Release of text confirms TPP fears

We are now entering a critical stage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) fight. President Obama is planning to sign the trade deal in early 2016, after which Congress will be able to vote on this dangerous trade pact.

 

Hundreds of Sierra Club chapters and volunteers have been working with labor, environment, and human rights allies to educate their communities about the TPP and convince members of Congress to oppose the deal. If you have not been engaged yet, this is the time to join.

Based on our initial analysis of the TPP text, the Sierra Club confirms that the TPP would not only fail to protect our environment, but would threaten our air, water, and climate.

 

The TPP actually takes a step back from the environmental protections of all U.S. free trade agreements (FTAs) since 2007 with respect to multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs). Past deals have required each of our FTA partners to “adopt, maintain, and implement laws, regulations, and all other measures to fulfill its obligations under” seven core MEAs. The TPP, however, only requires countries in the pact to “adopt, maintain, and implement” domestic policies to fulfill one of the seven core MEAs — the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). This regression violates:

 

While the range of conservation issues mentioned in the TPP may be wide, the obligations are generally very shallow. Vague obligations combined with weak enforcement, as described below, may allow countries to continue with business-as-usual practices.

 

Despite the fact that trade can significantly increase climate-disrupting emissions by spurring increased shipping, consumption, and fossil fuel exports, the TPP text fails to even mention the words “climate change” or the UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change — the treaty that all TPP countries are party to.

 

Even if the TPP’s conservation terms included more specific obligations and fewer vague exhortations, there is little evidence they would be enforced. The U.S. has never once brought a trade case against another country for failing to live up to its environmental commitments in trade agreements — even amid documented evidence of countries violating those commitments.
 

For example, the U.S.–Peru FTA, passed in 2007, included a forestry annex that not only required Peru “to combat trade associated with illegal logging,” but included eight pages of specific reforms that Peru had to take to fulfill this requirement. The obligations were far more detailed than any found in the TPP environment chapter, and were subject to the same enforcement mechanism. 

But after more than six years of the U.S.–Peru trade deal, widespread illegal logging remains unchecked in Peru’s Amazon rain forest.

In a 2014 investigation, Peru’s own government found that 78 percent of wood slated for export was harvested illegally.

For years, U.S. environmental groups have asked the U.S. government to use the FTA to counter Peru’s extensive illegal logging. Yet to date, Peru has faced no formal challenges, much less penalties, for violating its trade pact obligations. It is hard to imagine that the TPP’s weaker provisions would be more successful.

 

The TPP would undermine efforts to combat the climate crisis, empowering foreign fossil fuel corporations to challenge our environmental and climate safeguards in unaccountable trade tribunals via the controversial investor-state dispute settlement system.

 

The TPP’s provisions regarding natural gas would require the U.S. Department of Energy to automatically approve all exports of liquefied natural gas (LNG) to all TPP countries–including Japan, the world’s largest LNG importer. This would: