Here in the United States, debate over whether to grant the President Fast Track authority for the Trans-Pacific Partnership is currently causing much inner-party strife, and fortunately, it has been an uphill battle for TPP advocates – so far.

But President Barack Obama won an important procedural vote in Congress yesterday, when a handful of House Democrats joined with pro-trade House Republicans to advance his ‘free trade’ agenda in a 217-212 vote.

That has now cleared the way for a final vote in Congress today, Friday, giving campaigners just a few short hours in which to pressure their representatives for a ‘no’ vote – in the full knowledge that corporate lobbyists are hard at work practising their dark arts in the opposing direction.

The fact that President Obama has teamed up with the Republican establishment for this massive trade deal shows how un-socialist he really is – and how Republican’s aren’t really opposed to executive power, as long as it is in support of their policies.

Obviously, controversy over the TPP has made it a tough sell for the President, one that liberals are not buying. The TPP is full of corporate handouts, most notoriously for the pharmaceutical industry, which will be granted patent term extensions, and strengthen monopoly power on important medicines around the world, making them unaffordable in many areas. It will also strengthen intellectual property laws in other industries, specifically in the digital sphere.

Investment before health, environment, democracy

The most notorious part of the TPP, however, is the Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) provision, which Elizabeth Warren wrote about a few months back in the Washington Post, saying:

“ISDS would allow foreign companies to challenge US laws – and potentially to pick up huge payouts from taxpayers – without ever stepping foot in a US court.”

A scary thought indeed, but is it true? Well, it depends who you ask. If, for example, you were to ask the Obama administration, they would vehemently deny that the ISDS could challenge US laws – and shortly after the Warren editorial, they did just this, with a Q&A blog for the ISDS.

“It is an often repeated, but inaccurate, claim that ISDS gives companies the right to weaken labor or environmental standards, for example, suggesting that a trade agreement could result in the United States having to lower its minimum wage. The reality is that ISDS does not and cannot require countries to change any law or regulation”, wrote Director of National Economic Council and economic advisor to the president, Jeffrey Zients.

So, who is correct? Both, actually; but Warren is much more intellectually honest. While the ISDS cannot actually “require countries to change any law or regulation”, it can and has been used by corporations as a bargaining tool, pushing sovereign governments to back down on regulations, or fork out taxpayer money in arbitration, and possibly millions in damages.

ISDS is no ‘dead letter’ – it’s real, it’s armed, and it’s dangerous

The ISDS is barely a new instrument; it has been around since first being introduced in 1959, in a trade deal between Germany and Pakistan, but has become an increasingly popular mechanism of international law since the nineties. The original intent of the ISDS was to increase foreign investment in countries where business was risky, by providing a bit of security for investors.

While the ISDS has been included in many trade deals, it was barely used before the nineties. This changed towards the end of the century, and its use rapidly increased during the 2000s, going from just a few cases filed in the early nineties, to nearly sixty annual cases filed by 2012.

Basically, big corporations discovered how valuable the ISDS could be when dealing with foreign governments who were a bit too ambitious in the regulatory domain. In many cases, the lawsuit is brought after a government regulates an industry for environmental or health reasons.

This is currently happening in Australia, where tobacco company Phillip Morris is suing the government after they passed a law requiring cigarettes to be ‘plain-packaged’ without branding. This has been shown to reduce smoking, especially in youth, and so Phillip Morris is suing for ‘expropriation’, or lost profit.

The United States has many trade agreements with the ISDS provision, most notably in NAFTA. In once case, the extraction company, Lone Pine, has sued the Canadian government after they filed a moratorium on hydraulic fracturing for environmental reasons.

A valuable ‘bullying tool’ for corporate heavyweights

In one notable case the US-based Renco Group, owned by billionaire Ira Rennert, used the ISDS provision to bully the Peruvian government after they shut down a metal smelter in the town of La Oroya – one of the most polluted towns in the world – when the company delayed environmental improvements. The Renco Group pressured the Peruvian government into restarting the zinc smelting operations in 2012.

So, while the ISDS cannot literally overturn a regulation or law, it can be used to bully a country’s government into doing so. Of course, the White House has said that it will be different under the TPP. In the same blog, Zients writes:

“ISDS has come under criticism because of some legitimate complaints about poorly written agreements. The US shares some of those concerns, and agrees with the need for new, higher standards, stronger safeguards and better transparency provisions. Through TPP and other agreements, that is exactly what we are putting in place.”

At the time, we had to take his word, with the great secrecy surrounding the TPP; but today, we know a bit more, thanks to Wikileaks, who released the TPP Investing chapter last March, dated January 20, 2015.

So, is the TPP’s ISDS provision different from that of NAFTA or the other trade agreements? Are there higher standards and stronger safeguards to prevent a company like Phillip Morris from using the ISDS to sue for lost profit?

When is a public welfare objective ‘legitimate’?

Maybe a little, but not nearly enough. There is some wording in the chapter that does try to prevent the ISDS from being used as a corporate tool to sue governments over environmental, health, or other public safety regulations. In the preamble, it is written:

“Recognizing the inherent right to regulate and resolving to preserve the flexibility of the Parties to protect legitimate public welfare objectives, such as public health, safety, the environment, the conservation of living or non-living exhaustible natural resources, and public morals.”

This is good, but NAFTA has similar wording in its investment chapter, and corporations could easily argue over what a “legitimate public welfare objective” is. Is a moratorium on fracking a legitimate public welfare objective, for example?

Trade experts aren’t convinced that the TPP’s ISDS chapter is much different from previous ones, either, while the arbitration process, which has been one of the most criticized aspects of ISDS, has remained unchanged, with three highly paid lawyers selected, one by the defendant, one by the plaintiff, and one agreed upon by both.

The same lawyers also tend to alternate between the ‘suing’ and ‘judging’ positions, which critics have said creates conflict of interest.

ISDS must be eliminated from all future trade agreements

It is scary to think about this provision, largely unchanged from what we know, being included in the TPP, which covers about 40% of the worlds economy.

Warren was correct when she said that “agreeing to ISDS in this enormous new treaty would tilt the playing field in the United States further in favor of big multinational corporations. Worse, it would undermine US sovereignty.”

ISDS was an international trade mechanism that was created in earnest, to increase foreign trade by providing investors with a sort of insurance policy. But today, it has become a dangerous weapon for multi-national corporations who do not want to play by the rules, especially if it costs them some profit.

This endangers the safety of populations, the environment, and the sovereignty of nations, and it should be eliminated from any future trade agreements if our governments cannot agree on real changes.

Petition: ‘Tell Congress to Say NO to Monsanto and the TPP!‘

Call 1-888-804-8311 now to tell your Congress Person to vote NO! If this passes GMO labeling will be considered a trade barrier! (says Moms Across America).

