Investor oriented Free Trade under T.P.P. is NOT compatible with taking action to limit Global Warming. Why? Because T.P.P. (like the WTO) includes a poison pill mechanism to penalize any national government that's a signatory for taking action to limit Global Warming.
Here are a few excerpts from Naomi Klein's book 'This Changes Everything' from chapter two titled HOT MONEY How Free Market Fundamentalism Helped Overheat the Planet
Almost a decade ago, a WTO official claimed that the organization enables challenges against "almost any measure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions"
p.80
And the WTO is far from the only trade weapon that can be used in such battles-so too can countless bilateral and regional free trade and investment agreements.
p.80
To allow arcane trade law which has been negotiated with scant public input to have this kind of power over an issue so critical to humanity's future is a special kind of madness. As Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz put it, "Should you let a group of foolish lawyers, who put together something before they understood these issues, interfere with saving the planet?"
p. 80-81
Indeed the three pillars of the neoliberal age-privatization of the public sphere, deregulation of the corporate sector and the lowering of income and corporate taxes, paid for with cuts to the public spending- are each incompatible with many of the actions we must take to bring our emissions to safe levels. And together these three pillars form an ideological wall that has blocked a serious response to climate change for decades.
P. 81
Klein then explores how climate treaties are made subordinate to trade treaties.
In fact, the hierarchy was so clear that the climate negotiators formally declared their subservience to the trading system from the start.
P. 85
As Australian political scientist Robyn Eckersley put it ... "Rather than push for the recalibration of the international trade rules to conform with the requirements of climate protection ... the Parties to the climate regime have ensured that liberalized and an expanding global economy have been protected against trade restrictive climate policies"
P.85
A destabilized climate is the cost of deregulated, global capitalism, its unintended, yet unavoidable consequence.
p. 90
We need to make our economy more local not less. We need government that does more to protect its citizens and less to protect corporate profit margins.
Creating a special exalted status for investors as T.P.P. does to increase their economic prerogatives runs directly counter to creating sustainable economies and a more humane future for our descendants.
If you haven't done so already tell Congress to reject the T.P.P. Call 1-202-224-3121.