January 19, 2016
Message from the Chair
by Carl Arnold
by Carl Arnold
At the time of this writing, it’s been a rather extraordinary week.- Obama nixed the Keystone XL pipeline.
- Cuomo vetoed the Port Ambrose LNG project, upping the ante from his December 17 frack drilling prohibition.
- The New York Department of State refused Entergy the certificate required for future use of the Hudson River for Indian Point.
- NYS Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is suing Exxon for its records to explain its deep well of deception since the late ’70s.
- On the West Coast, the Portland, Oregon, City Council just passed a resolution — unanimously — opposing all new fossil fuel infrastructure.
Of course, the issues the Chapter continues to work on are vital, such as water, natural gas pipelines, and bomb trains — and all their accompanying infrastructure.
What we all must remember, however, is a looming threat that could jeopardize everything we do. The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) will be voted on in Congress, possibly in January. The documents from years of secret negotiations have finally been made public. (See article here.) While there are many sources that describe the details of how bad it is, for me one area stands out: any dispute under TPP will be adjudicated by a secret tribunal. A law passed by a national legislature can be overturned if deemed to diminish the plaintiff’s profits.
This has already happened under NAFTA. The TPP accentuates this nakedly corporate control, as will the TTIP (Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership) and TAFTA (Trans-Atlantic Free Trade Agreement).
Which means that any law regarding health, labor, the environment — passed by Congress, the Japanese National Diet, various parliaments — will be out of our hands. It is nothing less than a direct assault on democracy.
Which means that our attention must focus on our representatives in Congress to defeat this monstrous power grab. For more on the Club’s position, see what Ilana Solomon, director of the Club’s Responsible Trade Program, has said.
Our movement must rise to another level of energy and commitment in the coming months. As Bill McKibben says at Op-ed News.com, “Don’t expect President Obama (or President Clinton) to be out in the lead, and don’t expect Congress to do a damn thing [unless we push them]… The job of movements is to keep brewing up the gale-force winds that shifted our political landscape last week — and to hope we can do it before hurricane-force winds, drought, flood and sea level rise shift our landscape.”
The title of his article says it: We Must Keep Brewing Gale-Force Winds to Shift the Political Landscape. Our survival depends on it.