The Sierra Club released a report Wednesday concluding that President Barack Obama's landmark Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal would increase greenhouse gas emissions and significantly undermine efforts to fight climate change.
The TPP - a 6,000-page trade, investment and regulatory deal reached between the U.S. and 11 other Pacific Rim nations in October - doesn't mention the words "climate change," which The Sierra Club says is "a clear sign it is not 'a 21st-century trade agreement,' as some have claimed."
"Beyond making no effort to combat climate disruption, the TPP would actually fuel the climate crisis. If approved, the pact would increase greenhouse gas emissions and undermine efforts to transition to clean energy," the report says.
The Sierra Club contends that the TPP would give fossil fuel corporations expansive new rights to challenge climate protection policies in unaccountable private trade tribunals.
"These challenges would be brought before trade tribunals, comprised of three private lawyers who could order governments to pay fossil fuel firms for the profits they hypothetically would have earned if the climate protections being challenged had not been enacted," the report says.
The Sierra Club said the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative has inserted safeguards into the TPP's investment chapter, but "an analysis of the final text reveals that these so-called safeguards, many of which are not new, are far too weak to protect climate and environmental policies challenged by corporations in private tribunals." Further, the Obama administration has never effectively enforced environmental standards in trade deals, according to The Huffington Post.
The trade deal would also increase climate-disrupting emissions by shifting U.S. manufacturing overseas, where production is up to four times more carbon-intensive than U.S. production.
Shifting manufacturing from the U.S. to other countries on the other side of the Pacific Ocean would increase shipping-related greenhouse gas emissions as well, "which are projected to increase by up to 250 percent by 2050 as demand for traded goods rises," Sierra Club said.
The TPP would also increase industrial agriculture and animal production - two major emitters of greenhouse gases, reported The Washington Post.
"These agreements are really locking us into dependence on fossil fuels, when we need to be fully ramping up to 100 percent clean energy, and leaving the vast majority of fossil fuels in the ground," said Ilana Solomon, director of the Sierra Club's responsible trade program.
The trade deal won't be voted on by Congress until at least spring 2016, but environmental groups are gearing up to use the ongoing Paris climate talks as a platform to aggressively lobby against the TPP by arguing that it would undercut climate goals. World leaders hope to reach an internationally binding agreement at the summit to prevent global temperatures from rising more than two degrees Celsius, in order to prevent catastrophic climate change.
"Right now the world's eyes are on Paris for many reasons," said Solomon. "We have such an opportunity to create an outcome that sets us on a path to limiting global temperature rise and supporting countries vulnerable to climate impact. At the same time, Congress and parliaments in other countries are beginning to consider a sweeping set of trade rules that could directly undermine the environmental goals of climate agreements countries are seeking in Paris."