Conor J. Lynch is a writer living in New York City. He has written previously for openDemocracy, The Richard Dawkins Foundation, and regularly blogs on Daily Kos about politics, economics, and science. Follow him@dilgentbureauct

This article was originally published by openDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 licence. Additional reporting / news updates by The Ecologist.

Each year, Gray whales set out on one of the longest migratory journeys on the planet: a nearly 13,000-mile swim from their feeding grounds in Alaska to the warm waters of Baja California Sur in Mexico.

In Baja California Sur whales birth and raise their calves – after which they turn around and swim back again.

Experts estimate that by the time a Gray whale turns 50 it has traveled the distance from the earth to the moon and back.

But this impressive, 50-foot mammal and its migratory feat are threatened by one of the world’s first marine phosphate mines.

If the project gets the green light, the mine could gravely damage the environment the Gray whale needs to breed and nurse during winter months.

The scope of the threat to whale populations became all too clear in late February when more than 2,600 Gray whales arrived at the San Ignacio and Ojo de Liebre lagoons in Baja California Sur, very close to Ulloa Bay.

This was the highest number of whales recorded in the past 19 years. The whale migration provides an important source of income for local families who depend on tourism dollars from whale watchers.

Clearly, just the place for a 225,000 acre undersea mine

Yet it’s precisely in this area near Ulloa Bay that the American company Odyssey Marine Explorations intends to start the ‘Don Diego’ phosphate mine. The proposed mine would include five work sites in an area of more than 225,000 acres.

Each site would be exploited for 10 years, resulting in a 50-year-long project. The goal is to extract 350 million tons of phosphate sand from the marine floor-a quantity that would fill Mexico City’s Aztec Stadium 264 times.

Gray whales, as well as Humpback and Blue whales and Loggerhead turtles that live in or pass through the zone, depend on sound to communicate, stay together and find food. The Don Diego project will use dredging to collect the phosphate sand, producing a lot of noise in the process.

Even the company’s own environmental assessment concedes that the mine could create a “modification of vocal behavior or surprise reaction” in the whales. The noise could jeopardize the survival of the whales by causing changes in their behavior and migration route, and it could also disrupt mothers feeding their calves.

Moreover, large boats will dredge the seabed to extract sand, but in the process they will also upend living organisms. The dredged material will be separated to obtain phosphate, and the leftover material dumped back into the sea.

The sediments returning to the ocean may contain high levels of toxic elements such as uranium and thorium, which are exposed during the phosphate-separation process. These toxins may be consumed by fish that then arrive on our tables, making phosphate mining a potential source of radioactive contamination.

Mexico’s chance to prove itself a wise guardian of the oceans

In September 2014, Odyssey presented its environmental impact assessment to Mexico’s Secretariat of Environment and Natural Resources. AIDA, the Interamerican Association for Environmental Defense, presented comments on the Don Diego environmental assessment before the secretariat, spotlighting the ecological reasons the project should be shelved and requesting more detailed information from the company.

Last month the Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC), which includes the United States, Mexico and Canada, voted against a request that the nations investigate whether Mexico appropriately considers environmental risks of proposed projects with coastal impacts.

However the question is certain to recur at CEC’s 12th Council Session which is taking place in Boston next month, 14th-15th July – all the more so if civil society draws the matter to the Council’s attention.

Now, Mexico has the opportunity to demonstrate that it is in fact a good steward of the oceans by rejecting the Don Diego plan. A pristine marine area favored by tourists, sensitive ecosystems and the continued well-being of the Gray whale depend on the decision the Mexican government is about to make.

In places such as Namibia and New Zealand, after analyzing similar projects, governments revoked permissions or declared a moratorium on phosphate mining until the industry can show it does not cause grave environmental harm.

The Mexican government should follow their example and err on the side of caution.

Action: Ask CEC to reconsider its decision not to investigate the risks of Mexico’s coastal projects via Facebook and Twitter.

Action: Ask Odyssey Marine Explorations to desist from the project via its website, Facebook and Twitter.

Haydée Rodríguez is an environmental law attorney with a master’s in environmental science and public policy from Columbia University, New York. Based in San José, Costa Rica, Haydée has been working for AIDA on marine protection, freshwater and mining issues since 2013.

This article was originally published by EarthJustice.

Here in the United States, debate over whether to grant the President Fast Track authority for the Trans-Pacific Partnership is currently causing much inner-party strife, and fortunately, it has been an uphill battle for TPP advocates – so far.

But President Barack Obama won an important procedural vote in Congress yesterday, when a handful of House Democrats joined with pro-trade House Republicans to advance his ‘free trade’ agenda in a 217-212 vote.

That has now cleared the way for a final vote in Congress today, Friday, giving campaigners just a few short hours in which to pressure their representatives for a ‘no’ vote – in the full knowledge that corporate lobbyists are hard at work practising their dark arts in the opposing direction.

The fact that President Obama has teamed up with the Republican establishment for this massive trade deal shows how un-socialist he really is – and how Republican’s aren’t really opposed to executive power, as long as it is in support of their policies.

Obviously, controversy over the TPP has made it a tough sell for the President, one that liberals are not buying. The TPP is full of corporate handouts, most notoriously for the pharmaceutical industry, which will be granted patent term extensions, and strengthen monopoly power on important medicines around the world, making them unaffordable in many areas. It will also strengthen intellectual property laws in other industries, specifically in the digital sphere.

Investment before health, environment, democracy

The most notorious part of the TPP, however, is the Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) provision, which Elizabeth Warren wrote about a few months back in the Washington Post, saying:

“ISDS would allow foreign companies to challenge US laws – and potentially to pick up huge payouts from taxpayers – without ever stepping foot in a US court.”

A scary thought indeed, but is it true? Well, it depends who you ask. If, for example, you were to ask the Obama administration, they would vehemently deny that the ISDS could challenge US laws – and shortly after the Warren editorial, they did just this, with a Q&A blog for the ISDS.

“It is an often repeated, but inaccurate, claim that ISDS gives companies the right to weaken labor or environmental standards, for example, suggesting that a trade agreement could result in the United States having to lower its minimum wage. The reality is that ISDS does not and cannot require countries to change any law or regulation”, wrote Director of National Economic Council and economic advisor to the president, Jeffrey Zients.

So, who is correct? Both, actually; but Warren is much more intellectually honest. While the ISDS cannot actually “require countries to change any law or regulation”, it can and has been used by corporations as a bargaining tool, pushing sovereign governments to back down on regulations, or fork out taxpayer money in arbitration, and possibly millions in damages.

ISDS is no ‘dead letter’ – it’s real, it’s armed, and it’s dangerous

The ISDS is barely a new instrument; it has been around since first being introduced in 1959, in a trade deal between Germany and Pakistan, but has become an increasingly popular mechanism of international law since the nineties. The original intent of the ISDS was to increase foreign investment in countries where business was risky, by providing a bit of security for investors.

