Category Archives: climate change

Common Dreams: ‘Fighting for the Places We Love’: A Vision for the Climate Battles to Come Ahead of upcoming Global Divestment Day, a conversation between author Naomi Klein and 350.org executive director May Boeve

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/02/06/fighting-places-we-love-vision-climate-battles-come
Friday, February 06, 2015

(Image: Go Fossil Free)

CD editor’s note: The following conversation between Naomi Klein and May Boeve took place as an online webinar hosted by 350.org last week in advance of the upcoming Global Divestment Day(s), taking place on February 13 and 14, during which individuals and institutions from around the world will take action and urge others “do what is necessary for climate action by divesting from fossil fuels.”

Wide-ranging in terms of topics covered, the overall talk reveals the current thinking of two prominent voices within the global climate justice movement.  Klein and Boeve take a look back at the impactful events of 2014, strategic concerns for the year(s) ahead, and explore the unique historical moment that is now presenting itself to those who believe—in the face of an increasingly warming planet—that an economic, political, and energy transition is more necessary than ever.

In one key section, Klein argues what’s most essential is the further emergence of unified global movement—one whose agenda is “simple enough to fit on a postcard”— that can articulate a positive vision while continuing to make clear what it opposes. “We’re fighting to leave it in the ground. No new fossil fuel frontiers. We’re fighting for societies powered by 100% renewable energy. We’re fighting for free public transit. We’re fighting for the principle that polluters should pay, that how we pay for the transition has to be justice based. We’re fighting for the principle of frontlines first, that the people who got the worst deal in the old economy should be the first in line to benefit in the new economy. Those are some principles that we can all agree on and rally behind.”

And as Boeve states, “We have a moment, we have a movement, so let’s do it.”

Joining the online talk were more than 2,000 people who were able to listen in and ask questions.

Naomi Klein: [The number of people on this call] is a powerful indication of the interest in this topic [and shows] the message that divestment is everywhere. Because there’s a sort of patchy quality to it: there are places where this is very much part of the public debate and then there are places where it’s just getting started. And by having a coordinated day of action it sends a really clear message that this is happening all over, that it’s spreading quicker than any movement I’ve ever witnessed, and that it’s just an exciting time. So thank you all for being here.

MB: So my first question, Naomi, is this: there’s a lot of talk right now in the news about falling oil prices. Can you speak to the role that falling oil prices play in energy and climate politics in particular, and what we should be thinking about in this moment?

NK: That’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about, because the book I wrote before was called the Shock Doctrine, and the message of that book was that these moments are often catalysts for the wrong kind of change. I think that’s really important to understand that in the case of energy and climate change, none of this is predetermined. It is not preordained that low oil prices will either hurt or help the climate movement.

“It is not preordained that low oil prices will either hurt or help the climate movement.”

If we do nothing, then it’s more likely that low oil prices will work against sensible climate action, just for simple economic reasons. When oil is cheap, people feel able to buy more of it. Already we’re hearing these stories, like the comeback of the SUV. All of these incentives towards efficiency for reasons of financial strain–people were leaving their cars at home, taking public transit, carpooling and doing these things that were good for the environment, but for financial reasons—we’ve lost that. That’s the context in which we’re working. That’s not good news, it’s bad news.

But I think on the whole, if we look at this in the context of this rising movement that we’re a part of, if we look at it in the run-up to Paris and the fact that climate is going to be very much in the news and top of mind, if we also look at it in the context of the renewable energy sector, with prices falling rapidly, the fact that we can all now point to a country like Germany that has moved so rapidly toward having 20-25% of its electricity coming from renewables, this is definitely a moment.

[Take a look] at last week’s Economist cover? For those of you who can’t see it, this is a figure leaping off a pyramid of oil barrels, and the headline is “Sieze the Day.” The editorial that accompanies this—and this is a quote from the Economist, not from 350.org—is saying that this is a “once in a generation opportunity” to dramatically transform our energy system, to kick the oil habit. We’ve been using this slogan internally: “Kick it while it’s down.”

There are various reasons why, if we get the right set of incentives in place—both political and economic—it can be a really, really good time to get off fossil fuels and push very aggressively toward a decentralized, renewables-based economy.

One of the things that has really struck me as I’ve been thinking about this price plummet over the past couple of weeks, is that we’ve been living with an oil price between $80-100 dollars per barrel or more—even reaching $120 dollars per barrel—for over a decade. It went up to $100 a barrel after the US invaded Iraq in 2003, that’s when things really took off.

I wrote a column about a year after that, and the headline was “Baghdad burns, Calgary booms.” It was about the fact that the turmoil in the market that was linked to the invasion of Iraq, which had sent oil prices soaring, was leading to the boom that was happening with the Alberta tar sands. Calgary is ground zero for those profits: all money flows through Calgary. We have always known, or had known for a long time, that there were vast oil deposits in northern Alberta, but those oil deposits weren’t counted toward the global fossil fuel reserves because they were considered uneconomic. It wasn’t that they discovered oil in Alberta in 2003, it was that when oil prices were $30 a barrel it didn’t make sense to count it, because it costs so much to dig it up.

