Tpp will pass during the lame duck
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AT: Warming ImpactTPP doesn’t solve warming—provisions are weak and negative effects balance out the benefits Solomon 15-[Ilana Solomon, Ilana Solomon, 5-15-2015, "," Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ilana-solomon/the-trans-pacific-partnership-would-harm-our-environment_b_7292884.html 5-15-2015, "," Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ilana-solomon/the-trans-pacific-partnership-would-harm-our-environment_b_7292884.html] [MB] Proponents of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) have called the deal “the most progressive trade bill in history.” But given the history of U.S. trade deals, that bar is set exceedingly low. Our past trade deals have led to the offshoring of hundreds of thousands of American jobs, have allowed corporations to challenge policies designed to protect our air and water in private trade courts, and have degraded our environment. If you dig in even a little bit to what we know about the TPP and the history of past trade deals, it’s clear: The TPP would harm our air, water and climate. Here’s why. 1. The environment chapter will not go far enough. Proponents of the TPP often talk about the benefits of the pact based exclusively on the environment chapter. However, as House Ways and Means Ranking Democrat Sandy Levin (D-MI) recently wrote, while the environment chapter will cover a broad range of issues, including shark finning and illegal timber trade, the obligations — what countries are actually required to do — are often weak. For example, rather than prohibiting commercial whaling and shark fin trade — major issues in TPP countries like Japan and Singapore — the TPP is likely to include vague and toothless language that stops far short of requiring countries to stop these harmful practices. The deal will also likely fall short of prohibiting trade in illegally taken timber and wildlife and will not even mention the words “climate change.” 2. The environment chapter is unlikely to be enforced. Here is another reason to be skeptical that the environment chapter will lead to any meaningful protection of land, air, water, and wildlife. The United States Trade Representative (USTR) has never once brought a trade dispute against another country for failing to live up to its environmental obligations in trade deals, even when there is documented evidence of non-compliance with environmental safeguards. Let’s take Peru, for example. The United States-Peru free trade deal included a section aimed at stopping the illegal timber trade between Peru and the United States. Think it has worked? Think again. Here’s the story. In April 2012, the Environmental Investigation Agency published amulti-year investigative report which documented that at least 112 illegal shipments of cedar and mahogany wood — laundered with fabricated papers and approved by the Peruvian government — arrived in the U.S. between 2008 and 2010. As EIA noted, these shipments alone accounted for over 35 percent of all trade in these protected species between the U.S. and Peru. Just days after the report was released, EIA formally petitioned the USTR to take action under the U.S.-Peru trade deal and investigate and verify the legal origin of shipments from at least two Peruvian companies and to audit dozens more. The Sierra Club and other environmental, labor and industry partners sent a letter to the USTR joining the call for action. The result? Not much of anything. The USTR never used the tools available in the trade pact to hold Peru accountable for violating the agreement. Instead, it put together a five-point action plan which simply reiterated obligations that Peru undertook in the trade deal — obligations which Peru consistently failed to implement. In other words, Peru’s punishment for violating the trade deal was having the deal they signed read back to them. That’s not even a slap on the wrists — it’s a whisper in the ear. To date, no one has been held accountable for these violations of the U.S.-Peru trade deal and no enforcement action has been taken. As a result, illegal logging and associated trade continues to threaten communities and our environment. As the New York Times reported in late 2013, “But large quantities of timber, including increasingly rare types like mahogany, continue to flow out [of Peru], much of it ultimately heading to the United States for products like hardwood flooring and decking sold by American retailers.” So the story here is clear. Having obligations on paper is one thing, but without enforcement, those obligations are meaningless. It’s hard to believe the proponents of the TPP who say the deal will raise up environmental standards if even the clearest of violations of environmental rules in past trade deals continue to go unpunished. 