WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama has made environmental safeguards one of the selling points of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. But environmental groups aren’t buying.
The influential environmental groups – a key part of the effort to rally the Democratic base against the fast-track bill for trade talks – believe that a new trade pact could set back important gains achieved over the past two decades. By contrast, the White House argues, as senior adviser Brian Deese put it in a recent Web posting, that this is “a once-in-a-generation chance to protect our oceans, wildlife, and the environment.”
The trade issue pits Obama, who has devoted himself to slowing climate change, against environmental groups, who are clamoring for tougher terms. In a largely unpublicized May 21 meeting with the heads of a handful of major environmental groups including Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council and League of Conservation Voters, Obama asked for their trust and help convincing members of Congress to give him fast-track authority to conclude the TPP agreement.
But environmental groups, his natural allies in many ways, still are not willing to grant Obama that trust. And the president seemed more focused on explaining his position than hearing theirs, said someone familiar with the meeting.
“The president can’t just come into office and say ‘trust me’ because we have a couple of decades of experience where these trade agreements have been used to undermine environmental laws in other countries,” said Friends of the Earth President Erich Pica, who was not at the meeting. “So there’s a higher bar than just ‘trust us’ on trade.”
Rarely has the president been so isolated from virtually all of his traditional Democratic constituencies. But this is not the first time gaps have opened up between Obama and environmental groups. Close cooperation between the White House and the environmental advocacy community on issues such as clean-air regulations affecting coal plants and higher fuel-efficiency standards for vehicles has not stopped environmental leaders from marching on the White House over the Keystone XL pipeline or filing lawsuits for tougher regulatory enforcement.
Environmental groups are still noisily demanding that the president block Royal Dutch Shell plans to drill in Alaska’s Arctic, impose tougher regulation of oil and gas fracking, limit liquefied natural-gas exports and reject the Keystone XL application.
Their greatest fear about the trade pact under negotiation is that it would allow multinational corporations to ask international tribunals to overrule domestic regulations and laws. Rather than raise environmental standards to higher levels, the agreement would result in a “race to the bottom,” said League of Conservation Voters President Gene Karpinski.
“Many provisions under negotiation in pending trade deals could undermine important progress on top environmental concerns,” Karpinski said in a statement last week.
The two prominent environmental groups have been supportive of Obama’s positions in trade talks but have not yet formally endorsed the outcome. Oceana and the World Wildlife Fund like TPP provisions that the administration says would protect ocean life, forests and endangered species. Unlike 43 other environmental groups, they did not sign a June 11 letter to members of Congress opposing fast-track authority for the president.
“Harmful fisheries subsidies promote overfishing, pushing fleets to fish longer, harder and farther away than would otherwise be economically possible,” Dustin Cranor, communications director for Oceana, said in an email. “The TPP countries produce one-third of the world’s wild seafood by weight, and a TPP deal on fisheries subsidies could result in a big win for the oceans.”
These groups have come under pressure from their environmental colleagues to remain neutral and refrain from endorsing fast-track authority for the president, which is the most immediate legislative issue.
And environmental groups have good relationships with many West Coast Democrats, who sympathize with the benefits of free trade but also count themselves strong environmental advocates.
Those who voted for fast-track authority included Reps. Sam Farr, D-Calif., and Scott Peters, D-Calif. The director of the Sierra Club’s responsible trade program, Ilana Solomon, called both “environmental champions.”