“With oil at $100 per barrel, it makes people crazy. It’s irresistible. So, even as we’ve had scientists raising the alarm, we’ve been barreling down the wrong road.”

What’s really been striking to me is understanding that it really kind of makes sense why, despite all of the consciousness-raising that has taken place over the past decade—An Inconvenient Truth, the IPCC winning the Nobel Prize,  and all of these various moments when consciousness was raised around climate change—why this hasn’t translated into action? It’s because we have been working against the titanic power of enormous profit. The enormous profit that comes with oil at such a high price. Because that kind of pricing, with oil at $100 per barrel, it makes people crazy. It’s irresistible. So, even as we’ve had scientists raising the alarm, we’ve been barreling down the wrong road. We’ve been barreling into extreme energy, drilling in the Arctic, tar sands, fracking. And this is all linked to high prices.

Now, we find ourselves in this kind of reprieve. It’s not permanent. What goes down can go back up, and will go back up. But I think what this has given us is a little bit of breathing room, because suddenly a lot of these projects that we’ve been working so hard to stop, many of them are shutting down on their own. I mean, not completely, but a lot of investors are pulling their investments out of tar sands, or suspending their investments because it’s so expensive, there’s less of a push for Arctic drilling. That’s a context in which it’s easier to win political victories.

When you’re going head to head with the richest companies on earth, and they’re dying to get into the Arctic and you’re saying “no,” well, that’s not a fair fight. But when their own investors are going “Wow, is this really a good idea?” I think that’s a moment when we can win some really big victories to close off fossil fuel frontiers.

Of course, this is very tied to the whole logic of the divestment movement and the need to leave this carbon in the ground. But we all know we’re not going to win this one divestment fight at a time: we’re going to win this by building the arguments that will then lead to big demands, like no new fossil fuel frontiers, country-wide bans on fracking, closing off the Arctic to drilling permanently, and those types of policies.

So, I think we’re in a much better situation to win that. But we need to understand that this is a window. This is the last moment to be complacent. I mean, when the Economist is calling this a once in a generation opportunity, think about that: it means it doesn’t come around again.

One of the reasons that it’s been difficult to win and sustain victories to put a price on carbon, a carbon tax—and I don’t think a carbon tax is a silver bullet, but I think a progressively designed carbon tax is part of a slate of policies that we need to make this transition happen—is that when consumers are hurting (and we’ve been in the midst of an economic downturn, recession, or crisis depending on where you live) it’s hard for politicians to increase the price of energy. When suddenly oil is way cheaper and your energy bill is dropping, that’s a good time to introduce a progressive carbon tax.

“We’re going to win this by building the arguments that will then lead to big demands, like no new fossil fuel frontiers, country-wide bans on fracking, closing off the Arctic to drilling permanently, and those types of policies.”

Between the capacity to win some big keep-it-in-ground fights in the midst of falling prices, and the ability to fight for a progressive carbon tax, and that we now have these great examples of what a rapid renewables transition might look like—I think it is an extraordinary moment, to be honest.

MB: Yeah, I couldn’t agree with you more. And extraordinary moments can pass.

NK: They can and do pass. I mean, some of you have heard me say this before, but I am haunted by the long shadow of 2008, when the financial crisis hit and we all witnessed this huge transfer of wealth from public hands into the hands of the banks. And this was a moment when it could have been a real leap forward, especially in the US. It could have been a real leap forward because Obama had just been elected. He was elected with a clear mandate to act on climate change. It was also a moment when the car companies were bankrupt, and it was possible to write a really big stimulus bill, and we could have told the banks what to lend—they could have funded the energy transition—but that became this period of demobilization for people as they sort of waited for what Obama would do. And now I feel like we’re being given a second chance. When that happened and we didn’t seize that moment, I thought “Am I ever going to see another moment like this, with this amount of potential?”

And here we are now, with this opening, and we’re also seeing some big political shifts. Syriza just won in Greece, that’s a big message. Podemos is rising in Spain. There are political parties that need vision. They need a vision for what the next economy should look like, and I believe that the climate movement should be very much a part of that conversation.

MB: Absolutely. You know, I think about 2015 as the year that we have to demonstrate irrevocably that the age of fossil fuels is over. If we think about 2014 as the year that—through your book, through our mobilizations like the People’s Climate March—that brought this idea that climate change changes everything, and we need everyone to be part of the moment. That was the 2014 moment. Here we are in 2015. So how are you thinking about that? What’s on your wishlist for the climate movement in 2015? If you could sort of just snap your fingers and make it happen, what would be taking place?

NK: My personal obsession is that I feel like there’s this way in which we are still failing to break out of our respective issue silos. There are people who are working on climate where that doesn’t intersect nearly enough with the people working for the public sphere, fighting for the commons, fighting against austerity—even when it’s the same people. They put on their climate and they’re being one person, and then they put on their “no cuts” hat or their anti-austerity hat, and it somehow doesn’t become the same conversation. Even when we intellectually understand it as the same.

“There are political parties that need vision. They need a vision for what the next economy should look like, and I believe that the climate movement should be very much a part of that conversation.”