3. New rights to big polluters, more fossil fuel exports. Here is the last key point. Any potential benefits of the environment chapter would be overwhelmed by other dangerous provisions of the deal. For example, corporations including ExxonMobil, Chevron and Occidental have used rules in the investment chapters of trade pacts and bilateral investment treaties to bring more than 600 investor-state cases against nearly 100 governments. More and more, these cases are directly challenging policies designed to protect our air, water, and climate including a moratorium on fracking in Quebec, a nuclear energy phase-out and new coal-fired power plant standards in Germany, andrequirement for a pollution clean-up in Peru. And corporations are winning. In March 2015, a NAFTA tribunal found that Canada violated NAFTA’s investment rules because of an environmental impact assessment that led Canada to reject a U.S. company’s controversial mining project from moving forward in an important cultural and ecological area in Nova Scotia. The TPP would expand this harmful system of corporate privilege, offering broad new rights to thousands of corporations, including major polluters, when we should be reigning in the power of the fossil fuel industry to combat the climate crisis. JX Nippon Oil & Energy Corporation from Japan and BHP Billiton Limited from Australia, both with significant investments in coal, oil, and gas in the United States, are just two of the 9,000 subsidiaries of companies that would be newly empowered to challenge U.S. climate and energy policies as a result of the TPP. (And, more than 19,000 subsidiaries based in the United States would be newly empowered to challenge the laws and policies of the other 11 countries in the pact.) And there’s more. The TPP would also require the U.S. Department of Energy to automatically approve exports of liquefied natural gas to countries in the agreement which includes Japan, the world’s biggest natural gas importer. The TPP, therefore, would pave the way to more natural gas exports, more fracking, and more climate-disrupting emissions. Does this sound like a progressive trade deal? Hardly. The Trans-Pacific Partnership is shaping up to be all risk and no reward for our families, our economy, and our planet. It’s time to create a new model of trade that puts communities and the environment above corporate profits. TPP not key to the global trade of renewables necessary to solve warmingEdwards 14 (Len, Analyst @ Gowling Lafleur Henderson LLP, "Trade mega-deals and the WTO," 10/22/14http://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=96df3a91-9383-4f20-a638-42dc9b66a56e) The first is that the TPP and TTIP deals are by no means assured. Although the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations have made significant progress, they have missed deadline after deadline. The addition in mid-2013 of Japan has further complicated matters. The TPP is now essentially the framework for a huge bilateral deal between the 1st and 3rd largest global economies. And in late September, the latest USA/Japan talks ended with a Japanese walkout. Every passing day diminishes the chances of the TPP being concluded before presidential election politics take over the USA agenda at the end of 2015. Even if there were a breakthrough between Japan and the USA in the coming months, the lack of congressional “fast track” authority (which gives the Administration authority to negotiate a deal subject to a single yes/no vote by Congress) and the uncertainties of American domestic politics together constitute a serious hurdle. Why would America’s trading partners in the TPP make important final concessions without knowing that Congress will not take the deal apart clause by clause and impose additional demands as the price of its approval? Meanwhile the USA/EU negotiations are just getting underway. The size and complexity of this negotiation are enormous. If you add America’s political situation to Europe’s preoccupations with its flagging economy, the arrival of a new Commission leadership in Brussels, and the internal power jockeying among the Commission, member states and the European Parliament, it’s hard not to imagine that this “mega-deal” could be “mega-years” in the making. And Russian aggressiveness in Eastern Europe has become a major political/security distraction. Second, even if these strong head winds do not stall or blow off course the TPP and TTIP negotiations in the medium term (the TTIP would sit alongside the now complete Canada-Europe Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement or CETA), these “mega-deals” are still not likely to become game changers. While the TPP and TTIP together include 40 countries representing about 60% of the global economy, they still leave a significant 40% of world economic activity and 119 members of the WTO on sidelines. In the days when the “Quad” (USA, Europe, Japan and Canada) dominated world trade and largely determined the course of multilateral trade negotiations, these two proposed mega-deals could have been decisive in determining the future direction of the trading system. But as we have seen in the Doha Round, the rise of new economic players, the shift in global economic power, and a feistier developing world generally, have forever changed this dynamic. In this respect, neither the TPP nor the TTIP include Brazil, India