Sierra Club joins anti-TPP letter

From the National Sierra Club

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Today, 40 leading environmental groups including the Indigenous Environmental Network, Bold Nebraska, Friends of the Earth, 350.org, and the Sierra Club sent a letter urging Congress to oppose the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal. The letter, sent to Congress a day before President Obama and Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau meet in Washington, D.C., follows TransCanada’s January announcement that it plans to use rules in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to force American taxpayers to compensate the company for President Obama’s rejection of the Keystone XL project in November 2015.

In January TransCanada announced its intent to use the “investor-state dispute settlement” (ISDS) system in NAFTA to ask a private tribunal of three lawyers to order the U.S. government to pay them more than $15 billion as “compensation” for the pipeline rejection -- a decision that spared communities the threat of increased climate disruption and spills of dirty tar sands oil.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) -- a pending trade deal symbolically signed by the 12 member nations’ leaders at a ceremony in February but still requiring approval from Congress -- would extend virtually the same broad rights that TransCanada is claiming to more than 9,000 new foreign-owned firms operating in the U.S., roughly doubling the number of foreign corporations that could follow TransCanada’s lead and challenge our environmental protections in unaccountable tribunals.