NEW DELHI: India’s capital New Delhi was enveloped in heavy, toxic smog Sunday — the worst levels in recent years — with flights diverted or delayed as politicians blamed each other for failing to tackle the crisis.
Every winter, the megacity of 20 million people is blanketed by a poisonous smog of car fumes, industrial emissions and smoke from stubble burning at farms in neighboring states.
Concentrations of particles measuring less than 2.5 microns hit the highest level of this season, exacerbated by light rains late Saturday, India’s state-run System of Air Quality Weather Forecasting and Research (SAFAR) said.
The reading for pollutants in the atmosphere hit 810 micrograms per cubic meter Sunday morning, beyond the “hazardous” zone according to the US embassy in Delhi, which independently monitors pollution levels.
The recommended World Health Organization safe daily maximum is 25.
“Pollution has reached unbearable levels,” Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal tweeted Sunday.
Visibility was so poor that major carriers Air India and Vistara said Sunday flights were being delayed or diverted to and from Delhi’s airports.
Some cricket players and coaches have also been training in masks ahead of the Twenty20 international between Bangladesh and India later Sunday.
“It’s actually scary — you can’t see things in front of you,” protester Jaivipra said at a rally in Delhi on Sunday calling for politicians to do more to curb pollution.
Nurses at the demonstration said they were seeing more people suffering from respiratory problems.
“Patients are coming with more lung and respiratory diseases, like more (are) affected with asthma,” Reshma C.M. said.
The conditions sparked a blame game between state and federal politicians over who was responsible for the conditions, which authorities said Friday reached “emergency” levels.
In a tweet last week, Kejriwal called on the state governments of neighboring Punjab and Haryana to take action.
“Delhi has turned into a gas chamber due to smoke from crop burning in neighboring states,” he tweeted.
Federal Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar accused Kejriwal of politicizing the issue and presenting the two states “in a bad light and as villains.”
Schools in Delhi have already been ordered closed until Tuesday, and construction halted From Monday there will be an odd/even car license plate scheme to cut traffic.
Global non-profit Vital Strategies’ senior vice president for environmental health, Daniel Kass, said while temporary curbs were helpful, they had limited impact over time.
“They are insufficient to address the most important aspect of air pollution, which is what people live with day-to-day,” Kass said.
He said a range of measures needed to be imposed at local and national levels for air quality to improve.
Apart from changing agricultural practices, he said the measures should include more public transport investment, emission controls on two-wheelers, switching electricity generation sources, and accelerating the conversion of home-heating from charcoal to natural gas.
Last year, a UN report found 14 of the world’s 15 most polluted cities were in India, with one US study saying it kills a million people prematurely every year.
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Indian capital Delhi gasps under choking smog
Indian capital Delhi gasps under choking smog
- Every winter, the megacity of 20 million people is blanketed by a poisonous smog
- The reading for pollutants in the atmosphere hit 810 micrograms per cubic meter Sunday morning
Trump’s new tariffs shift focus to balance of payments; economists see no crisis
President Donald Trump’s temporary 15 percent tariffs to replace those struck down by the US Supreme Court are meant to resolve a problem that many economists say does not exist: a US balance of payments crisis, making them potentially vulnerable to new legal challenges.
Hours after the high court on Friday struck down a huge swath of tariffs Trump had imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, the president announced the new duties under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 — a never-used statute that even his own legal team dismissed as irrelevant months ago.
Collections of the new 15 percent tariffs began at midnight on Tuesday as IEEPA tariff collections of 10 percent to 50 percent halted.
The Section 122 law allows the president to impose duties of up to 15 percent for up to 150 days on any and all countries to address “large and serious” balance-of-payments deficits and “fundamental international payments problems.”
Trump’s tariff order argued that a serious balance of payments deficit existed in the form of a $1.2 trillion annual US goods trade deficit and a current account deficit of 4 percent of GDP and a reversal of the US primary income surplus.
Some economists, including former International Monetary Fund First Deputy Managing Director Gita Gopinath, disagreed with the Trump administration’s alarm.
“We can all agree that the US is not facing a balance of payment crisis, which is when countries experience an exorbitant increase in international borrowing costs and lose access to financial markets,” Gopinath told Reuters.
Gopinath rejected the White House’s claim that a negative balance on the US primary income for the first time since 1960 was evidence of a large and serious balance of payment problem.
She attributed the negative balance to a large increase in foreign purchases of US equities and risky assets over the past decade, which outperformed foreign equities over this period.
Mark Sobel, a former US Treasury and IMF official, said that balance of payments crises are more associated with countries that have fixed exchange rates, and noted that the floating-rate dollar has been steady, the 10-year Treasury yield fairly stable, with US stocks performing well.
Josh Lipsky, chair of international economics at the Atlantic Council think tank, agreed, noting that a balance of payments crisis occurred when a country could not pay for what it was importing or was unable to service foreign debt. That was fundamentally different from a trade deficit, he added.
Brad Setser, a currency and trade expert at the Council on Foreign Relations who served as a senior adviser to the US Trade Representative in the Biden administration, took a somewhat contrarian view, arguing in lengthy X posts on Sunday that the Trump administration may have a reasonable case that there is a “large and serious” balance of payments deficit.
He noted that the current account deficit was far higher than when then-president Richard Nixon erected tariffs in 1971 to address a balance of payments crisis, and the US net international investment position is much worse. This “gives the administration a real argument,” in favor of its tariffs, Setser wrote.
