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Safe Drinking Water at Risk  The FTAA is likely to replicate NAFTA provisions that could force citizens to pay polluters not to pollute. Several years ago, Californians discovered that a widely used gasoline additive called MTBE was leaking from boats, cars and gasoline storage tanks into the water supply. Added to gasoline to improve engine performance, MTBE poses serious cancer risks, damages the nervous system, and causes breathing problems. A mere tablespoon-full can make a swimming pool smell like turpentine. MTBE dissolves readily in water, so it spreads quickly from leaky gasoline storage tanks into the state's drinking water. It has been detected in water sources throughout California, forcing officials to shut drinking water wells from Santa Monica to Sacramento. Altogether, MTBE has contaminated groundwater at over 10,000 sites in California. Nationally, MTBE has been found in 14 percent of urban drinking water wells. In response to the growing health threat, California's Gov. Gray Davis decided to phase out MTBE. Problem solved? Hardly. The Methanex Corporation, a Canadian company that makes MTBE, alleges that the ban hurt its stock price. Taking advantage of little known provisions in NAFTA, Methanex sued the US government in September 2000 to lift the ban or to pay nearly $1 billion in compensation.  The company filed its complaint before a NAFTA arbitration tribunal. Unlike US courts, these three-judge tribunals operate behind closed doors and do not normally allow citizen participation. Its rulings are final and cannot be appealed. If the tribunal rules that California deprived Methanex of its property and awards damages, the federal government could force California to roll back the MTBE ban. Methanex's claim is so extreme that the NAFTA tribunal could easily reject it. However, it is worrisome that the tribunal would even consider such a claim at all. A decision could be made later this year. The MTBE case is the tip of a very large, very dangerous iceberg. If the NAFTA rules applied in this case are implemented widely, they could exert a profound chilling effect on environmental protection and cost taxpayers untold billions of dollars. The Methanex case is just the most recent example in a growing list of efforts by corporate polluters to use these NAFTA provisions to to attack environmental laws:
Polluter Rights vs. the Public Interest Under the Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution, property owners must be given "just compensation" if a government "takes" their property for some public purpose. For nearly two hundred years, this wise principle has protected property owners against loss if government action, such as the decision to build a road through a house, completely destroys the value of a person's property. But since the late 1970s, powerful corporate interests have sought a radical change in this well-established constitutional principle. Mining, logging, and industrial lobbyists have fought for laws that would require government to compensate propertyholders if any government action, no matter how important, reduced their property values, no matter how little. Adoption of such a radical change in long-established constitutional principles would elevate property rights above the public interest and cost taxpayers billions of dollars. Public pressure repeatedly stopped the so-called "takings" agenda in Congress by exposing it as nothing but an effort to make citizens pay polluters to stop polluting. For example, citizens stopped most of the "takings" agenda in Newt Gingrich's "Contract with America." Then, the polluters got creative and inserted the "takings" agenda into NAFTA where citizen input is virtually nonexistent. The FTAA: Environmental Safeguards at Risk In 1994, thirty-four Western Hemisphere chiefs of state announced plans to create the hemisphere-wide FTAA. Powerful industry trade associations are lobbying hard to include NAFTA-like "takings" provisions in the FTAA. If they succeed, governments across the Western Hemisphere could face severe obstacles to solving their environmental problems. Companies based in any FTAA member country with investments in the United States could sue the US government over our pollution control laws. Venezuela-based Citgo could, for instance, sue over new standards that might tighten controls on air or water pollution from gasoline. Alternatively, US companies could use an FTAA investor's tribunal to undermine environmental laws in Latin America. For instance, US mining companies that hold rights to dig for gold beneath the Amazon rainforest could sue for compensation if the Brazilian government moves to protect the rainforest or its indigenous inhabitants. These examples should correct the misperception that trade agreements are only aimed at expanding trade. Instead, key provisions of these agreements are also aimed at expanding corporate property rights at the expense of public interests. Our health and the environment could be the losers. Get Involved: Make Trade Clean, Green, and Fair A responsible trade policy would open markets and protect the environment -- not put our health and natural heritage at risk. To make trade clean, green, and fair, the Sierra Club is urging the Bush administration to take executive action to:
Citizen involvement is critical to winning the fight to make trade clean green and fair:
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