I have a lot of hope about the fact that the next COP is happening in Europe. I think that presents enormous opportunities, because in Europe the anti-austerity movement is so strong. In this moment, we have these political parties that are running on anti-austerity agendas that are winning elections or are poised to win elections. It’s a moment when we can bring our movements together and have one conversation instead of these separate conversations.

I’ll give you an example of what I mean. I was going from Amsterdam to Brussels and there was a train strike. Belgium is getting hit with a round of austerity right now, and one of the services that’s getting hit is the public trains, and they’re having series of rotating strikes leading up to a general strike. The day I was there, there was a rail strike, and all of the climate activists were generally talking about it as a bit of an inconvenience getting from point A to point B. I was just amazed that it wasn’t being talked about as part of the climate movement.

Now, May, you and I have talked about this as one of the things that we want to do at 350 is have the fight for not just affordable, but in my opinion, free public transit, be welcomed into the climate movement. When you see the people on the streets of Rio and Sao Paulo fighting for affordable public transit it doesn’t matter if they call themselves climate activists. They are climate activists. Because affordable public transit is central to any just transition or any transition whatsoever.

That’s part of what I mean when I say that somehow we’re not yet having the same conversation. When, of course, it’s the same conversation. This is the world we’re fighting for. And so my real hope is that the labor movement, the anti-cuts movement, the climate movement will really come together in a coherent demand for a just transition away from fossil fuels, using this price shock as the catalyst.

Because climate change is never going to be that shock. We think it is, that if we scare people enough, then that will shock them.There’s this great group in the Bay Area called Movement Generation that we work with at 350, who are just an amazing group of thinkers and theorists, and they have this presentation that they do called, “Shock, Slide, Shift.” It’s about how you have these punctuated shocks and these long slides. A disaster is a shock. Climate change is a slide. Our mission is to harness the shocks and the slides to win the shifts that we want. We’re in a slide, we just got a shock, and now we need to fight for the shift.

“When you see the people on the streets fighting for affordable public transit it doesn’t matter if they call themselves climate activists. They are climate activists.”

I feel like it almost needs to be simple enough to fit on a postcard: what is it that we’re fighting for? We’re fighting to leave it in the ground. No new fossil fuel frontiers. We’re fighting for societies powered by 100% renewable energy. We’re fighting for free public transit, I would add that. We’re fighting for the principle that polluters should pay, that how we pay for the transition has to be justice based. We’re fighting for the principle of frontlines first, that the people who got the worst deal in the old economy should be the first in line to benefit in the new economy. Those are some principles that we can all agree on and rally behind.

That’s my hope for 2015. That we get off the defense and put forward this very clear vision, bringing all of our movements together, because they are mobilizing in incredible ways. Some of you may have read the piece I wrote trying to connect the #BlackLivesMatter movement with the climate justice movement, because so much of what we are fighting for is based on the principle that black lives matter, that all lives matter. The way our governments are behaving in the face of the climate crisis actively discounts black and brown lives over white lives. It is an actively racist response to climate change that we should expose. I think we have to not be afraid to bust down these barriers if we really mean it when we say that if we’re going to change everything, it’s going to take everyone.

MB: Absolutely. I think that coupled with what you were saying earlier about this moment is that there is so much energy and alignment happening within all these different movements. We have a moment, we have a movement, so let’s do it.

My last question is, as we move towards the 13th and 14th of February, Global Divestment Day, and think about the next moves on divestment, I wanted to ask you about that. You were instrumental in helping articulate the link between stranded assets, unburnable carbon, climate change, and divestment. The movement to divest has taken off in incredible ways, so I’d like to ask you a reflective question: what has been most significant about divestment and what is needed to keep that call fresh and alive in this moment?

NK: If you can just indulge me a moment, I want to give a little bit of history from my perspective of where all of this came from. When we had the idea for a national, and then international, divestment call on fossil fuels, there were already pockets at certain universities that were pushing their schools to divest from coal, but there wasn’t an overall fossil fuel divestment call that had been made.

That call came out of a call between Bill McKibben and I, that happened after both of us had read the Carbon Tracker research, which blew both of our minds. This is the research that all of this is based on, that shows that the fossil fuel industry has five times more carbon dioxide in their proven reserves than the atmosphere can absorb and leave us with a decent shot of keeping global warming below two degrees celsius.

“My real hope is that the labor movement, the anti-cuts movement, the climate movement will really come together in a coherent demand for a just transition away from fossil fuels, using this price shock as the catalyst.”

Now, the thing that was striking when we were reading that research was that it was not addressed to us, this is research that was done for the investment community. It was addressed to investors as a warning to them, warning that there is a bubble in the market. This was a couple years out of the housing bubble bursting, and it was warning, “Ok, we see another bubble on the horizon, we don’t want to have another bubble burst.” Obviously, these companies cannot burn five times more carbon than the atmosphere can observe, so obviously these are going to become stranded assets.

Now, I read that research and I went, “No, that’s not right.” We’re the bubble. They’re planning to burn the carbon, and they have made a political assessment that when our politicians said they were going to keep warming below two degrees they were lying, that they didn’t mean it. The commitments made in Copenhagen were unbinding, and Exxon and Shell and everyone else decided that that was not something that they had to worry about, that they were going to go ahead and burn it anyway.

