Kansas, Missouri would suffer if the Trump administration discards NAFTA

Converging proof shows that Earth’s climate is seriously deteriorating, and the observable effects are mounting. Just this week, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats’ Worldwide Threat Assessment warned: “Global environmental and ecological degradation, as well as climate change, are likely to fuel competition for resources, economic distress, and social discontent through 2019 and beyond.”

Under former Defense Secretary James Mattis, Pentagon planners took climate disruption into account. Repeated flooding of naval bases will require costly rebuilding. Droughts and crop failures, such as those in Syria, bring huge migration pressures and disrupt our globalized society with armed conflicts.

Wise policy can reduce the severity of climate damage. We must shift our energy use away from internal combustion engines and toward renewable energy.

President Donald Trump’s deregulation of carbon-based fuel production takes us in the wrong direction. His proposed USMCA, or United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement — an alternative to the North American Free Trade Agreement — would boost carbon fuel consumption and carbon emissions. We must urge Congress to refuse to ratify USMCA because of several detrimental provisions:

▪ It would deprive our government of needed discretion to restrain exports of natural gas in the national interest. Not limiting these exports would encourage excessive fracking, further polluting our surface and ground waters.

▪ It would remove tariff restraints on transferring Canadian tar sands through the Midwest via pipelines. This would lead to burning more natural gas needed to extract oil from the sands.

▪ It would establish additional opportunities for fossil fuel corporations to routinely challenge proposed regulations before they are finalized, and to ask that existing regulations be repealed. This would make it harder to reverse unwise deregulation from the Trump administration.

Furthermore, just as under NAFTA, oil and gas producers could claim damages from governments for alleged reduction of profits because of regulation of extraction methods. Claims are filed in international tribunals staffed by practicing lawyers rather than by judges. Governments often weaken needed climate-protection regulations when such claims are brought.

While Congress can undo unwise statutes passed in previous sessions, it is more difficult to undo unwise conventions among nations. If the United States enters USMCA, it cannot change its duties under the convention except by joint action with Canada and Mexico, making it likely that these climate-damaging effects would continue for years.

USMCA would harm our region’s interests. The Weather Channel’s “disruption index” lists Kansas City fifth among American cities likely to be hit hardest by climate change. Americans in urban heat islands will suffer, and extreme droughts will hurt our agricultural economy. However, because warmer air holds more moisture, heavy rains will occur about twice as frequently as they did a century ago, bringing floods and increased erosion. Jet streams are becoming more erratic, bringing increased uncertainty for farmers about weather and their timing for planting and harvest.

UMKC School of Law professor Irma Russell supports this analysis, and notes that Kansas City is a recognized leader in promoting electric vehicles and other green initiatives. She states that our region can thrive in the new green economy.

Orange EV in Riverside is a leader in producing electric trucks for freight terminals. Wind energy installations developed by companies such as Tradewind Energy in Lenexa bring income to landowners in Kansas and Missouri. Such trends would be undercut by unhealthy competition from a glut of cheap gasoline and coal if USMCA is ratified.

Our senators and representatives should vote against ratifying USMCA. Our city and region would suffer the enhanced effects of climate change brought about by this dangerous agreement.

This story was originally published January 31, 2019 at 8:32 PM.