While the ISDS has been included in many trade deals, it was barely used before the nineties. This changed towards the end of the century, and its use rapidly increased during the 2000s, going from just a few cases filed in the early nineties, to nearly sixty annual cases filed by 2012.

Basically, big corporations discovered how valuable the ISDS could be when dealing with foreign governments who were a bit too ambitious in the regulatory domain. In many cases, the lawsuit is brought after a government regulates an industry for environmental or health reasons.

This is currently happening in Australia, where tobacco company Phillip Morris is suing the government after they passed a law requiring cigarettes to be ‘plain-packaged’ without branding. This has been shown to reduce smoking, especially in youth, and so Phillip Morris is suing for ‘expropriation’, or lost profit.

The United States has many trade agreements with the ISDS provision, most notably in NAFTA. In once case, the extraction company, Lone Pine, has sued the Canadian government after they filed a moratorium on hydraulic fracturing for environmental reasons.

A valuable ‘bullying tool’ for corporate heavyweights

In one notable case the US-based Renco Group, owned by billionaire Ira Rennert, used the ISDS provision to bully the Peruvian government after they shut down a metal smelter in the town of La Oroya – one of the most polluted towns in the world – when the company delayed environmental improvements. The Renco Group pressured the Peruvian government into restarting the zinc smelting operations in 2012.

So, while the ISDS cannot literally overturn a regulation or law, it can be used to bully a country’s government into doing so. Of course, the White House has said that it will be different under the TPP. In the same blog, Zients writes:

“ISDS has come under criticism because of some legitimate complaints about poorly written agreements. The US shares some of those concerns, and agrees with the need for new, higher standards, stronger safeguards and better transparency provisions. Through TPP and other agreements, that is exactly what we are putting in place.”

At the time, we had to take his word, with the great secrecy surrounding the TPP; but today, we know a bit more, thanks to Wikileaks, who released the TPP Investing chapter last March, dated January 20, 2015.

So, is the TPP’s ISDS provision different from that of NAFTA or the other trade agreements? Are there higher standards and stronger safeguards to prevent a company like Phillip Morris from using the ISDS to sue for lost profit?

When is a public welfare objective ‘legitimate’?

Maybe a little, but not nearly enough. There is some wording in the chapter that does try to prevent the ISDS from being used as a corporate tool to sue governments over environmental, health, or other public safety regulations. In the preamble, it is written:

“Recognizing the inherent right to regulate and resolving to preserve the flexibility of the Parties to protect legitimate public welfare objectives, such as public health, safety, the environment, the conservation of living or non-living exhaustible natural resources, and public morals.”

This is good, but NAFTA has similar wording in its investment chapter, and corporations could easily argue over what a “legitimate public welfare objective” is. Is a moratorium on fracking a legitimate public welfare objective, for example?

Trade experts aren’t convinced that the TPP’s ISDS chapter is much different from previous ones, either, while the arbitration process, which has been one of the most criticized aspects of ISDS, has remained unchanged, with three highly paid lawyers selected, one by the defendant, one by the plaintiff, and one agreed upon by both.

The same lawyers also tend to alternate between the ‘suing’ and ‘judging’ positions, which critics have said creates conflict of interest.

ISDS must be eliminated from all future trade agreements

It is scary to think about this provision, largely unchanged from what we know, being included in the TPP, which covers about 40% of the worlds economy.

Warren was correct when she said that “agreeing to ISDS in this enormous new treaty would tilt the playing field in the United States further in favor of big multinational corporations. Worse, it would undermine US sovereignty.”

ISDS was an international trade mechanism that was created in earnest, to increase foreign trade by providing investors with a sort of insurance policy. But today, it has become a dangerous weapon for multi-national corporations who do not want to play by the rules, especially if it costs them some profit.

This endangers the safety of populations, the environment, and the sovereignty of nations, and it should be eliminated from any future trade agreements if our governments cannot agree on real changes.

Petition: ‘Tell Congress to Say NO to Monsanto and the TPP!‘

Call 1-888-804-8311 now to tell your Congress Person to vote NO! If this passes GMO labeling will be considered a trade barrier! (says Moms Across America).

Conor J. Lynch is a writer living in New York City. He has written previously for openDemocracy, The Richard Dawkins Foundation, and regularly blogs on Daily Kos about politics, economics, and science. Follow him@dilgentbureauct

This article was originally published by openDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 licence. Additional reporting / news updates by The Ecologist.

Each year, Gray whales set out on one of the longest migratory journeys on the planet: a nearly 13,000-mile swim from their feeding grounds in Alaska to the warm waters of Baja California Sur in Mexico.

In Baja California Sur whales birth and raise their calves – after which they turn around and swim back again.

Experts estimate that by the time a Gray whale turns 50 it has traveled the distance from the earth to the moon and back.

But this impressive, 50-foot mammal and its migratory feat are threatened by one of the world’s first marine phosphate mines.

If the project gets the green light, the mine could gravely damage the environment the Gray whale needs to breed and nurse during winter months.

The scope of the threat to whale populations became all too clear in late February when more than 2,600 Gray whales arrived at the San Ignacio and Ojo de Liebre lagoons in Baja California Sur, very close to Ulloa Bay.

This was the highest number of whales recorded in the past 19 years. The whale migration provides an important source of income for local families who depend on tourism dollars from whale watchers.

Clearly, just the place for a 225,000 acre undersea mine

Yet it’s precisely in this area near Ulloa Bay that the American company Odyssey Marine Explorations intends to start the ‘Don Diego’ phosphate mine. The proposed mine would include five work sites in an area of more than 225,000 acres.

Each site would be exploited for 10 years, resulting in a 50-year-long project. The goal is to extract 350 million tons of phosphate sand from the marine floor-a quantity that would fill Mexico City’s Aztec Stadium 264 times.

Gray whales, as well as Humpback and Blue whales and Loggerhead turtles that live in or pass through the zone, depend on sound to communicate, stay together and find food. The Don Diego project will use dredging to collect the phosphate sand, producing a lot of noise in the process.

Even the company’s own environmental assessment concedes that the mine could create a “modification of vocal behavior or surprise reaction” in the whales. The noise could jeopardize the survival of the whales by causing changes in their behavior and migration route, and it could also disrupt mothers feeding their calves.

Moreover, large boats will dredge the seabed to extract sand, but in the process they will also upend living organisms. The dredged material will be separated to obtain phosphate, and the leftover material dumped back into the sea.

The sediments returning to the ocean may contain high levels of toxic elements such as uranium and thorium, which are exposed during the phosphate-separation process. These toxins may be consumed by fish that then arrive on our tables, making phosphate mining a potential source of radioactive contamination.

Mexico’s chance to prove itself a wise guardian of the oceans

In September 2014, Odyssey presented its environmental impact assessment to Mexico’s Secretariat of Environment and Natural Resources. AIDA, the Interamerican Association for Environmental Defense, presented comments on the Don Diego environmental assessment before the secretariat, spotlighting the ecological reasons the project should be shelved and requesting more detailed information from the company.

