Trump Canceled Canada's 61-Year Old Colulmbia River Water Treaty -- 40% of U.S. Hydropower at Risk

[Cirsium]

58. Ridiculous clickbait

The title for the video is itself a lie. "Trump Canceled Canada's 61-Year Water Treaty — 40% of U.S. Hydropower at Risk!" No, he did not. Donald Trump did not "just walk away from a 61-year-old treaty that quietly powers nearly 40 percent of America's hydroelectricity." The treaty is still in effect. 40% of U.S. hydropower is not at risk, unless Canada turned off that imaginary faucet they have. You know, the one that Trump talks about. Absolutely absurd.

The entire opening of the video is completely irrelevant nonsense. The video is supposedly about the Columbia River. The reporters are talking about water quality in the Great Lakes. At one point, the narrator is talking about the massive amount of tonnage that goes down the Columbia River, while the image is of a container ship going under the Golden Gate Bridge. Completely unrelated clips of Trump are thrown in here and there.

The random stock footage clips, often completely unrelated to the narrative, are pretty hilarious. The whole mess had to have been generated by AI.

Then we are treated to a long segment telling us how expensive it would be and how long it would take to build the power infrastructure necessary to replace that generated by the Columbia river. If what? If the Columbia river disappeared? Hard to say.

The suddenly we are talking about Taiwan. Who knows why? "Trump was in Beijing, sitting across from Xi Jinping, trying to manage another situation where America's economic power depends on systems it doesn't fully control. She reportedly warned Trump directly that mishandling Taiwan could push the relationship between the two countries into what he described as an extremely dangerous place."

Next, this howler: "And it lands harder when you remember that Taiwan produces the advanced semiconductors that run everything from American military hardware to artificial intelligence data centers. Data centers, by the way, that need enormous amounts of electricity. Electricity that in the Pacific Northwest comes from a river system Canada now controls more firmly than at any point in the last 20 years." Huh? Canada does not have firmer control than it did before.

Ten this: "There's also a domestic angle nobody wants to talk about. The Pacific Northwest has been a democratic leaning region for decades. Oregon and Washington reliably vote blue. The governors of both states have already started warning that federal policy is putting their economies at risk. If electricity rates spike, if industrial customers start losing reliability, if Bonneville has to renegotiate contracts under worse terms, the political backlash inside the United States will hit hardest in regions Trump didn't win anyway."

This segment says nothing:

"I want to be clear about something. This isn't a story about whether Trump was right or wrong to renegotiate the treaty. There are legitimate arguments that the Canadian entitlement should have been adjusted. There are legitimate arguments that aspects of the 1964 framework didn't account for modern climate realities. Reasonable people on both sides of the border believed modernization was overdue. The problem isn't that Washington wanted a new deal. The problem is that Washington walked away from the negotiating table thinking Canada would chase after them. Canada didn't, and now America is stuck with the old version of a treaty."