In the latest sign that the White House intends to use trade policy to fill the pockets of corporate polluters, Donald Trump has pushed the theme of American energy “dominance” via a massive build out of fossil fuels exports. The fight to replace the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is more urgent than ever, not only for clean air, water, climate, and jobs, but also for healthy communities everywhere, working people across borders, and environmental justice for all.
A couple weeks ago, we described four ways that Trump could make NAFTA worse. Indeed, it has become increasingly clear that Trump is barreling down on a self-serving corporate agenda written by Big Oil and Wall Street. In fact, just days after the American Petroleum Institute (API) submitted its own recommendations to preserve and expand North America’s fossil fuel dependency, Energy Secretary Rick Perry (a former board member of Energy Transfers Partners, the builder of four gas pipelines along US-Mexico border), reiterated API’s push to use NAFTA as a means for creating a “North American energy strategy” chained to the fossil fuel past.
Fossil fuel executives are so confident in their ties to the Trump Administration that Steven Pruett, chief executive of Eleven Resources, a Texas oil and gas company, openly spoke of how his NAFTA strategy is to simply “reach out to our own Texan, Rick Perry, and bend his ear.” It appears that Trump can rail against NAFTA all he likes from the teleprompter until he hears how much profit he can make for his oil industry friends. Rather than undermining the real clean energy revolution driving job growth nationwide, we demand a new approach to trade that supports the people and the planet.
NAFTA has already profited Chevron and Exxon Mobil at too great a cost to the rest of us. If we are going to have any chance at building the future we need, we will need all hands on deck to stop Trump Trade. We can’t afford a NAFTA 2.0 that builds pipelines across a racist border wall, threatens more of our public and ancestral lands and waters with extraction, and abandons a just transition to a stable climate and a new economy that works for all of us.
We are the movement that defeated the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and we are many. The Sierra Club and our allies and supporters just submitted over 50,000 comments calling for the elimination of the investor-state dispute settlement system (ISDS), protecting buy local and buy green procurement policies, and implementing strong and enforceable environmental and labor standards. We’ll know by July 17th the full extent of Trump’s priorities before negotiations begin in late August, which means now is the critical moment to define our new shared vision for trade justice. I believe that we will win - but only if you join us and take action today.