So, I didn’t think that this was a warning to investors. I thought that this was a warning to all of us, and that’s what Bill thought, too. So, the question is, ok, if we’re the bubble, how do we flip it? How do we turn them into the bubble that’s going to burst? And that’s where the divestment idea comes from. Those are the stakes, that’s really what that research shows: it’s them or us.

Bill wrote that incredible piece for Rolling Stone that popularized this idea, just laying it out, because people get these numbers. Bill is such an incredible teacher, such a patient explainer, and people got it. I had just had my kid at this point, so I wasn’t able to go on the full Fossil Free tour that Bill and 350 kicked off, but I did go, with my five-month old in tow, to New York and Boston, which were a couple of biggest events. What was amazing, was that people were on their feet before we said a word. I’d never seen anything like it. The movement was waiting for someone to admit that there was a war going on.

This comes back to one of the most controversial parts of This Changes Everything, the part about how so many of the big green groups have partnered with fossil fuel companies, based on the false idea that we’re in this together. No, we’re not. I think people really get this, and young people get this most of all. It all comes back to that research. Every time you explain it to somebody else, you are part of the solution, because these are illegitimate profits.

“I think we have to not be afraid to bust down barriers if we really mean it when we say that if we’re going to change everything, it’s going to take everyone.”

Coming back to low oil prices, the other thing that helps is that fossil fuel stocks are not performing very well right now. So your opponents have just lost their best argument. They won’t lose it for long, so that’s another reason to just pound away at this. If this was last year, they could say, “these stocks are performing better than other ones, you want to bankrupt our schools.” But, no, in fact these stocks are underperforming. Not only are institutions destroying the planet, but they are also taking unnecessary risks with their endowments.

Another point I would make, and this comes back to the issue around carbon pricing, is that when we make the argument that this is a rogue sector, that their business plan is at odds with life on earth, we are creating an intellectual and political space where it becomes much easier to tax those profits, to increase royalties, and even, if there is too much resistance, to nationalizing these companies. This is not just about the fact that we want to separate ourselves from these companies, it’s also that we have a right to those profits. If those profits are so illegitimate that Harvard shouldn’t be invested in them, they’re also so illegitimate that taxpayers have a right to them to pay for a transition away from fossil fuels, and to pay the bills for a crisis created by this sector. It’s not just about dissociating ourselves from their profits, but potentially getting a much larger piece of them.

MB: Here’s a question from online, “Where do we put our divested funds? How do we push local economy investment in the transition?”

NK: I think the reason why the reinvestment piece is a little bit trickier than the divestment call, is because what we need to get out of is really simple, we want to divest from the fossil fuel companies, but what we want to get into will look a little bit different everywhere we live. There isn’t one blanket investment, nor should their be. I don’t think that the response should be, “Goodbye, big carbon. Hello, big wind, big solar.” I think we can do better than that.

“It’s not just about dissociating ourselves from [fossil fuel] profits, but potentially getting a much larger piece of them.”

Which isn’t to say big green companies don’t have a place in the transition. I think they do, but I think we should also be looking at supporting local solar coops, that reinvestment should be very much a tool for climate justice. The answer for what that means is only going to come from building alliances with frontline communities in all of your communities and developing tools and projects that can be supported and are being prioritized.

The Our Power campaign in the US is a great example of identifying six climate communities that have great transition plans, some of them already quite far along, that can be supported. We should resist the temptation of just presenting this as flipping the switch from dirty energy to big, clean, green energy that will be controlled by a different set of corporations. I realize that it’s tempting and that some people will disagree with me on that.

MB: Next question is from Eileen, who says she’s 93, in Manchester, UK. The question is, “Of all the urgent environmental issues in your book that you identified that we could campaign on, which should we prioritize?”

NK: Once again, I would say that this is really dependent on where you live. Anyone who would pretend that there is one answer to that question is leading us down the wrong path.

Something I write about in the book is that for too long the climate movement has adopted the astronauts eye view of the Earth. The icon of the globe seen from space that has been adopted by the green movement has been a bit of a problem. Because when you are looking down at the Earth from space, things get very blurry and then you can say, well, there’s one solution, and we should all just be fighting on this very narrow solution. That it’s all about just parts per million, for example. What we’ve found at 350, and I mean, we are an organization that’s named after parts per million, and we care about carbon, but we have found that this movement is powered by people fighting for the places we love. It’s a movement that is not driven by hatred of fossil fuel companies, more than anything it’s driven by love of place. It’s driven by a duty and responsibility to protect the land and water for future generations.

So wherever you live, it’s going to look differently. If there’s fracking in your backyard, which is certainly an issue in Manchester, then it’s probably fracking, especially what the British government is doing. But that doesn’t mean it’s fracking everywhere (although they would like to frack everywhere).

“We have found that this movement is powered by people fighting for the places we love. It’s a movement that is not driven by hatred of fossil fuel companies, more than anything it’s driven by love of place. It’s driven by a duty and responsibility to protect the land and water for future generations.”

