New Sierra Club Report Exposes How Corporations Use Trade Pacts to Undermine Climate Action
iStock/D Pavlish
Sierra Club’s strategic vision for 2030 includes restoring clean air and water, providing affordable clean energy, supporting family-sustaining jobs, and addressing both systemic injustices and inequities in our response to climate disruptions. Reorienting international trade policies represents an important strategy in this transformation.
Trading Away Our Climate: How Corporations Use Trade and Investment Agreements to Undermine Action on Climate Change, highlights how fossil fuel companies worldwide threaten climate progress through outdated trade agreements that favor corporate interests over the public good.
Fossil fuels are responsible for over 75% of greenhouse gas emissions and nearly 90% of all carbon dioxide emissions. The report scrutinizes trade and investment agreements containing investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) provisions as significant obstacles to lowering emissions and achieving a just clean energy transition. Fossil fuel corporations are ardent users of ISDS provisions, with nearly 20% of the 1,206 known treaty-based ISDS arbitrations coming from fossil fuel companies. Trading Away Our Climate argues that eliminating ISDS is crucial to the global goal of limiting warming to well below 2°C, and preferably to 1.5°C, above pre-industrial levels.
Governments can take decisive action to avert catastrophic impacts on vulnerable ecosystems and societies by taking proactive steps in their trade policies to halt fossil fuel company abuse of the ISDS system.
Recognizing the broad dangers of ISDS beyond climate change, including impacts on public health, labor protections, and green jobs policies, the report advocates for the complete elimination of ISDS. It calls on the U.S. government to take the lead in this effort by:
- Stopping the Expansion of ISDS: President Biden and future administrations must publicly oppose ISDS, commit to avoiding new agreements containing ISDS, and use diplomatic influence to discourage other countries from entering into such agreements.
- Removing ISDS from Existing Agreements: The U.S. should terminate bilateral investment treaties (BITs) that include ISDS, neutralize sunset clauses that extend their effects, and renegotiate or withdraw consent to ISDS provisions in existing agreements.
Explore the Report
Contact
For questions about the report, please contact Iliana Paul (iliana.paul@sierraclub.org).