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Comment by max76 | Hacker News Reader

"For the first time, the trade agreement includes countries' Paris climate deal commitments."

This is a brilliant answer to the tragedy of the commons. Often times people ask why they should make great efforts to be more environmentally friendly when other groups are not. This creates multiparty incentives attached to real economic benefits to keep their word on climate change. I hope The US, China, and Russia all enter economic agreements with similar clauses.

EDIT: I didn't mean to single out those three countries. All countries should include these clauses in their economic agreements. India, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Canada are top ten polluters that are not covered in this specific agreement or mentioned by me above.

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Hardly. The countries already made these non binding commitments, there is still no penalty for breaking them, and they bear no resemblance to what would be required to stay below 1.5C or 2C (the supposed headline achievement of Paris).

They were not negotiated on either - they are just what each country has said it would do.

There is technically a penalty, but it's unlikely to be enforced - if one party breaches their commitments, they could be considered in breach of the agreement and the other party would have license to break it.

As the effects of climate change become worse I suspect enforcement of these penalties to increase.

The TPP would have folded in a bunch of environmental protection rules, but the US blew it up. It's debatable how good these protections would have been, but they were not nothing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Pacific_Partnership#Envi...

The TPP had many other issues though.

Examples include criminal penalties for breaking DRM or disclosing trade secrets, and establishing an international tribunal that allows corporations to sue for monetary damages from a government that passes a law which they feel is discriminatory. (I know the US has trade agreements like this already, but it's a new thing for Australia -- and unfortunately we are now part of the new US-exempt TPP.)

The point of that was to stop Malaysia and Singapore from pirating movies and software.

I think there's something to be said about the correct distrust of MPAA. But at the same time, Malaysia and Singapore were clear pirate hubs that were harmful to any IP based economy.

> ... Singapore were clear pirate hubs that were harmful to any IP based economy.

That's an absurd and factually incorrect statement.

You're aware of the history of singapore, right?

Joke alert - it used to be a piracy hub.

arr. strait over my head.

Well, from my point of view, copyright maximalism is much bigger theft than file sharing in Malaysia.

What's your proposed alternative to this sort of international tribunal? To me it feels like obviously the correct solution, and e.g. the EU/EEA has this with the EFTA courts and the WTO has it with its courts. Point in favor:

1. It makes sense for a corporation in say Malaysia to be able to sue Australia over state subsidies, otherwise they need to convince their own governments to bring it up at the inter-state level, and Malaysia may consider it too small of an issue to piss off Australia

2. There needs to be one centralized enforcing mechanism. A Malaysian company can't sue the Australian government in its own courts (or Australia's), both would have an obvious bias towards their own country.

Even if we assume the courts are fair you'll create N^2 amount of enforcement relationships for the N countries in the deal. That's just redundant, and everyone has an interest in centrally set legal precedent.

3. There need to be damages so countries can't circumvent the trade deal with what amounts to state-sponsored favoritism with impunity.

The presence of a central court that can regulate goverment that act rashly is one thing, to allow individual companies to sue governments is another.

Yes it's a different thing. I'm asking you to make the case that it's a bad thing, which you're not doing.

You're also assuming that all trade disputes are going to involve country X having an issue with country Y, whereas e.g. in the EU/EEA companies sometimes sue their own government for being in breach of the trade rules, and prevail in front of the EFTA court.

E.g. a meat importing company in Iceland sued the Icelandic state over the Icelandic government's ban on the import of fresh meat from the EU/EEA[1]. They prevailed, and now Iceland's having to allow that, over the objections of its powerful farming lobby.

It wouldn't have made sense for any foreign EU/EEA government to start a trade dispute with Iceland over this matter, but it got resolved because a local company was able to sue and have the EFTA court rule on the matter.

Why shouldn't the aggrieved party be able to sue?

1. http://www.eftasurv.int/media/press-releases/Fact-sheet-Icel...

As I mentioned in my sister comment, because we have evidence that allowing companies to do this would've resulted in the tobacco lobby being able to overturn public health laws in Australia (because they tried to do it within an arbitration courts that they didn't have jurisdiction in). If the TPP was signed in 2011, Australia would've had to pay damages to Phillip Morris for passing plain packaging laws (something that is now becoming a more common law in many jurisdictions).