Last month the Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC), which includes the United States, Mexico and Canada, voted against a request that the nations investigate whether Mexico appropriately considers environmental risks of proposed projects with coastal impacts.

However the question is certain to recur at CEC’s 12th Council Session which is taking place in Boston next month, 14th-15th July – all the more so if civil society draws the matter to the Council’s attention.

Now, Mexico has the opportunity to demonstrate that it is in fact a good steward of the oceans by rejecting the Don Diego plan. A pristine marine area favored by tourists, sensitive ecosystems and the continued well-being of the Gray whale depend on the decision the Mexican government is about to make.

In places such as Namibia and New Zealand, after analyzing similar projects, governments revoked permissions or declared a moratorium on phosphate mining until the industry can show it does not cause grave environmental harm.

The Mexican government should follow their example and err on the side of caution.

Action: Ask CEC to reconsider its decision not to investigate the risks of Mexico’s coastal projects via Facebook and Twitter.

Action: Ask Odyssey Marine Explorations to desist from the project via its website, Facebook and Twitter.

Haydée Rodríguez is an environmental law attorney with a master’s in environmental science and public policy from Columbia University, New York. Based in San José, Costa Rica, Haydée has been working for AIDA on marine protection, freshwater and mining issues since 2013.

This article was originally published by EarthJustice.

Here in the United States, debate over whether to grant the President Fast Track authority for the Trans-Pacific Partnership is currently causing much inner-party strife, and fortunately, it has been an uphill battle for TPP advocates – so far.

But President Barack Obama won an important procedural vote in Congress yesterday, when a handful of House Democrats joined with pro-trade House Republicans to advance his ‘free trade’ agenda in a 217-212 vote.

That has now cleared the way for a final vote in Congress today, Friday, giving campaigners just a few short hours in which to pressure their representatives for a ‘no’ vote – in the full knowledge that corporate lobbyists are hard at work practising their dark arts in the opposing direction.

The fact that President Obama has teamed up with the Republican establishment for this massive trade deal shows how un-socialist he really is – and how Republican’s aren’t really opposed to executive power, as long as it is in support of their policies.

Obviously, controversy over the TPP has made it a tough sell for the President, one that liberals are not buying. The TPP is full of corporate handouts, most notoriously for the pharmaceutical industry, which will be granted patent term extensions, and strengthen monopoly power on important medicines around the world, making them unaffordable in many areas. It will also strengthen intellectual property laws in other industries, specifically in the digital sphere.

Investment before health, environment, democracy

The most notorious part of the TPP, however, is the Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) provision, which Elizabeth Warren wrote about a few months back in the Washington Post, saying:

“ISDS would allow foreign companies to challenge US laws – and potentially to pick up huge payouts from taxpayers – without ever stepping foot in a US court.”

A scary thought indeed, but is it true? Well, it depends who you ask. If, for example, you were to ask the Obama administration, they would vehemently deny that the ISDS could challenge US laws – and shortly after the Warren editorial, they did just this, with a Q&A blog for the ISDS.

“It is an often repeated, but inaccurate, claim that ISDS gives companies the right to weaken labor or environmental standards, for example, suggesting that a trade agreement could result in the United States having to lower its minimum wage. The reality is that ISDS does not and cannot require countries to change any law or regulation”, wrote Director of National Economic Council and economic advisor to the president, Jeffrey Zients.

So, who is correct? Both, actually; but Warren is much more intellectually honest. While the ISDS cannot actually “require countries to change any law or regulation”, it can and has been used by corporations as a bargaining tool, pushing sovereign governments to back down on regulations, or fork out taxpayer money in arbitration, and possibly millions in damages.

ISDS is no ‘dead letter’ – it’s real, it’s armed, and it’s dangerous

The ISDS is barely a new instrument; it has been around since first being introduced in 1959, in a trade deal between Germany and Pakistan, but has become an increasingly popular mechanism of international law since the nineties. The original intent of the ISDS was to increase foreign investment in countries where business was risky, by providing a bit of security for investors.

While the ISDS has been included in many trade deals, it was barely used before the nineties. This changed towards the end of the century, and its use rapidly increased during the 2000s, going from just a few cases filed in the early nineties, to nearly sixty annual cases filed by 2012.

Basically, big corporations discovered how valuable the ISDS could be when dealing with foreign governments who were a bit too ambitious in the regulatory domain. In many cases, the lawsuit is brought after a government regulates an industry for environmental or health reasons.

This is currently happening in Australia, where tobacco company Phillip Morris is suing the government after they passed a law requiring cigarettes to be ‘plain-packaged’ without branding. This has been shown to reduce smoking, especially in youth, and so Phillip Morris is suing for ‘expropriation’, or lost profit.

The United States has many trade agreements with the ISDS provision, most notably in NAFTA. In once case, the extraction company, Lone Pine, has sued the Canadian government after they filed a moratorium on hydraulic fracturing for environmental reasons.

A valuable ‘bullying tool’ for corporate heavyweights

In one notable case the US-based Renco Group, owned by billionaire Ira Rennert, used the ISDS provision to bully the Peruvian government after they shut down a metal smelter in the town of La Oroya – one of the most polluted towns in the world – when the company delayed environmental improvements. The Renco Group pressured the Peruvian government into restarting the zinc smelting operations in 2012.

So, while the ISDS cannot literally overturn a regulation or law, it can be used to bully a country’s government into doing so. Of course, the White House has said that it will be different under the TPP. In the same blog, Zients writes:

“ISDS has come under criticism because of some legitimate complaints about poorly written agreements. The US shares some of those concerns, and agrees with the need for new, higher standards, stronger safeguards and better transparency provisions. Through TPP and other agreements, that is exactly what we are putting in place.”

At the time, we had to take his word, with the great secrecy surrounding the TPP; but today, we know a bit more, thanks to Wikileaks, who released the TPP Investing chapter last March, dated January 20, 2015.

So, is the TPP’s ISDS provision different from that of NAFTA or the other trade agreements? Are there higher standards and stronger safeguards to prevent a company like Phillip Morris from using the ISDS to sue for lost profit?

When is a public welfare objective ‘legitimate’?

Maybe a little, but not nearly enough. There is some wording in the chapter that does try to prevent the ISDS from being used as a corporate tool to sue governments over environmental, health, or other public safety regulations. In the preamble, it is written:

“Recognizing the inherent right to regulate and resolving to preserve the flexibility of the Parties to protect legitimate public welfare objectives, such as public health, safety, the environment, the conservation of living or non-living exhaustible natural resources, and public morals.”

This is good, but NAFTA has similar wording in its investment chapter, and corporations could easily argue over what a “legitimate public welfare objective” is. Is a moratorium on fracking a legitimate public welfare objective, for example?

