residual lawsuits remain<\/a>. Had \u2018free-trade\u2019 proponents had their way, the ISDS clauses in the original NAFTA and the TPP would have made the enforcement of environmental regulations by national governments virtually impossible.<\/p>\nOf current relevance is that the legal structures created through ISDS clauses can be used to preclude environmental regulation without in any way identifying them as \u2018environmental.\u2019 While those who pay attention to trade issues might know them as such, political opportunists who publicly identify as environmentalists have become particularly adept at undermining their own well-publicized environmental programs. Joe Biden has left the door open to negotiating trade agreements with the promise to \u2018give labor a seat at the table.\u2019 However, if \u2018the table\u2019 isn\u2019t where binding decisions are made, the offer is worse than useless because it is deceptive.<\/p>\n
The point here isn\u2019t to cast aspersions, but to consider how environmental agreements are conceived, negotiated, and enforced. Readers are invited to further consider how the income measure of GDP works as a framework for understanding the political economy of climate change. The logic, again, is that GDP and greenhouse gas emission levels and rates of change are causally related. At the levels of nations and class, rich nations and the global rich bear quanta of responsibility for these emissions approximated by their income-shares of GDP. The relationship isn\u2019t perfect, but it fundamentally reframes environmental politics in the class terms from which the problems emanate.<\/p>\n
The prospective benefit of a robust Green New Deal with a Job Guarantee is that it would shift social resources down the class distribution in a way that reflects the class basis of environmental problems. This isn\u2019t what is being proposed and it is important to understand the difference. The rich made themselves rich by trashing the planet that the rest of us depend on for existence. Leaving it to the rich to voluntarily clean up the mess they created would look a lot like making nice-sounding but unenforceable agreements between nations while subsidizing corporations to further trash the planet through \u2018green\u2019 capitalism. This will not work, and we\u2019re out of time for marketing b.s. and green capitalist experiments.<\/p>\n\n
This post was originally published on Radio Free<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Through 2019, the last year for which data is available, greenhouse gas emissions and global GDP growth remained as highly correlated as they have been for the last\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":532,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64987"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/532"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64987"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64987\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":64988,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64987\/revisions\/64988"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64987"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64987"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64987"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}