’s unapologetically left-wing manifesto earned it unforeseen success in the U.K.’s snap election.

It is telling—deeply, devastatingly telling—that Penn has apparently learned nothing from his decades in politics. His thoughts are stale; his politics are discredited. The Democratic Party should ignore him for its own benefit—and ours.

On Wednesday night, the New York Times published an article that outlined the ongoing war between Jeff Zucker’s CNN and Trump. The most recent skirmish had come earlier in the day, when CNN faced intense backlash from Trump supporters after the organization published a strangely worded story that made it sound as if CNN was holding a Reddit user’s identity hostage. But the most interesting revelation in the Times piece was that the White House was considering using a pending merger as a cudgel against CNN for its perceived anti-Trump behavior:   

White House advisers have discussed a potential point of leverage over their adversary, a senior administration official said: a pending merger between CNN’s parent company, Time Warner, and AT&T. Mr. Trump’s Justice Department will decide whether to approve the merger, and while analysts say there is little to stop the deal from moving forward, the president’s animus toward CNN remains a wild card.

The merger between AT&T (a giant wireless carrier company) and Time Warner (a giant content provider) has been pending approval by the Justice Department to finally become the giant wireless content provider of their dreams. On the campaign trail, Trump took a populist stance in opposing the merger, stating, “AT&T is buying Time Warner and thus CNN, a deal we will not approve in my administration because it’s too much concentration of power in the hands of too few.” But he was much more tempered on the issue when he spoke to Axios right before the inauguration. 

Of course, what Trump has promised in the past is completely worthless for predicting what he might do in the future. And his increased hostility towards CNN has been looming over the deal for months. Just last week, the New York Post reported that because of a number of highly publicized controversies, AT&T was potentially looking to “neutralize” Jeff Zucker after the deal went through. Another strategy to allay Trump could be for AT&T to throw CNN under the bus: 

“The news business doesn’t seem to be central to AT&T’s content strategy,” said Craig Moffett, a co-founder of independent media research firm MoffettNathanson. “They seem much more interested in the entertainment brands. If selling CNN would make regulators happy, they’ll sell it. I can’t imagine AT&T would let CNN stand in the way of securing approval for the merger.”

The deal itself is bad news for anti-trust advocates. A group of Senate Democrats led by Al Franken recently sent a letter to the Justice Department calling on it to reject the merger if the department found that it led to “higher prices, fewer choices, and poorer quality services for Americans.” But, if the Department of Justice scuttles the deal because of Trump’s personal beef with CNN, or if the White House uses the merger to force CNN to play nice, that comes with its own set of troubling implications.  

When Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi visited the White House, Trump made no mention of the fact that thousands of dissidents are being held in Egyptian jails. When he visited Saudi Arabia, he did a sword dance, but broke from longstanding tradition by not mentioning the country’s numerous human rights abuses. Instead, he emphasized a shared mission against terrorism, which he depicted as a “battle between good and evil.” Trump has been reluctant to present the U.S. as a beacon for freedom or liberty or human rights, but he has made the case that it is the leader in a fight against evil.

On his current foreign trip, Trump has broadened this fight to a civilizational scale. In a speech in Poland today, he asserted that the U.S. is not withdrawing from the world while calling on European allies to increase their commitment to fighting terrorism. In doing so, he pitched the fight against extremism as a war for the survival of Western civilization and its allies.

The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive.... Our own fight for the West does not begin on the battlefield—it begins with our minds, our wills, and our souls.... Americans, Poles, and the nations of Europe value individual freedom and sovereignty. We must work together to counter forces, whether they come from inside or out, from the South or the East, that threaten over time to undermine these values and to erase the bonds of culture, faith, and tradition that make us who we are.

This is a radical simplification of the kinds of arguments that have been made in defense of the War on Terror. Trump is pitching the fight as a war between differing cultures, rather than between differing values. This has always been the subtext of many of these arguments. True to form, Trump is making that subtext into text.

Sater, the Russian-born wheeler-dealer who once served time for stabbing the face of a fellow businessman with broken glass, sits at the crossroads that connect the president’s business dealings with Russia and the former Soviet Union. Over the years, Sater has helped channel millions of dollars from Eastern bloc oligarchs into Trump-branded real estate deals.

The Financial Times reports Sater is cooperating with an international investigation into money-laundering by Kazakh oligarchs:

Mr. Sater has now agreed to co-operate with an international investigation into the alleged money-laundering network, five people with knowledge of the matter said....In Kazakhstan as in other former Soviet states, Mr Trump’s sprawling business interests threaten to impinge on the president as he manages American foreign policy commitments in the region.

While the focus of this investigation is Kazahk money-laundering and not specifically Trump or Sater, the president has reason to worry about this latest news.

Sater has a history of saving himself from criminal prosecution by betraying associates. In the late 1990s, he avoided serving more jail time by providing information on Russian organized crime to the FBI and CIA. Andrew Weissmann, the prosecutor who negotiated the plea deal with Sater in 1998, has been hired by Robert Mueller to be part of the special counsel’s probe into the president.

The president left Washington, D.C., for Poland on Wednesday for the annual G-20 summit. This year’s theme is “sustainability,” so, naturally, Trump is expected to be grilled over his controversial decision to leave the Paris climate agreement.

World leaders do not appear to be taking the U.S. decision lightly. Last week, Newsweek reported that German chancellor Angela Merkel “vowed confrontation” with Trump at the G-20 over his refusal to work with other countries to fight global warming. “The differences are obvious and it would be dishonest to try to cover that up. That I won’t do,” she said.

Though the U.S. has contributed more to global warming than any other country, Trump—though his decision to withdraw from the Paris agreement, and his domestic energy agenda—has isolated the U.S. as the only major country not promising to do anything about it. As such, Merkel is emerging as Trump’s most outspoken critic in the international community. Last week, she shamed him for not accepting the science behind the threat. “We can’t wait for the last man on Earth to be convinced by the scientific evidence for climate change,” she said. Trump also spoke with Merkel about “climate issues” over the phone on Monday, according to a White House press release.

Other countries have been speaking out against the president in their own ways. Following Trump’s decision to abandon the Paris agreement, French President Emmanuel Macron offered American climate scientists grant money to come to France, using the cheeky slogan: “Make Our Planet Great Again.” And in a newspaper editorial this week, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe called on countries to work together on climate change, implicitly calling out the United States.

Three weeks before taking office, Donald Trump issued a stark warning to North Korea:

Trump has largely stuck to this tough-guy approach. He has threatened China with tariffs if it doesn’t keep its belligerent client-state in check, and has said that if China won’t stop North Korea then the United States will be forced to act unilaterally.

There was a brief pause in this policy after Trump met Chinese President Xi Jinping. “After listening for ten minutes, I realized that it’s not so easy,” Trump said about China’s complicated relationship with North Korea. But since then, Trump has repeatedly responded to North Korean missile tests with saber-rattling, apparently convinced that the threat of a U.S. strike—which is clearly a bluff—would stop North Korea’s missile program in its tracks.

Then on Monday evening North Korea launched a missile capable of reaching Alaska. In response, Trump has stuck to the same flawed approach:

The problem with this strategy isn’t just that it isn’t working, it’s that it has made things worse. Trump’s belligerence has boxed North Korea in—if it were to stop testing intercontinental ballistic missiles now, it would look like it was giving in to Trump’s bluffs. Trump has almost no good options, but he is proving that it is still possible to make a bad situation even worse.