Trade experts aren’t convinced that the TPP’s ISDS chapter is much different from previous ones, either, while the arbitration process, which has been one of the most criticized aspects of ISDS, has remained unchanged, with three highly paid lawyers selected, one by the defendant, one by the plaintiff, and one agreed upon by both.

The same lawyers also tend to alternate between the ‘suing’ and ‘judging’ positions, which critics have said creates conflict of interest.

ISDS must be eliminated from all future trade agreements

It is scary to think about this provision, largely unchanged from what we know, being included in the TPP, which covers about 40% of the worlds economy.

Warren was correct when she said that “agreeing to ISDS in this enormous new treaty would tilt the playing field in the United States further in favor of big multinational corporations. Worse, it would undermine US sovereignty.”

ISDS was an international trade mechanism that was created in earnest, to increase foreign trade by providing investors with a sort of insurance policy. But today, it has become a dangerous weapon for multi-national corporations who do not want to play by the rules, especially if it costs them some profit.

This endangers the safety of populations, the environment, and the sovereignty of nations, and it should be eliminated from any future trade agreements if our governments cannot agree on real changes.

Petition: ‘Tell Congress to Say NO to Monsanto and the TPP!‘

Call 1-888-804-8311 now to tell your Congress Person to vote NO! If this passes GMO labeling will be considered a trade barrier! (says Moms Across America).

Conor J. Lynch is a writer living in New York City. He has written previously for openDemocracy, The Richard Dawkins Foundation, and regularly blogs on Daily Kos about politics, economics, and science. Follow him@dilgentbureauct

This article was originally published by openDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 licence. Additional reporting / news updates by The Ecologist.

Each year, Gray whales set out on one of the longest migratory journeys on the planet: a nearly 13,000-mile swim from their feeding grounds in Alaska to the warm waters of Baja California Sur in Mexico.

In Baja California Sur whales birth and raise their calves – after which they turn around and swim back again.

Experts estimate that by the time a Gray whale turns 50 it has traveled the distance from the earth to the moon and back.

But this impressive, 50-foot mammal and its migratory feat are threatened by one of the world’s first marine phosphate mines.

If the project gets the green light, the mine could gravely damage the environment the Gray whale needs to breed and nurse during winter months.

The scope of the threat to whale populations became all too clear in late February when more than 2,600 Gray whales arrived at the San Ignacio and Ojo de Liebre lagoons in Baja California Sur, very close to Ulloa Bay.

This was the highest number of whales recorded in the past 19 years. The whale migration provides an important source of income for local families who depend on tourism dollars from whale watchers.

Clearly, just the place for a 225,000 acre undersea mine

Yet it’s precisely in this area near Ulloa Bay that the American company Odyssey Marine Explorations intends to start the ‘Don Diego’ phosphate mine. The proposed mine would include five work sites in an area of more than 225,000 acres.

Each site would be exploited for 10 years, resulting in a 50-year-long project. The goal is to extract 350 million tons of phosphate sand from the marine floor-a quantity that would fill Mexico City’s Aztec Stadium 264 times.

Gray whales, as well as Humpback and Blue whales and Loggerhead turtles that live in or pass through the zone, depend on sound to communicate, stay together and find food. The Don Diego project will use dredging to collect the phosphate sand, producing a lot of noise in the process.

Even the company’s own environmental assessment concedes that the mine could create a “modification of vocal behavior or surprise reaction” in the whales. The noise could jeopardize the survival of the whales by causing changes in their behavior and migration route, and it could also disrupt mothers feeding their calves.

Moreover, large boats will dredge the seabed to extract sand, but in the process they will also upend living organisms. The dredged material will be separated to obtain phosphate, and the leftover material dumped back into the sea.

The sediments returning to the ocean may contain high levels of toxic elements such as uranium and thorium, which are exposed during the phosphate-separation process. These toxins may be consumed by fish that then arrive on our tables, making phosphate mining a potential source of radioactive contamination.

Mexico’s chance to prove itself a wise guardian of the oceans

In September 2014, Odyssey presented its environmental impact assessment to Mexico’s Secretariat of Environment and Natural Resources. AIDA, the Interamerican Association for Environmental Defense, presented comments on the Don Diego environmental assessment before the secretariat, spotlighting the ecological reasons the project should be shelved and requesting more detailed information from the company.

Last month the Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC), which includes the United States, Mexico and Canada, voted against a request that the nations investigate whether Mexico appropriately considers environmental risks of proposed projects with coastal impacts.

However the question is certain to recur at CEC’s 12th Council Session which is taking place in Boston next month, 14th-15th July – all the more so if civil society draws the matter to the Council’s attention.

Now, Mexico has the opportunity to demonstrate that it is in fact a good steward of the oceans by rejecting the Don Diego plan. A pristine marine area favored by tourists, sensitive ecosystems and the continued well-being of the Gray whale depend on the decision the Mexican government is about to make.

In places such as Namibia and New Zealand, after analyzing similar projects, governments revoked permissions or declared a moratorium on phosphate mining until the industry can show it does not cause grave environmental harm.

The Mexican government should follow their example and err on the side of caution.

Action: Ask CEC to reconsider its decision not to investigate the risks of Mexico’s coastal projects via Facebook and Twitter.

Action: Ask Odyssey Marine Explorations to desist from the project via its website, Facebook and Twitter.

Haydée Rodríguez is an environmental law attorney with a master’s in environmental science and public policy from Columbia University, New York. Based in San José, Costa Rica, Haydée has been working for AIDA on marine protection, freshwater and mining issues since 2013.

This article was originally published by EarthJustice.

Here in the United States, debate over whether to grant the President Fast Track authority for the Trans-Pacific Partnership is currently causing much inner-party strife, and fortunately, it has been an uphill battle for TPP advocates – so far.

But President Barack Obama won an important procedural vote in Congress yesterday, when a handful of House Democrats joined with pro-trade House Republicans to advance his ‘free trade’ agenda in a 217-212 vote.

That has now cleared the way for a final vote in Congress today, Friday, giving campaigners just a few short hours in which to pressure their representatives for a ‘no’ vote – in the full knowledge that corporate lobbyists are hard at work practising their dark arts in the opposing direction.

The fact that President Obama has teamed up with the Republican establishment for this massive trade deal shows how un-socialist he really is – and how Republican’s aren’t really opposed to executive power, as long as it is in support of their policies.

Obviously, controversy over the TPP has made it a tough sell for the President, one that liberals are not buying. The TPP is full of corporate handouts, most notoriously for the pharmaceutical industry, which will be granted patent term extensions, and strengthen monopoly power on important medicines around the world, making them unaffordable in many areas. It will also strengthen intellectual property laws in other industries, specifically in the digital sphere.

Investment before health, environment, democracy

The most notorious part of the TPP, however, is the Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) provision, which Elizabeth Warren wrote about a few months back in the Washington Post, saying:

“ISDS would allow foreign companies to challenge US laws – and potentially to pick up huge payouts from taxpayers – without ever stepping foot in a US court.”