MB: The third question here is from Ian Middleton. Ian asks, “We’ve been here before though, haven’t we? What’s to stop the reversion to business as usual when the price of oil rises again?”

NK: Yes, we have been here before. But we have never been exactly here before, in the sense of this particular confluence of events, with the price of renewables dropping, with the German transition, and with where the climate movement is. The climate movement of today is not Al Gore’s climate movement, it is a much more grassroots movement, a much more youth-led movement. I think it is a movement that is a lot clearer about what it is fighting for and who it is fighting against.

I am by no means saying that this price shock is going to do this for us. It’s about what we do in this window, and what you do once you get a few of these policies in place. It’s really about taking advantage of the fact that it’s a little bit easier to get some big wins right now. It’s a little bit easier to win a carbon tax right now, it’s a little bit easier to win some “keep it in the ground” fights right now, it’s a little bit easier to fight for visionary policies right now, policies that then have their own momentum. This is the thing about Germany: once you have proof of concept, once people are experiencing it, then they start fighting to defend it.

“We can’t beat the bean counters at their own game. We’re going to win this, because this is an issue of values, human rights, right and wrong.”

So, it isn’t saying that the market is going to take care of this for us, it’s that we a have a very brief moment where a few market forces are working in our favor. It will not last, it will not do it for us, but we need to use this moment to push for policies that can then create a context where people are fighting for the policies that work. Our problem is that we haven’t had the chance to get the right policies in place.

MB: Here’s a specific campaign question, the question is, “What do you think the likelihood is that Pope Francis will divest the Vatican and call on all Catholics to divest?”

NK: Hmm, you know, well that guy is full of surprises, that’s all I can say. I think it’s great to keep the pressure up.

I do think that raises a slightly different point. You know, I’ve been making these arguments around economics, but there is nothing more powerful than a values based argument. We’re not going to win this as bean counters. We can’t beat the bean counters at their own game. We’re going to win this, because this is an issue of values, human rights, right and wrong. We just have this brief period where we also have to have some nice stats that we can wield, but we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that what actually moves people’s hearts are the arguments based on the value of life.

Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist, author, and syndicated columnist. Her new book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate (Simon & Schuster, 2014), has just been published. Her previous books include the international best-sellers,  The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism and No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies.   To read all her writing visit www.naomiklein.org. Follow her on Twitter: @NaomiAKlein.

May Boeve is the Executive Director of 350.org.

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Top Comments

theoldgoat

18 hours ago

Actually, it seems to me that when the call is for grassroots engagement on the premise of loving the land where you live, you are talking about coalitions that engage on issues, not from ‘right-left’ silos. Part of that is shifting balances from supply side to demand side awareness and policy. The latter is in the process of occurring as we seem to have hit ‘peak’ supply side extraction/externalization/financial fraud/austerity/waste/pollution etcetera.

“Carbon taxes should be 100% returned to private citizens with no share for government of corporations.”
That strikes me as a supply-side framing that doesn’t yet realize it is a supply side framing. For example: shall we turn to the prison industrial complex for slave labor to rebuild infrastructure in order to keep “government” small ? Now, what happens when these are envisioned from a demand side framing?

The uncounted costs that continually aggregate (environmental – think today BP 10 mil. gal at the bottom of the Gulf) and the list not even yet tabulated for future generations…

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Common Dreams: Ten Reasons Why the TPP Must Be Defeated by Bernie Sanders

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2014/12/31/ten-reasons-why-tpp-must-be-defeated
Published on
Wednesday, December 31, 2014
People gather at Peace Arch Park in 2012 to oppose the U.S.-led Trans Pacific Partnership agreement (TPP). (Photo: Caelie_Frampton/flickr/cc)

The Trans-Pacific Partnership is a disastrous trade agreement designed to protect the interests of the largest multi-national corporations at the expense of workers, consumers, the environment and the foundations of American democracy. It will also negatively impact some of the poorest people in the world.

The TPP is a treaty that has been written behind closed doors by the corporate world. Incredibly, while Wall Street, the pharmaceutical industry and major media companies have full knowledge as to what is in this treaty, the American people and members of Congress do not. They have been locked out of the process. Further, all Americans, regardless of political ideology, should be opposed to the “fast track” process which would deny Congress the right to amend the treaty and represent their constituents’ interests.

The TPP follows in the footsteps of other unfettered “free trade” agreements like NAFTA, CAFTA and the Permanent Normalized Trade Agreement with China (PNTR). These treaties have forced American workers to compete against desperate and low-wage labor around the world. The result has been massive job losses in the United States and the shutting down of tens of thousands of factories. These corporately backed trade agreements have significantly contributed to the race to the bottom, the collapse of the American middle class and increased wealth and income inequality. The TPP is more of the same, but even worse.

During my 23 years in Congress, I helped lead the fight against NAFTA and PNTR with China. During the coming session of Congress, I will be working with organized labor, environmentalists, religious organizations, Democrats, and Republicans against the secretive TPP trade deal.

