Let’s be clear about the just-released, negotiated-in-secret Trans-Pacific Partnership deal. Despite how it’s being referred to by journalists, officialsand academics, as Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and economist Adam Hersh have noted, it is definitely not a “free-trade” agreement. It’s much more than that.
What are Dr. Stiglitz and others arguing, and why does it matter? Simply put, calling the TPP a free-trade agreement overplays its benefits, plays down its problematic aspects and fundamentally misunderstands what the deal is actually about.
Lost in the political fallout from President Barack Obama’s decision to once and for all reject Keystone XL is the fact that there is no longer an economic context for the pipeline. For that matter, the same can be said for any of the other proposed pipelines that would service the planned massive expansion of production from Alberta’s oil sands.
[An important article: "I would argue that it's much more likely to come from social protest than from the eventual exhaustion of natural resources."- says Chris Williams - read the full article - Editors]
We are now officially living amid the sixth great extinction, according to scientists, but the global economy has still not shifted to prevent climate change's existential threat to human civilization and much of the biosphere.
I’ve often wondered how the media would respond when eco-apocalypsestruck. I pictured the news programmes producing brief, sensational reports, while failing to explain why it was happening or how it might be stopped. Then they would ask their financial correspondents how the disaster affected share prices, before turning to the sport. As you can probably tell, I don’t have an ocean of faith in the industry for which I work. What I did not expect was that they would ignore it.
If you believe press reports, governments are preparing for “serious” climate negotiations at the upcoming December UN climate conference in Paris. I put quotes around serious because there is good reason to believe that most governments, at least the most powerful, care little about the outcome. One indicator is their commitment to protecting the environment in two so-called free trade agreements.