A scary thought indeed, but is it true? Well, it depends who you ask. If, for example, you were to ask the Obama administration, they would vehemently deny that the ISDS could challenge US laws – and shortly after the Warren editorial, they did just this, with a Q&A blog for the ISDS.

“It is an often repeated, but inaccurate, claim that ISDS gives companies the right to weaken labor or environmental standards, for example, suggesting that a trade agreement could result in the United States having to lower its minimum wage. The reality is that ISDS does not and cannot require countries to change any law or regulation”, wrote Director of National Economic Council and economic advisor to the president, Jeffrey Zients.

So, who is correct? Both, actually; but Warren is much more intellectually honest. While the ISDS cannot actually “require countries to change any law or regulation”, it can and has been used by corporations as a bargaining tool, pushing sovereign governments to back down on regulations, or fork out taxpayer money in arbitration, and possibly millions in damages.

ISDS is no ‘dead letter’ – it’s real, it’s armed, and it’s dangerous

The ISDS is barely a new instrument; it has been around since first being introduced in 1959, in a trade deal between Germany and Pakistan, but has become an increasingly popular mechanism of international law since the nineties. The original intent of the ISDS was to increase foreign investment in countries where business was risky, by providing a bit of security for investors.

While the ISDS has been included in many trade deals, it was barely used before the nineties. This changed towards the end of the century, and its use rapidly increased during the 2000s, going from just a few cases filed in the early nineties, to nearly sixty annual cases filed by 2012.

Basically, big corporations discovered how valuable the ISDS could be when dealing with foreign governments who were a bit too ambitious in the regulatory domain. In many cases, the lawsuit is brought after a government regulates an industry for environmental or health reasons.

This is currently happening in Australia, where tobacco company Phillip Morris is suing the government after they passed a law requiring cigarettes to be ‘plain-packaged’ without branding. This has been shown to reduce smoking, especially in youth, and so Phillip Morris is suing for ‘expropriation’, or lost profit.

The United States has many trade agreements with the ISDS provision, most notably in NAFTA. In once case, the extraction company, Lone Pine, has sued the Canadian government after they filed a moratorium on hydraulic fracturing for environmental reasons.

A valuable ‘bullying tool’ for corporate heavyweights

In one notable case the US-based Renco Group, owned by billionaire Ira Rennert, used the ISDS provision to bully the Peruvian government after they shut down a metal smelter in the town of La Oroya – one of the most polluted towns in the world – when the company delayed environmental improvements. The Renco Group pressured the Peruvian government into restarting the zinc smelting operations in 2012.

So, while the ISDS cannot literally overturn a regulation or law, it can be used to bully a country’s government into doing so. Of course, the White House has said that it will be different under the TPP. In the same blog, Zients writes:

“ISDS has come under criticism because of some legitimate complaints about poorly written agreements. The US shares some of those concerns, and agrees with the need for new, higher standards, stronger safeguards and better transparency provisions. Through TPP and other agreements, that is exactly what we are putting in place.”

At the time, we had to take his word, with the great secrecy surrounding the TPP; but today, we know a bit more, thanks to Wikileaks, who released the TPP Investing chapter last March, dated January 20, 2015.

So, is the TPP’s ISDS provision different from that of NAFTA or the other trade agreements? Are there higher standards and stronger safeguards to prevent a company like Phillip Morris from using the ISDS to sue for lost profit?

When is a public welfare objective ‘legitimate’?

Maybe a little, but not nearly enough. There is some wording in the chapter that does try to prevent the ISDS from being used as a corporate tool to sue governments over environmental, health, or other public safety regulations. In the preamble, it is written:

“Recognizing the inherent right to regulate and resolving to preserve the flexibility of the Parties to protect legitimate public welfare objectives, such as public health, safety, the environment, the conservation of living or non-living exhaustible natural resources, and public morals.”

This is good, but NAFTA has similar wording in its investment chapter, and corporations could easily argue over what a “legitimate public welfare objective” is. Is a moratorium on fracking a legitimate public welfare objective, for example?

Trade experts aren’t convinced that the TPP’s ISDS chapter is much different from previous ones, either, while the arbitration process, which has been one of the most criticized aspects of ISDS, has remained unchanged, with three highly paid lawyers selected, one by the defendant, one by the plaintiff, and one agreed upon by both.

The same lawyers also tend to alternate between the ‘suing’ and ‘judging’ positions, which critics have said creates conflict of interest.

ISDS must be eliminated from all future trade agreements

It is scary to think about this provision, largely unchanged from what we know, being included in the TPP, which covers about 40% of the worlds economy.

Warren was correct when she said that “agreeing to ISDS in this enormous new treaty would tilt the playing field in the United States further in favor of big multinational corporations. Worse, it would undermine US sovereignty.”

ISDS was an international trade mechanism that was created in earnest, to increase foreign trade by providing investors with a sort of insurance policy. But today, it has become a dangerous weapon for multi-national corporations who do not want to play by the rules, especially if it costs them some profit.

This endangers the safety of populations, the environment, and the sovereignty of nations, and it should be eliminated from any future trade agreements if our governments cannot agree on real changes.

Petition: ‘Tell Congress to Say NO to Monsanto and the TPP!‘

Call 1-888-804-8311 now to tell your Congress Person to vote NO! If this passes GMO labeling will be considered a trade barrier! (says Moms Across America).

Conor J. Lynch is a writer living in New York City. He has written previously for openDemocracy, The Richard Dawkins Foundation, and regularly blogs on Daily Kos about politics, economics, and science. Follow him@dilgentbureauct

This article was originally published by openDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 licence. Additional reporting / news updates by The Ecologist.

Each year, Gray whales set out on one of the longest migratory journeys on the planet: a nearly 13,000-mile swim from their feeding grounds in Alaska to the warm waters of Baja California Sur in Mexico.

In Baja California Sur whales birth and raise their calves – after which they turn around and swim back again.

Experts estimate that by the time a Gray whale turns 50 it has traveled the distance from the earth to the moon and back.

But this impressive, 50-foot mammal and its migratory feat are threatened by one of the world’s first marine phosphate mines.

If the project gets the green light, the mine could gravely damage the environment the Gray whale needs to breed and nurse during winter months.

The scope of the threat to whale populations became all too clear in late February when more than 2,600 Gray whales arrived at the San Ignacio and Ojo de Liebre lagoons in Baja California Sur, very close to Ulloa Bay.

This was the highest number of whales recorded in the past 19 years. The whale migration provides an important source of income for local families who depend on tourism dollars from whale watchers.

Clearly, just the place for a 225,000 acre undersea mine

Yet it’s precisely in this area near Ulloa Bay that the American company Odyssey Marine Explorations intends to start the ‘Don Diego’ phosphate mine. The proposed mine would include five work sites in an area of more than 225,000 acres.

