{"id":20619,"date":"2016-05-14T11:38:22","date_gmt":"2016-05-14T16:38:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=20619"},"modified":"2016-05-14T11:38:22","modified_gmt":"2016-05-14T16:38:22","slug":"trade-deals-and-the-environmental-crisis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=20619","title":{"rendered":"Trade Deals and the Environmental Crisis"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3 class=\"headline\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/2016\/05\/13\/trade-deals-and-the-environmental-crisis\/\" rel=\"bookmark\">Trade Deals and the Environmental Crisis<\/a><\/h3>\n<p class=\"post_meta\">With the release of\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/ttip-leaks.org\/\">leaked documents<\/a>\u00a0from the TTIP (Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership) \u2018trade\u2019 deal Greenpeace framed its conclusions more diplomatically than I will: the actions of the U.S. political leadership undertaken at the behest of American corporate \u2018leaders\u2019 and their masters in the capitalist class make it among the most profoundly destructive forces in human history. At a time when\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/environment\/2016\/may\/11\/worlds-carbon-dioxide-concentration-teetering-on-the-point-of-no-return\">environmental milestones<\/a>\u00a0pointing to irreversible global warming are being reached on a daily basis, the U.S. political leadership\u2019s response is to pronounce publicly that it favors environmental resolution while using \u2018trade\u2019 negotiations to assure that effective resolution never takes place.<\/p>\n<div class=\"post_content\">\n<p>Those representing the U.S. in these negotiations are mainly business lobbyists who have been given the frame of state power to promote policies that benefit the businesses they represent. The thrust of the agreements is to enhance corporate power through legal mechanisms including patents, intellectual property rights and ISDS (Investor-State Dispute Settlement) provisions that create supranational judiciaries run by corporate lawyers for the benefit of corporations. Shifting the power to regulate greenhouse gas emissions to the corporations producing them precludes effective regulation in the public interest. The position that environmental harms must be proven before regulations are implemented leaves a dead planet as the admissible evidence.<\/p>\n<p>U.S. President Barack Obama is both the most articulate American politician urging action on climate change and the central Liberal proponent of the trade agreements. The apparent paradox isn\u2019t difficult to understand\u2014 the trade agreements will be legally binding on signatory states while Mr. Obama\u2019s statement of the problem won\u2019t be. As evidence of global warming mounts the Republican tactic of denial is looking more and more delusional. By articulating the problem Mr. Obama poses Democrats as the solution while handing the power to curtail greenhouse gas emissions to business lobbyists and corporate lawyers.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Trade Deals and the Environmental Crisis With the release of\u00a0leaked documents\u00a0from the TTIP (Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership) \u2018trade\u2019 deal Greenpeace framed its conclusions more diplomatically than I will: the actions of the U.S. political leadership undertaken at the behest of American corporate \u2018leaders\u2019 and their masters in the capitalist class make it among the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,4],"tags":[5493,13828,369,1115,387,6367,5388,13827,805,13829,1133,1132,827],"class_list":["post-20619","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-environment","tag-counterpunch","tag-environmental-crisis","tag-global-warming","tag-greenhouse-gas-emissions","tag-greenpeace","tag-investor-state-dispute-resolution","tag-isds","tag-rob-urie","tag-trade","tag-trade-negotiations","tag-transatlantic-trade-and-investment-partnership","tag-ttip","tag-united-states"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20619","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20619"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20619\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20620,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20619\/revisions\/20620"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20619"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20619"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20619"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}