Let’s be clear: the TPP is much more than a “free trade” agreement. It is part of a global race to the bottom to boost the profits of large corporations and Wall Street by outsourcing jobs; undercutting worker rights; dismantling labor, environmental, health, food safety and financial laws; and allowing corporations to challenge our laws in international tribunals rather than our own court system. If TPP was such a good deal for America, the administration should have the courage to show the American people exactly what is in this deal, instead of keeping the content of the TPP a secret.

10 Ways that TPP Would Hurt Working Families

1. TPP will allow corporations to outsource even more jobs overseas.

According to the Economic Policy Institute, if the TPP is agreed to, the U.S. will lose more than 130,000 jobs to Vietnam and Japan alone. But that is just the tip of the iceberg. ·∙ Service Sector Jobs will be lost. At a time when corporations have already outsourced over 3 million service sector jobs in the U.S., TPP includes rules that will make it even easier for corporate America to outsource call centers; computer programming; engineering; accounting; and medical diagnostic jobs.

Manufacturing jobs will be lost. As a result of NAFTA, the U.S. lost nearly 700,000 jobs. As a result of Permanent Normal Trade Relations with China, the U.S. lost over 2.7 million jobs. As a result of the Korea Free Trade Agreement, the U.S. has lost 70,000 jobs. The TPP would make matters worse by providing special benefits to firms that offshore jobs and by reducing the risks associated with operating in low-wage countries.

2. U.S. sovereignty will be undermined by giving corporations the right to challenge our laws before international tribunals.

The TPP creates a special dispute resolution process that allows corporations to challenge any domestic laws that could adversely impact their “expected future profits.” These challenges would be hea rd before UN and World Bank tribunals which could require taxpayer compensation to corporations. This process undermines our sovereignty and subverts democratically passed laws including those dealing with labor, health, and the environment.

3. Wages, benefits, and collective bargaining will be threatened.

NAFTA, CAFTA, PNTR with China, and other free trade agreements have helped drive down the wages and benefits of American workers and have eroded collective bargaining rights. The TPP will make the race to the bottom worse because it forces American workers to compete with desperate workers in Vietnam where the minimum wage is just 56 cents an hour .

4. Our ability to protect the environment will be undermined.

The TPP will allow corporations to challenge any law that would adversely impact their future profits. Pending claims worth over $14 billion have been filed based on similar language in other trade agreements. Most of these claims deal with challenges to environmental laws in a number of countries. The TPP will make matters even worse by giving corporations the right to sue any of the nations that sign onto the TPP. These lawsuits would be heard in international tribunals bypassing domestic courts.

5. Food Safety Standards will be threatened.

The TPP would make it easier for countries like Vietnam to export contaminated fish and seafood into the U.S. The FDA has already prevented hundreds of seafood imports from TPP countries because of salmonella, e-coli, methyl-mercury and drug residues. But the FDA only inspects 1-2 percent of food imports and will be overwhelmed by the vast expansion of these imports if the TPP is agreed to.

6. Buy America laws could come to an end.

The U.S. has several laws on the books that require the federal government to buy goods and services that are made in America or mostly made in this country. Under TPP, foreign corporations must be given equal access to compete for these government contracts with companies that make products in America.

Under TPP, the U.S. could not even prevent companies that have horrible human rights records from receiving government contracts paid by U.S. taxpayers.

7. Prescription drug prices will increase, access to life saving drugs will decrease, and the profits of drug companies will go up.

Big pharmaceutical companies are working hard to ensure that the TPP extends the monopolies they have for prescription drugs by extending their patents (which currently can last 20 yea rs or more). This would expand the profits of big drug companies, keep drug prices artificially high, and leave millions of people around the world without access to life saving drugs. Doctors without Borders stated that “the TPP agreement is on track to become the most harmful trade pact ever for access to medicines in developing countries.”

8. Wall Street would benefit at the expense of everyone else.

Under TPP, governments would be barred from imposing “capital controls” that have been successfully used to avoid financial crises. These controls range from establishing a financial speculation tax to limiting the massive flows of speculative capital flowing into and out of countries responsible for the Asian financial crisis in the 1990s. In other words, the TPP would expand the rights and power of the same Wall Street firms that nearly destroyed the world economy just five years ago and would create the conditions for more financial instability in the future. Last year, I co-sponsored a bill with Sen. Harkin to create a Wall Street speculation tax of just 0.03 percent on trades of derivatives, credit default swaps, and large amounts of stock. If TPP were enacted, such a financial speculation tax may be in violation of this trade agreement.

9. The TPP would reward authoritarian regimes like Vietnam that systematically violate human rights.

The State Department, the U.S. Department of Labor, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International have all documented Vietnam’s widespread violations of basic international standards for human rights. Yet, the TPP would reward Vietnam’s bad behavior by giving it duty free access to the U.S. market.

10. The TPP has no expiration date, making it virtually impossible to repeal.

Once TPP is agreed to, it has no sunset date and could only be altered by a consensus of all of the countries that agreed to it.

Other countries, like China, could be allowed to join in the future. For example, Canada and Mexico joined TPP negotiations in 2012 and Japan joined last year.

Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2006 after serving 16 years in the House of Representatives. He is the longest serving independent member of Congress in American history. Elected Mayor of Burlington, Vt., by 10 votes in 1981, he served four terms. Before his 1990 election as Vermont’s at-large member in Congress, Sanders lectured at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and at Hamilton College in upstate New York. Read more at his website.

Common Dreams: Despite Climate Warnings, New Export Rules Open Crude Oil Floodgates

http://www.commondreams.org/news/2014/12/31/despite-climate-warnings-new-export-rules-open-crude-oil-floodgates
Published on
Wednesday, December 31, 2014

The loosened regulations will reportedly ‘please domestic oil drillers, foreign trade partners, and some Republicans’

Opening the door to U.S. crude exports is expected to give relief to some domestic drillers who have been forced to sell their shale oil at a discount of as much as $15 a barrel versus global markets as fast-rising domestic supplies overwhelm local demand. (Photo: WildEarth Guardians/flickr/cc)

Despite warnings about how such a move could accelerate climate change, the Obama administration has quietly loosened its regulations on crude oil exports, “opening the floodgates” for the shipment of as much as a million barrels per day of ultra-light crude, also known as condensate, to the rest of the world.

The obscure rule change by the Department of Commerce “will likely please domestic oil drillers, foreign trade partners and some Republicans who have urged Obama to loosen the export ban,” Reuters reports. “The latest measures were wrapped in regulatory jargon and couched by some as a basic clarification of existing rules, but analysts said the message was unambiguous: a green light for any company willing and able to process their light condensate crude through a distillation tower, a simple piece of oilfield kit.”

According to Bloomberg:

The guidelines could “open the floodgates to substantial increases in exports,” Citigroup Inc. said in a research note. Total U.S. production of light and ultra-light crude oil now exceeds 3.81 million barrels a day, and exports could reach 1 million barrels daily by the end of 2015, Citi Research said.

…In addition to approving applications, the government also allows companies to “self-certify,” that is, to export their products without seeking the permission if they think the law allows for the exchange.

Officials were quick to point out that most untreated crude is still covered by the existing ban.

“It’s a long way from here to a full repeal of the export ban, and they went out of their way to stipulate that this is not, in their view, crude oil,” Jeff Navin, a former deputy chief of staff at the Energy Department, said in an e-mail to Bloomberg. “But it does show how they’re thinking about exporting at least some of our light products.”

But earlier this year, environmental watchdogs warned that any loosening of the decades-old ban on crude oil exports could lead to the release of billions of tons of additional carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

“Allowing U.S. crude oil exports will result in increased profits that will in turn result in increased oil production,” read a report (pdf) by Oil Change International, Lifting the Ban, Cooking the Climate. “In the midst of President Obama’s ‘All of the Above’ energy strategy, the ban on crude oil exports is one of the few policies in place that effectively limits oil and gas extraction and protects our climate. The Obama Administration and the U.S. Congress must take a stand for the climate and resolve to leave the crude oil export ban intact.”

As Andy Rowell, of Oil Change International, pointed out in October, the U.S. Government Accountability Office has recommended against lifting the ban, saying greenhouse gas emissions would rise if the ban was lifted—an outcome with serious implications for the climate and environment.

“It is important to remember what the GAO said last week in its report,” Rowell wrote. “It argued that ‘additional crude oil production may pose risks to the quality and quantity of surface groundwater sources; increase greenhouse gas and other emissions; and increase the risk of spills from crude oil transportation’.”

Mediaite.com: Why Obama Should Veto the Keystone XL Pipeline

http://www.mediaite.com/tv/why-obama-should-veto-the-keystone-xl-pipeline/
by Matt Wilstein | 2:52 pm, November 14th, 2014 VIDEO 444

On Friday afternoon, the House of Representatives voted for the ninth time to approve a bill directing President Barack Obama to take action on the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. Next Tuesday, the Senate will hold a similar vote that is expected to pass. But it is looking increasingly likely that Obama will veto the bill when it reaches his desk. And he should.

“I have to constantly push back against this idea that somehow the Keystone pipeline is either this massive jobs bill for the United States or is somehow lowering gas prices,” the president said at a press conference in Myanmar Friday morning. “Understand what this project is: It is providing the ability of Canada to pump their oil, send it through our land down to the Gulf where it will be sold everywhere else.”

Watch video below, via CNN:

 

Republicans in Congress — along with some Democrats like Mary Landrieu, who is now leading the charge for the pipeline in the Senate in a last ditch effort to save her seat — point to a State Department report that says the project will not have a major impact on greenhouse gas emissions because the Canadian oil is likely to be extracted at a similar rate with or without the pipeline. Meanwhile, they argue that it will create a large number of American jobs. Of course, for conservatives who don’t believe in man-made climate change, even one job is probably worth more any potential decrease in emissions.

But, as Obama said earlier today, Keystone is not some “massive jobs bill” that is going to solve America’s (diminishing) unemployment problem. Republicans love to cite the State Department report on the pipeline’s environmental impact, but you are not going to hear them talking as much about the section that covers job creation. That’s because while the report estimates the pipeline will create 42,100 jobs annually, only 16,100 of those are directly connected to the pipeline (the rest are predicted to be the result of a “ripple” effect of the project).