Each site would be exploited for 10 years, resulting in a 50-year-long project. The goal is to extract 350 million tons of phosphate sand from the marine floor-a quantity that would fill Mexico City’s Aztec Stadium 264 times.

Gray whales, as well as Humpback and Blue whales and Loggerhead turtles that live in or pass through the zone, depend on sound to communicate, stay together and find food. The Don Diego project will use dredging to collect the phosphate sand, producing a lot of noise in the process.

Even the company’s own environmental assessment concedes that the mine could create a “modification of vocal behavior or surprise reaction” in the whales. The noise could jeopardize the survival of the whales by causing changes in their behavior and migration route, and it could also disrupt mothers feeding their calves.

Moreover, large boats will dredge the seabed to extract sand, but in the process they will also upend living organisms. The dredged material will be separated to obtain phosphate, and the leftover material dumped back into the sea.

The sediments returning to the ocean may contain high levels of toxic elements such as uranium and thorium, which are exposed during the phosphate-separation process. These toxins may be consumed by fish that then arrive on our tables, making phosphate mining a potential source of radioactive contamination.

Mexico’s chance to prove itself a wise guardian of the oceans

In September 2014, Odyssey presented its environmental impact assessment to Mexico’s Secretariat of Environment and Natural Resources. AIDA, the Interamerican Association for Environmental Defense, presented comments on the Don Diego environmental assessment before the secretariat, spotlighting the ecological reasons the project should be shelved and requesting more detailed information from the company.

Last month the Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC), which includes the United States, Mexico and Canada, voted against a request that the nations investigate whether Mexico appropriately considers environmental risks of proposed projects with coastal impacts.

However the question is certain to recur at CEC’s 12th Council Session which is taking place in Boston next month, 14th-15th July – all the more so if civil society draws the matter to the Council’s attention.

Now, Mexico has the opportunity to demonstrate that it is in fact a good steward of the oceans by rejecting the Don Diego plan. A pristine marine area favored by tourists, sensitive ecosystems and the continued well-being of the Gray whale depend on the decision the Mexican government is about to make.

In places such as Namibia and New Zealand, after analyzing similar projects, governments revoked permissions or declared a moratorium on phosphate mining until the industry can show it does not cause grave environmental harm.

The Mexican government should follow their example and err on the side of caution.

Action: Ask CEC to reconsider its decision not to investigate the risks of Mexico’s coastal projects via Facebook and Twitter.

Action: Ask Odyssey Marine Explorations to desist from the project via its website, Facebook and Twitter.

Haydée Rodríguez is an environmental law attorney with a master’s in environmental science and public policy from Columbia University, New York. Based in San José, Costa Rica, Haydée has been working for AIDA on marine protection, freshwater and mining issues since 2013.

This article was originally published by EarthJustice.

Here in the United States, debate over whether to grant the President Fast Track authority for the Trans-Pacific Partnership is currently causing much inner-party strife, and fortunately, it has been an uphill battle for TPP advocates – so far.

But President Barack Obama won an important procedural vote in Congress yesterday, when a handful of House Democrats joined with pro-trade House Republicans to advance his ‘free trade’ agenda in a 217-212 vote.

That has now cleared the way for a final vote in Congress today, Friday, giving campaigners just a few short hours in which to pressure their representatives for a ‘no’ vote – in the full knowledge that corporate lobbyists are hard at work practising their dark arts in the opposing direction.

The fact that President Obama has teamed up with the Republican establishment for this massive trade deal shows how un-socialist he really is – and how Republican’s aren’t really opposed to executive power, as long as it is in support of their policies.

Obviously, controversy over the TPP has made it a tough sell for the President, one that liberals are not buying. The TPP is full of corporate handouts, most notoriously for the pharmaceutical industry, which will be granted patent term extensions, and strengthen monopoly power on important medicines around the world, making them unaffordable in many areas. It will also strengthen intellectual property laws in other industries, specifically in the digital sphere.

Investment before health, environment, democracy

The most notorious part of the TPP, however, is the Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) provision, which Elizabeth Warren wrote about a few months back in the Washington Post, saying:

“ISDS would allow foreign companies to challenge US laws – and potentially to pick up huge payouts from taxpayers – without ever stepping foot in a US court.”

A scary thought indeed, but is it true? Well, it depends who you ask. If, for example, you were to ask the Obama administration, they would vehemently deny that the ISDS could challenge US laws – and shortly after the Warren editorial, they did just this, with a Q&A blog for the ISDS.

“It is an often repeated, but inaccurate, claim that ISDS gives companies the right to weaken labor or environmental standards, for example, suggesting that a trade agreement could result in the United States having to lower its minimum wage. The reality is that ISDS does not and cannot require countries to change any law or regulation”, wrote Director of National Economic Council and economic advisor to the president, Jeffrey Zients.

So, who is correct? Both, actually; but Warren is much more intellectually honest. While the ISDS cannot actually “require countries to change any law or regulation”, it can and has been used by corporations as a bargaining tool, pushing sovereign governments to back down on regulations, or fork out taxpayer money in arbitration, and possibly millions in damages.

ISDS is no ‘dead letter’ – it’s real, it’s armed, and it’s dangerous

The ISDS is barely a new instrument; it has been around since first being introduced in 1959, in a trade deal between Germany and Pakistan, but has become an increasingly popular mechanism of international law since the nineties. The original intent of the ISDS was to increase foreign investment in countries where business was risky, by providing a bit of security for investors.

While the ISDS has been included in many trade deals, it was barely used before the nineties. This changed towards the end of the century, and its use rapidly increased during the 2000s, going from just a few cases filed in the early nineties, to nearly sixty annual cases filed by 2012.

Basically, big corporations discovered how valuable the ISDS could be when dealing with foreign governments who were a bit too ambitious in the regulatory domain. In many cases, the lawsuit is brought after a government regulates an industry for environmental or health reasons.

This is currently happening in Australia, where tobacco company Phillip Morris is suing the government after they passed a law requiring cigarettes to be ‘plain-packaged’ without branding. This has been shown to reduce smoking, especially in youth, and so Phillip Morris is suing for ‘expropriation’, or lost profit.

The United States has many trade agreements with the ISDS provision, most notably in NAFTA. In once case, the extraction company, Lone Pine, has sued the Canadian government after they filed a moratorium on hydraulic fracturing for environmental reasons.

A valuable ‘bullying tool’ for corporate heavyweights

In one notable case the US-based Renco Group, owned by billionaire Ira Rennert, used the ISDS provision to bully the Peruvian government after they shut down a metal smelter in the town of La Oroya – one of the most polluted towns in the world – when the company delayed environmental improvements. The Renco Group pressured the Peruvian government into restarting the zinc smelting operations in 2012.

