This Changes Everything (14 page)

As the free trade system was put in place and producing
offshore became the rule, emissions did more than move—they multiplied. As mentioned earlier, before the neoliberal era, emissions growth had been slowing, from 4.5 percent annual increases in the 1960s to about 1 percent a year in the 1990s. But the new millennium was a watershed: between 2000 and 2008, the growth rate reached 3.4 percent a year, shooting past the highest IPCC projections of
the day. In 2009, it dipped due to the financial crisis, but made up for lost time with the historic 5.9 percent increase in 2010 that left climate watchers reeling. (In mid-2014, two decades after the creation of the WTO, the IPCC finally acknowledged the reality of globalization and noted in its Fifth Assessment Report, “A growing share of total anthropogenic CO
₂
emissions is released in the
manufacture of products that are traded across international borders.”)
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The reason for what Andreas Malm—a Swedish expert on the history of coal—describes as “the early 21st Century emissions explosion” is straightforward enough. When China became the “workshop of the world” it also became the coal-spewing “chimney of the world.” By 2007, China was responsible for two thirds of the annual increase
in global emissions. Some of that was the result of China’s own internal development—bringing electricity to rural areas, and building roads. But a lot of it was directly tied to foreign trade: according to one study, between 2002 and 2008, 48 percent of China’s total emissions was related to producing goods for export.
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“One of the reasons why we’re in the climate crisis is because of this
model of globalization,” says Margrete Strand Rangnes, executive vice president at Public Citizen, a Washington-based policy institute that has been at the forefront of the fight against free trade. And that, she says, is a problem that requires “a pretty fundamental re-formation of our economy, if we’re going to do this right.”
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International trade deals were only one of the reasons that governments
embraced this particular model of fast-and-dirty, export-led development, and every country had its own peculiarities. In many cases (though not China’s), the conditions attached to loans from the International Monetary Fund and World Bank were a major factor, so was the economic orthodoxy imparted to elite students at schools like Harvard and the University of Chicago. All of these and other
factors played a role in shaping what was (never ironically) referred to as the Washington Consensus. Underneath it all is the constant drive for endless economic growth, a drive that, as will be explored later on, goes much deeper than the trade history of the past few decades. But there is no question that the trade architecture and the economic ideology embedded within it played a central role
in sending emissions into hyperdrive.

That’s because one of the primary driving forces of the particular trade system designed in the 1980s and 1990s was always to allow multinationals the freedom to scour the globe in search of the cheapest and most exploitable labor force. It was a journey that passed through Mexico and Central America’s sweatshop maquiladoras and had a long stopover in South
Korea. But by the end of the 1990s, virtually all roads led to China, a country where wages were extraordinarily low, trade unions were brutally suppressed, and the state was willing to spend seemingly limitless funds on massive infrastructure projects—modern ports, sprawling highway systems, endless numbers of coal-fired power plants, massive dams—all to ensure that the lights stayed on in the
factories and the goods made it from the assembly lines onto the container ships on time. A free trader’s dream, in other words—and a climate nightmare.

A nightmare because there is a close correlation between low wages and high emissions, or as Malm puts it, “a causal link between the quest for cheap and disciplined labor power and rising CO
₂
emissions.” And why wouldn’t there be? The same logic
that is willing to work laborers to the bone for pennies a day will burn mountains of dirty coal while spending next to nothing on pollution controls because it’s the cheapest way to produce. So when the factories moved to China, they also got markedly dirtier. As Malm points out, Chinese coal use was declining slightly between 1995 and 2000, only for the explosion in manufacturing to send it
soaring once again. It’s not that the companies moving their production to China
wanted to drive up emissions: they were after the cheap labor, but exploited workers and an exploited planet are, it turns out, a package deal. A destabilized climate is the cost of deregulated, global capitalism, its unintended, yet unavoidable consequence.
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This connection between pollution and labor exploitation
has been true since the earliest days of the Industrial Revolution. But in the past, when workers organized to demand better wages, and when city dwellers organized to demand cleaner air, the companies were pretty much forced to improve both working and environmental standards. That changed with the advent of free trade: thanks to the removal of virtually all barriers to capital flows, corporations
could pick up and leave every time labor costs started rising. That’s why many large manufacturers left South Korea for China in the late 1990s, and it’s why many are now leaving China, where wages are climbing, for Bangladesh, where they are significantly lower. So while our clothes, electronics, and furniture may be made in China, the economic model was primarily made in the U.S.A.

And yet
when the subject of climate change comes up in discussion in wealthy, industrialized countries, the instant response, very often, is that it’s all China’s fault (and India’s fault and Brazil’s fault and so on). Why bother cutting our own emissions when everyone knows that the fast developing economies are the real problem, opening more coal plants every month than we could ever close?
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This argument
is made as if we in the West are mere spectators to this reckless and dirty model of economic growth. As if it was not our governments and our multinationals that pushed a model of export-led development that made all of this possible. It is said as if it were not our own corporations who, with single-minded determination (and with full participation from China’s autocratic rulers), turned
the Pearl River Delta into their carbon-spewing special economic zone, with the goods going straight onto container ships headed to our superstores. All in the name of feeding the god of economic growth (via the altar of hyper-consumption) in every country in the world.

The victims in all this are regular people: the workers who lose their factory jobs in Juárez and Windsor; the workers who get
the factory jobs in Shenzhen and Dhaka, jobs that are by this point so degraded that some employers install nets along the perimeters of roofs to catch employees
when they jump, or where safety codes are so lax that workers are killed in the hundreds when buildings collapse. The victims are also the toddlers mouthing lead-laden toys; the Walmart employee expected to work over the Thanksgiving
holiday only to be trampled by a stampede of frenzied customers, while still not earning a living wage. And the Chinese villagers whose water is contaminated by one of those coal plants we use as our excuse for inaction, as well as the middle class of Beijing and Shanghai whose kids are forced to play inside because the air is so foul.
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The greatest tragedy of all
is that so much of this was eminently avoidable. We knew about the climate crisis when the rules of the new trade system were being written. After all, NAFTA was signed just one year after governments, including the United States, signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Rio. And it was by no means inevitable that these deals would go through. A strong coalition of North
American labor and environmental groups opposed NAFTA precisely because they knew it would drive down labor and environmental standards. For a time it even looked as if they would win.