The White House, US Treasury and US Trade Representative did not immediately respond to requests for comment about the use of Section 122.
WRONG STATUTE FOR THE JOB
Despite the Trump administration’s new focus on balance of payments, the Justice Department had previously argued that Section 122 was the wrong statute to handle a national emergency over the trade deficit.
In court filings in its defense of IEEPA tariffs, the Justice Department said Section 122 would not have “any obvious application here, where the concerns the president identified in declaring an emergency arise from trade deficits, which are conceptually distinct from balance-of-payments deficits.”
Neal Katyal, who argued at the Supreme Court on behalf of plaintiffs challenging the IEEPA tariffs, told CNBC that the Trump administration’s stance against the use of Section 122 for a trade deficit will make those tariffs vulnerable to litigation.
“I’m not sure it will necessarily even need to get to the Supreme Court, but if the president adheres to this plan of using a statute that his own Justice Department has said he can’t use, yeah, I think that’s a pretty easy thing to litigate,” Katyal said.
It is unclear who might take the lead in challenging the Section 122 tariffs.
Sara Albrecht, chair of the Liberty Justice Center, a nonprofit, public-interest law firm representing several small businesses that challenged the IEEPA tariffs, said the group would closely monitor any new statutes being invoked.
Albrecht did not reveal any future litigation strategy, adding: “Our immediate focus is simple: making sure the refund process begins and that checks start flowing to the American businesses that paid those unconstitutional duties.”
In its ruling, the Supreme Court did not give instructions regarding refunds, instead remanding the case to a lower trade court to determine next steps.
Hours after the high court on Friday struck down a huge swath of tariffs Trump had imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, the president announced the new duties under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 — a never-used statute that even his own legal team dismissed as irrelevant months ago.
Collections of the new 15 percent tariffs began at midnight on Tuesday as IEEPA tariff collections of 10 percent to 50 percent halted.
The Section 122 law allows the president to impose duties of up to 15 percent for up to 150 days on any and all countries to address “large and serious” balance-of-payments deficits and “fundamental international payments problems.”
Trump’s tariff order argued that a serious balance of payments deficit existed in the form of a $1.2 trillion annual US goods trade deficit and a current account deficit of 4 percent of GDP and a reversal of the US primary income surplus.
Some economists, including former International Monetary Fund First Deputy Managing Director Gita Gopinath, disagreed with the Trump administration’s alarm.
“We can all agree that the US is not facing a balance of payment crisis, which is when countries experience an exorbitant increase in international borrowing costs and lose access to financial markets,” Gopinath told Reuters.
Gopinath rejected the White House’s claim that a negative balance on the US primary income for the first time since 1960 was evidence of a large and serious balance of payment problem.
She attributed the negative balance to a large increase in foreign purchases of US equities and risky assets over the past decade, which outperformed foreign equities over this period.
Mark Sobel, a former US Treasury and IMF official, said that balance of payments crises are more associated with countries that have fixed exchange rates, and noted that the floating-rate dollar has been steady, the 10-year Treasury yield fairly stable, with US stocks performing well.
Josh Lipsky, chair of international economics at the Atlantic Council think tank, agreed, noting that a balance of payments crisis occurred when a country could not pay for what it was importing or was unable to service foreign debt. That was fundamentally different from a trade deficit, he added.
Brad Setser, a currency and trade expert at the Council on Foreign Relations who served as a senior adviser to the US Trade Representative in the Biden administration, took a somewhat contrarian view, arguing in lengthy X posts on Sunday that the Trump administration may have a reasonable case that there is a “large and serious” balance of payments deficit.
He noted that the current account deficit was far higher than when then-president Richard Nixon erected tariffs in 1971 to address a balance of payments crisis, and the US net international investment position is much worse. This “gives the administration a real argument,” in favor of its tariffs, Setser wrote.
The White House, US Treasury and US Trade Representative did not immediately respond to requests for comment about the use of Section 122.
WRONG STATUTE FOR THE JOB
Despite the Trump administration’s new focus on balance of payments, the Justice Department had previously argued that Section 122 was the wrong statute to handle a national emergency over the trade deficit.
In court filings in its defense of IEEPA tariffs, the Justice Department said Section 122 would not have “any obvious application here, where the concerns the president identified in declaring an emergency arise from trade deficits, which are conceptually distinct from balance-of-payments deficits.”
Neal Katyal, who argued at the Supreme Court on behalf of plaintiffs challenging the IEEPA tariffs, told CNBC that the Trump administration’s stance against the use of Section 122 for a trade deficit will make those tariffs vulnerable to litigation.
“I’m not sure it will necessarily even need to get to the Supreme Court, but if the president adheres to this plan of using a statute that his own Justice Department has said he can’t use, yeah, I think that’s a pretty easy thing to litigate,” Katyal said.
It is unclear who might take the lead in challenging the Section 122 tariffs.
Sara Albrecht, chair of the Liberty Justice Center, a nonprofit, public-interest law firm representing several small businesses that challenged the IEEPA tariffs, said the group would closely monitor any new statutes being invoked.
Albrecht did not reveal any future litigation strategy, adding: “Our immediate focus is simple: making sure the refund process begins and that checks start flowing to the American businesses that paid those unconstitutional duties.”
In its ruling, the Supreme Court did not give instructions regarding refunds, instead remanding the case to a lower trade court to determine next steps.
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