The problem with the EFTA (or ECJ) comparison is that those courts are designed to deal with the laws and directives passed by the EU/EEA. The entire point of the EU/EEA is that members democratically vote on laws that will affect members -- thus a violation of said laws by a government is similar (in principle) to any other violation by a government where an individual can sue the government for violating a law.

The TPP arbitration process is not like this at all. There is no democratic agreement on common laws that member states must not violate -- it's a process to allow a corporation to sue a government for enacting "discriminatory" laws (unless those laws are "fair and proportionate" -- which obviously is a very wishy-washy constraint).

We've had this for a long time in NAFTA and it hasn't been a big deal:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investor-state_dispute_settlem...

The people in the international tribunal come from somewhere. Wouldn't they still be biased toward the part of the world they come from?

Presumably a panel of said international tribunal would have equal members of participating countries to avoid such favoritism in the first place.

Having a process like the ECJ or EFTA (where governments breaking international agreements can go through a tribunal process) is one thing. Giving corporations the ability to sue governments for laws that are "discriminatory" is another thing entirely.

In Australia we have a concrete example of what negative effects such a court would have. When we introduced plain packaging laws, many tobacco companies have attempted to use international trade agreement arbitration systems to overturn the law. They first tried persuading several governments (Ukraine, Cuba, Honduras and the Dominican Republic) to use the WTO court system to start legal proceedings against Australia[1]. When it looked like that attempt would fail, they tried to use the international arbitration system that was part of a trade agreement from 1939 that Australia has with Hong Kong[2]. This also failed because of a jurisdictional issue.

However if there was a court that was specifically designed to allow companies to sue governments for discrimination, Phillip Morris and similar tobacco companies would've had jurisdiction for such a claim (and likely they would've won, because the plain packaging laws explicitly discriminate against tobacco companies and were seen as very extreme at the time).

In fact, the only reason why the TPP explicitly excludes tobacco is because Australia complained and gave this same example. The response was just to remove tobacco from the agreement, not redesign the international tribunal system they wanted (which misses the point of the complaint). Unfortunately we've changed government since then, so we've now signed the new version of the TPP.

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/07/business/global/07iht-smo... [2]: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/dec/18/austr...

It's not quite accurate to say the US "blew it up." The other countries just signed TPP-11 without the US, and the agreement went into effect on December 30, 2018

William Nordhaus, winner of the 2018 Nobel prize in economics, advocated for this, calling such agreements "Climate Clubs"

https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.15000001

Here is some good news I found today:

The Montreal protocol (to ban ozone-layer-destroying gas emissions) works quite well so far and also has implications for climate change:

> As reported in the 2014 Assessment, chemistry–climate models suggest that continued accumulation of ODSs in the atmosphere in the absence of the Montreal Protocol would have led to a collapse of the global ozone layer by the mid-21st century, with devastating environ-mental implications (Newman et al., 2009; Garcia et al., 2012).

> The last Assessment also reported on the additional (mostly unanticipated) benefits of ODS regulations for mitigation of global climate change.

> Specifically, it was reported that by later this century, unregulated ODS increases could have led to global surface temperature increases comparable to tem-perature increases caused by other greenhouse gases (Velders et al., 2007) and could have almost doubled changes in the hydrological cycle (precipitation minus evaporation) over the next few decades.

The newest addition, the Kigali Amendment, phases out some more gases. This also has implications:

> As discussed in Chapter 2, these new studies indicate that the an-ticipated phasedown of HFCs is expected to avoid up to 0.4 K of global mean surface warming by 2100.

(see some plots on page 34)

http://ozone.unep.org/sites/default/files/Assessment_Panel/S...

I _think_ a key difference between the montreal protocol and the paris agreement is that the first meant _banning products_, so a if country X keeps producing something with CFCs and tries to sell it to country Y then the latter can just forbid importing.

So individual actors have an economical incentive to be compliant.

This does not work for CO2 emissions, we're left to the individual countries' "goodwill".

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