Public opinion in all three countries was deeply divided, so much so that when Bill Clinton ran for president in 1992, he pledged that he would not sign NAFTA until it substantively reflected those concerns. In
Canada, Jean Chrétien campaigned for prime minister against the deal in the election of 1993. Once both were in office, however, the deal was left intact and two toothless side agreements were tacked on, one for labor and one for environmental standards. The labor movement knew better than to fall for this ploy and continued to forcefully oppose the deal, as did many Democrats in the U.S. But for
a complex set of reasons that will be explored later, having to do with a combination of reflexive political centrism and the growing influence of corporate “partners” and donors, the leadership of many large environmental organizations decided to play ball. “One by one, former NAFTA opponents and skeptics became enthusiastic supporters, and said so publicly,” writes journalist Mark Dowie in his
critical history
of the U.S. environmental movement,
Losing Ground
. These Big Green groups even created their own pro-NAFTA organization, the Environmental Coalition for NAFTA—which included the National Wildlife Federation, the Environmental Defense Fund, Conservation International, the National Audubon Society, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the World Wildlife Fund—which, according
to Dowie provided its “unequivocal support to the agreement.” Jay Hair, then head of the National Wildlife Federation, even flew to Mexico on an official U.S. trade mission to lobby his Mexican counterparts, while attacking his critics for “putting their protectionist polemics ahead of concern for the environment.”
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Not everyone in the green movement hopped on the pro-trade bandwagon: Greenpeace,
Friends of the Earth, and the Sierra Club, as well as many small organizations, continued to oppose NAFTA. But that didn’t matter to the Clinton administration, which had what it wanted—the ability to tell a skeptical public that “groups representing 80 percent of national [environmental] group membership have endorsed NAFTA.” And that was important, because Clinton faced an uphill battle getting
NAFTA through Congress, with many in his own party pledging to vote against the deal. John Adams, then director of the Natural Resources Defense Council, succinctly described the extraordinarily helpful role played by groups like his: “We broke the back of the environmental opposition to NAFTA. After we established our position Clinton only had labor to fight. We did him a big favor.”
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Indeed
when the president signed NAFTA into law in 1993, he made a special point of thanking “the environmental people who came out and worked through this—many of them at great criticism, particularly in the environmental movement.” Clinton also made it clear that this victory was about more than one agreement. “Today we have the chance to do what our parents did before us. We have the opportunity to
remake the world.” He explained that, “We are on the verge of a global economic expansion. . . . Already the confidence we’ve displayed by ratifying NAFTA has begun to bear fruit. We are now making real progress toward a worldwide trade agreement so significant that it could make the material gains of NAFTA for our country look small by comparison.” He was referring to the World Trade Organization.
And just in case anyone was still worried about the envi
ronmental consequences, Clinton offered his personal assurance. “We will seek new institutional arrangements to ensure that trade leaves the world cleaner than before.”
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Standing by the president’s side was his vice president, Al Gore, who had been largely responsible for getting so many Big Green groups on board. Given this history, it
should hardly come as a surprise that the mainstream environmental movement has been in no rush to draw attention to the disastrous climate impacts of the free trade era. To do so would only highlight their own active role in helping the U.S. government to, in Clinton’s words, “remake the world.” Much better, as we will see later on, to talk about light bulbs and fuel efficiency.

The significance
of the NAFTA signing was indeed historic, tragically so. Because if the environmental movement had not been so agreeable, NAFTA might have been blocked or renegotiated to set a different kind of precedent. A new trade architecture could have been built that did not actively sabotage the fragile global climate change consensus. Instead—as had been the promise and hope of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit—this
new architecture could have been grounded in the need to fight poverty and reduce emissions at the same time. So for example, trade access to developing countries could have been tied to transfers of resources and green technology so that critical new electricity and transit infrastructure was low carbon from the outset. And the deals could have been written to ensure that any measures taken
to support renewable energy would not be penalized and, in fact, could be rewarded. The global economy might not have grown as quickly as it did, but it also would not be headed rapidly off the climate cliff.

The errors of this period cannot be undone, but it is not too late for a new kind of climate movement to take up the fight against so-called free trade and build this needed architecture
now. That doesn’t—and never did—mean an end to economic exchange across borders. It does, however, mean a far more thoughtful and deliberate approach to why we trade and whom it serves. Encouraging the frenetic and indiscriminate consumption of essentially disposable products can no longer be the system’s goal. Goods must once again be made to last, and the use of energy-intensive long-haul transport
will need to be rationed—reserved for those cases where goods cannot be produced locally or where local production is more carbon-
intensive. (For example, growing food in greenhouses in cold parts of the United States is often more energy intensive than growing it in warmer regions and shipping it by light rail.)
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According to Ilana Solomon, trade analyst for the Sierra Club, this is not a fight
that the climate movement can avoid. “In order to combat climate change, there’s a real need to start localizing our economies again, and thinking about how and what we’re purchasing and how it’s produced. And the most basic rule of trade law is you can’t privilege domestic over foreign. So how do you tackle the idea of needing to incentivize local economies, tying together local green jobs policies
with clean energy policies, when that is just a no-go in trade policy? . . . If we don’t think about how the economy is structured, then we’re actually never going to the real root of the problem.”
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