But as CBS News’ Amy Picchi points out in a piece published today, those jobs will only exist for the two years during which the pipeline is being built. After that, the State Department estimates there would only be 35 permanent employees needed for the operational phase.

And when the president stated that Keystone won’t lower gas prices, he could have also mentioned that it might actually raise them. In April, Bloomberg’s Tom Randall reported that “in Keystone’s weirdonomics, the pipeline would actually increase prices of gasoline for much of the country, according to at least three studies that have looked into it.” Basically, because the oil would be bypassing Midwest refineries in favor of the Gulf, where it can be shipped to more lucrative overseas markets, there will be less oil to be had here at home, therefore increasing prices for American consumers.

So, the Keystone XL pipeline will not create any long-term jobs and could actually make gas more expensive in the U.S. But what about the environmental impact? While the State Department has said that the project will likely not significantly increase greenhouse gas emissions, it definitely will not decrease them, which is what America and the rest of the world needs to be doing in order to avert the worst case scenarios of climate change. On top of that, construction of the pipeline greatly increases the risk of a massive oil spill on U.S. soil.

Ultimately, the Keystone XL pipeline represents more than a simple construction project. It is about the decision to move forward on renewable energy or remain stuck in the past for generations to come, extracting every last bit of crude oil out of the ground until there’s nothing left. As long as Obama is still president, he has the ability to send a message to world that despite the modest benefits Keystone might bring, it is not worth the risks and would send the United States down a long path in the wrong direction.

[Photo via screengrab]

Huffington Post: Read The Secret Trade Memo Calling For More Fracking and Offshore Drilling

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/19/trade-fracking_n_5340420.html

Posted: 05/19/2014 6:00 am EDT Updated: 4 hours ago

WASHINGTON — The European Union is pressing the Obama administration to expand U.S. fracking, offshore oil drilling and natural gas exploration under the terms of a secret negotiation text obtained by The Huffington Post.

The controversial document is an early draft of energy policies that EU negotiators hope to see adopted under the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) trade deal, which is currently being negotiated. The text was shared with American officials in September. The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative declined to comment on the document.

Environmental groups fear the broad language proposed for the deal would eliminate key restrictions on the export of crude oil and natural gas, fossil fuels that contribute to climate change. The document marks the first major bone of contention in the EU deal, amid an outcry from environmentalists over leaked terms of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a separate pact that the U.S. and 11 Pacific nations are also negotiating.
“Exports of energy goods to the other Party shall be deemed automatically to comply with any conditions and tests foreseen in the Parties’ respective legislation for the granting of export licenses,” the memo reads, defining “energy goods” as “coal, crude oil, oil products, natural gas, whether liquefied or not, and electrical energy.”

The U.S. government treats trade negotiation texts as classified information. Previous leaks concerning the EU deal have focused on lighter topics, including whether American cheesemakers can call their products “feta” or “parmesan.”

By encouraging more crude oil and natural gas exports to the EU — a massive economic force that uses a tremendous amount of global energy — the proposal could spur more domestic oil and gas drilling and discourage the development of green energy in the EU, dealing a significant blow to efforts to avert climate change. Some environmental and citizens groups also object to the fracking process itself — in which a high-pressure mixture of chemicals, water, and sand is injected into rock formations to release natural gas — because of concerns that it might affect groundwater supplies.

“Encouraging trade in dirty fossil fuels would mean more dangerous fracking here in the U.S. and would push more climate-disrupting fuels into the European Union,” Ilana Solomon, director of the Responsible Trade Program at Sierra Club, told HuffPost. “The oil and gas industry is the only winner in this situation.”

The U.S. banned crude oil exports in 1975, and imposes a host of restrictions on the export of natural gas for both economic and national security reasons. But the president can issue special licenses to exempt some crude oil exports from the ban, and Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz said this month that he wants to consider relaxing it.

There has also been an increasing push to loosen constraints on natural gas exports from the U.S. to Europe, particularly as the conflict between Russia and the Ukraine has grown, highlighting Europe’s dependency on Russian energy. Although burning natural gas produces lower emissions than oil or coal, the energy-intensive storage and shipping process — liquefying the gas and then sending it in fuel-burning vessels — eliminates many of its advantages. And critics of gas say that increasing exports would only increase reliance on fossil fuels, rather than speeding the transition to renewables. It would also likely increase energy prices in the U.S., although the effects of the deal would not come to fruition for several years.

Free trade agreements frequently bind all of their participants to a specific regulatory regime, hindering the deployment of future regulations in response to new problems. Trade pacts are enforced by international courts, which can issue economic sanctions against countries that violate the deals. The proposed EU language would run counter to existing environmental standards that limit the development of the fossil fuel industry.

“It expands a trend in trade negotiations of removing policy decisions from national and local governments and enshrining those policy decisions in international trade laws,” said Sarah Burt, an attorney with the environmentalist legal organization Earthjustice, who has seen the document. Those negotiations, said Burt, happen outside of the public eye and are an “opaque process where trade and economics are elevated above any other values.”

Special thanks to Richard Charter

"Be the change you want to see in the world." Mahatma Gandhi