or most importantly China. Mexico’s presence at the TPP table is the one exception to the inclusion of a major emerging market. Measured in nominal GDP, Brazil, India and China are predicted to be the world’s 4th, 3rd and largest economies respectively by mid-century, with China achieving number 1 status before 2030. By 2050, today’s emerging economies generally are expected to account for up to 70% of global trade. Unless these three emerging economies in particular are engaged by the USA, Europe, Japan and Canada in these or other new mega-arrangements, it is very doubtful that the TPP and TTIP alone will have the critical weight to transform the international trading system’s rules and set the new standard for global trade governance. They will have an impact, certainly, but it will not be decisive. AT: Asia Stability ImpactTPP doesn’t solve Asia stability Drysdale, 11 [Peter, editor, East Asia Forum. "Are there real dangers in the Trans Pacific Partnership idea?". http://www.eastasiaforum.org/2011/04/18/are-there-real-dangers-in-the-trans-pacific-partnership-idea/] The TPP is supposed to weld the Asia Pacific region together. It is supposed to deal with ‘behind-the-border’ regulatory (21st century) issues that other preferential trade agreements don’t deal with. Without careful consideration, design and a manageable framework, it will likely do the reverse, excluding key partners and making it difficult for those excluded to join. And, despite the rhetoric, the only ‘behind-the border’ issues on which US negotiators are mandated to focus are ‘labour laws,’ ‘environmental laws’ and ‘intellectual property rights.’ Those are not priority issues for making markets more contestable and efficient. As Shiro Armstrong says in this week’s lead essay, ‘the risks of a quick deal on the TPP — one that is full of exceptions, allows continued protection of sensitive sectors, and excludes ready accession by others — go well beyond getting just another ineffective trade agreement.’ We’ve had a lot of them in the last decade or two but they don’t matter in the same way as this one will if it is forged on the wrong terms. What are the risks?
As Armstrong argues: ‘a quick agreement with exemptions and exclusions will mean accession for future members will have to be negotiated separately with each member. That is a laborious and counterproductive process, which will likely build layer upon layer of further exclusions, exemptions and protection. It will leave power of veto for economic, political and whatever reasons with individual original signatories.’ A TPP of that kind will essentially be a series of bilateral agreements (in Australia’s case hardly different from what is already in place with the other partners) cobbled together around the United States. There will be little liberalisation of sensitive markets, and certainly no give by the United States on its cosseted agricultural sectors. If Japan eventually joined in — an outcome that looks less and less likely day by day — some concessions may be forced by America on agriculture. And there will be no easy expansion of the arrangement to encompass the broader region, importantly China and India. It was never likely that the US would give its individual power of veto away in any event. And yet, with the WTO’s Doha Round still heading towards the rocks, there will be powerful momentum to doing a deal of some kind no matter what. And the structure of the new US Congress means the ‘free trade’ brand is no longer on the nose in Washington, no matter what the label really covers. If there is some kind of agreement on offer however bad, the smaller partners will find it difficult to refuse, not for any good economic reason, but for political reasons. So what’s the problem? Does it matter if we get yet another pseudo ‘free trade’ agreement, between the US and group of eight partners who in the total scheme of things are pretty insignificant? It would be more significant, of course, if Japan and Korea signed on, however little that improved the quality of the agreement. It certainly would matter. A rum deal like this would be of little economic consequence but it would be of considerable political consequence. It would drive a wedge down the middle of the Pacific, not only or mainly economically but also politically — between the United States, its partners and China. It would entrench the adversarial political psychology that is developing in US-China relations in a way that would be very difficult to unravel for a long time. That might matter less if the WTO was not also in disarray. It matters a lot, as that prospect grows daily. Directory: file -> view view -> Western Europe after wwii view -> Author study: paul fleischman view -> Qpa1 7ela study Guide view -> Arctic Oil/Gas Neg view -> November 1970 Approximately 150,000-500,000 deaths Bhola Cyclone Bangladesh view -> Grade Level: 6 Unit of Study: Caribbean glce view -> Citation: Duffield, Katy view -> Table of Contents Lesson # view -> Chinese Wind Energy Disad Download 499.68 Kb. Share with your friends:
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