So, while the ISDS cannot literally overturn a regulation or law, it can be used to bully a country’s government into doing so. Of course, the White House has said that it will be different under the TPP. In the same blog, Zients writes:

“ISDS has come under criticism because of some legitimate complaints about poorly written agreements. The US shares some of those concerns, and agrees with the need for new, higher standards, stronger safeguards and better transparency provisions. Through TPP and other agreements, that is exactly what we are putting in place.”

At the time, we had to take his word, with the great secrecy surrounding the TPP; but today, we know a bit more, thanks to Wikileaks, who released the TPP Investing chapter last March, dated January 20, 2015.

So, is the TPP’s ISDS provision different from that of NAFTA or the other trade agreements? Are there higher standards and stronger safeguards to prevent a company like Phillip Morris from using the ISDS to sue for lost profit?

When is a public welfare objective ‘legitimate’?

Maybe a little, but not nearly enough. There is some wording in the chapter that does try to prevent the ISDS from being used as a corporate tool to sue governments over environmental, health, or other public safety regulations. In the preamble, it is written:

“Recognizing the inherent right to regulate and resolving to preserve the flexibility of the Parties to protect legitimate public welfare objectives, such as public health, safety, the environment, the conservation of living or non-living exhaustible natural resources, and public morals.”

This is good, but NAFTA has similar wording in its investment chapter, and corporations could easily argue over what a “legitimate public welfare objective” is. Is a moratorium on fracking a legitimate public welfare objective, for example?

Trade experts aren’t convinced that the TPP’s ISDS chapter is much different from previous ones, either, while the arbitration process, which has been one of the most criticized aspects of ISDS, has remained unchanged, with three highly paid lawyers selected, one by the defendant, one by the plaintiff, and one agreed upon by both.

The same lawyers also tend to alternate between the ‘suing’ and ‘judging’ positions, which critics have said creates conflict of interest.

ISDS must be eliminated from all future trade agreements

It is scary to think about this provision, largely unchanged from what we know, being included in the TPP, which covers about 40% of the worlds economy.

Warren was correct when she said that “agreeing to ISDS in this enormous new treaty would tilt the playing field in the United States further in favor of big multinational corporations. Worse, it would undermine US sovereignty.”

ISDS was an international trade mechanism that was created in earnest, to increase foreign trade by providing investors with a sort of insurance policy. But today, it has become a dangerous weapon for multi-national corporations who do not want to play by the rules, especially if it costs them some profit.

This endangers the safety of populations, the environment, and the sovereignty of nations, and it should be eliminated from any future trade agreements if our governments cannot agree on real changes.

Petition: ‘Tell Congress to Say NO to Monsanto and the TPP!‘

Call 1-888-804-8311 now to tell your Congress Person to vote NO! If this passes GMO labeling will be considered a trade barrier! (says Moms Across America).

Conor J. Lynch is a writer living in New York City. He has written previously for openDemocracy, The Richard Dawkins Foundation, and regularly blogs on Daily Kos about politics, economics, and science. Follow him@dilgentbureauct

This article was originally published by openDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 licence. Additional reporting / news updates by The Ecologist.

Each year, Gray whales set out on one of the longest migratory journeys on the planet: a nearly 13,000-mile swim from their feeding grounds in Alaska to the warm waters of Baja California Sur in Mexico.

In Baja California Sur whales birth and raise their calves – after which they turn around and swim back again. Experts estimate that by the time a Gray whale turns 50 it has traveled the distance from the earth to the moon and back.

But this impressive, 50-foot mammal and its migratory feat are threatened by one of the world’s first marine phosphate mines.

If the project gets the green light, the mine could gravely damage the environment the Gray whale needs to breed and nurse during winter months.

The scope of the threat to whale populations became all too clear in late February when more than 2,600 Gray whales arrived at the San Ignacio and Ojo de Liebre lagoons in Baja California Sur, very close to Ulloa Bay.

This was the highest number of whales recorded in the past 19 years. The whale migration provides an important source of income for local families who depend on tourism dollars from whale watchers.

Clearly, just the place for a 225,000 acre undersea mine

Yet it’s precisely in this area near Ulloa Bay that the American company Odyssey Marine Explorations intends to start the ‘Don Diego’ phosphate mine. The proposed mine would include five work sites in an area of more than 225,000 acres.

Each site would be exploited for 10 years, resulting in a 50-year-long project. The goal is to extract 350 million tons of phosphate sand from the marine floor-a quantity that would fill Mexico City’s Aztec Stadium 264 times.

Gray whales, as well as Humpback and Blue whales and Loggerhead turtles that live in or pass through the zone, depend on sound to communicate, stay together and find food. The Don Diego project will use dredging to collect the phosphate sand, producing a lot of noise in the process.

Even the company’s own environmental assessment concedes that the mine could create a “modification of vocal behavior or surprise reaction” in the whales. The noise could jeopardize the survival of the whales by causing changes in their behavior and migration route, and it could also disrupt mothers feeding their calves.

Moreover, large boats will dredge the seabed to extract sand, but in the process they will also upend living organisms. The dredged material will be separated to obtain phosphate, and the leftover material dumped back into the sea.

The sediments returning to the ocean may contain high levels of toxic elements such as uranium and thorium, which are exposed during the phosphate-separation process. These toxins may be consumed by fish that then arrive on our tables, making phosphate mining a potential source of radioactive contamination.

Mexico’s chance to prove itself a wise guardian of the oceans

In September 2014, Odyssey presented its environmental impact assessment to Mexico’s Secretariat of Environment and Natural Resources. AIDA, the Interamerican Association for Environmental Defense, presented comments on the Don Diego environmental assessment before the secretariat, spotlighting the ecological reasons the project should be shelved and requesting more detailed information from the company.

Last month the Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC), which includes the United States, Mexico and Canada, voted against a request that the nations investigate whether Mexico appropriately considers environmental risks of proposed projects with coastal impacts.

However the question is certain to recur at CEC’s 12th Council Session which is taking place in Boston next month, 14th-15th July – all the more so if civil society draws the matter to the Council’s attention.

Now, Mexico has the opportunity to demonstrate that it is in fact a good steward of the oceans by rejecting the Don Diego plan. A pristine marine area favored by tourists, sensitive ecosystems and the continued well-being of the Gray whale depend on the decision the Mexican government is about to make.

In places such as Namibia and New Zealand, after analyzing similar projects, governments revoked permissions or declared a moratorium on phosphate mining until the industry can show it does not cause grave environmental harm.

The Mexican government should follow their example and err on the side of caution.

Action: Ask CEC to reconsider its decision not to investigate the risks of Mexico’s coastal projects via Facebook and Twitter.

Action: Ask Odyssey Marine Explorations to desist from the project via its website, Facebook and Twitter.

Haydée Rodríguez is an environmental law attorney with a master’s in environmental science and public policy from Columbia University, New York. Based in San José, Costa Rica, Haydée has been working for AIDA on marine protection, freshwater and mining issues since 2013.

This article was originally published by EarthJustice.