a review of how the new trade deals will impact oil & gas exploitation in the US
this past week we witnessed an elaborate kabuki in the Senate, wherein the Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) that Obama has sought at first appeared to have blocked by the Senate Democrats, and then, within 48 hours, a deal was cut and we saw it pass...hence, the last chance to stop this TPA, and hence the passage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which will mandate exports of our gas and oil to Asia and turn half this country into a fracking hellhole, lies with the House, where we'll need a coalition of progressive Democrats and tea-party Republicans to stop it...if it is not stopped, any hopes for home rule in Ohio, or anywhere else in the nation, will be waylaid by the coming multinational corporate state, and we'll begin the transition into a world wherein our national laws and environmental regulations will be subservient to the international investors and corporations that will ultimately become the de facto new world government...
so, while we've discussed this issue before, most recently 7 weeks ago, it's worth reiterating what it's all about...for over 5 years, the Administration has been working in secret to get two major trade deals, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), with 12 nations on the Pacific Rim, and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, between the US and countries of the European Union, completed and ratified...the larger purpose of these pending agreements is to benefit multinational corporations, who in doing business worldwide, must presently contend with different laws and regulations in each country they do business in, and the ultimate goal of these agreements, and of those that will eventually follow them, is to create what will be an overriding international corporate government with its own laws and court system that will trump the laws of the member nations, and give corporations free reign to do business everywhere, unencumbered by national laws, under this new system worldwide...under our own Constitution, such international treaties would normally need to be reviewed and ratified by a two-thirds vote of Congress; under TPA, aka "fast track", this administration, and the Jeb Bush administration to follow, will be granted the right to negotiate trade treaties without input from Congress, and once completed, these trade treaties will not be reviewable or amendable by Congress, who can then only ratify them with a simple majority...
as noted, these two agreements have been negotiated in secret, and most of what we know about them has come from Wikileaks, who has obtained and released a few of the 29 secret chapters of the TPP...the TPP has been negotiated by U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman, in consultation with 605 corporate advisers, and their counterparts from the other 12 nations; and neither the people nor their representatives in Congress have had any input....in fact, if a Congressman wants to read the copy of the current text, he or she must go alone, to a guarded and locked room in the basement of the capital building, and surrender any notes they take after leaving; they are sworn not to reveal what they've read, and their staff, or advisors, who might be able to interpret the trade legalese, are not permitted to accompany them...so chances are that if you would read the TPP chapter on the environment released by Wikileaks, and the TPP chapter on the investor-state protections, you would know more about what's in these agreements than 90% of the congresscritters who are voting to allow them to go forward...
as the Sierra Club warned us two years ago, passage of these agreements would unleash a nightmare of increased oil & gas fracking activity, as not only will these agreements allow for oil and gas exports, they effectively mandate those exports, giving the signatories equal claim to our oil and gas resources as our own citizens, and supersede domestic energy policy and protections currently in place...furthermore, there will no longer be legal recourse available under US law to control this drilling activity...the investor-state provisions of these agreements set up a supra-national court under the World Trade Organization's Dispute Settlement Body, whereby corporations will be able to sue governments and obtain taxpayer compensation for whatever "expected future profits" that any state or local law encumbered...hence, the state of New York could be sued by the natural gas leaseholders in the Southern tier of the state who've been economically encumbered by the state fracking ban, Pennsylvania frackwater disposal operations could sue Ohio after being shut down for causing earthquakes in Trumbull county, and California oil companies could sue the counties who passed fracking bans last November...
furthermore, with the international price of oil running $5 to $10 dollars more than the US oil price, US frackers would take advantage of the higher prices they'd garner from selling their oil overseas, with the attendant increase in fracking, and hence eventually the US price would rise to the world price level...even worse, US domestic natural gas, now fairly landlocked with few approved LNG export terminals, would be sold in Japan near $15 per mmBTU, roughly five times the $3 per mmBTU that US natural gas has been priced at in recent months...even considering the additional costs of liquefying and transporting American gas to Asia, American producers stand to triple their profits or more by selling LNG overseas....and if they can get $15 from Japan, don't imagine that US prices will stay anywhere close to where they've been...so not only will passing this agreement upend our environmental regulations, it will also be the impetus for higher domestic prices for oil and gas and increased fracking in even the thinnest bands of shale that have been ignored up till now...furthermore, natural gas prices for heating and industry will skyrocket, and with natural gas priced higher than coal, utilities will return to coal, and strip mining of Appalachian communities will come back with a vengeance...