TRADE AND ENVIRONMENT IN NAFTA’S REPLACEMENT: AN OLD GAS GUZZLER GETS A PAINT JOB
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)2 is now history, and, depending on where you are, as of July 1, 2020, the Canada- United States-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA) in Canada, the United- States-Mexico-Canada (USMCA) in the United States, or the Tratado entre M´exico, Estados Unidos y Canad´a (T-MEC) is in force. The renegotiation of NAFTA fulfilled candidate Donald Trump’s promise to scrap or renegotiate NAFTA in order to protect and restore United States jobs and industrial capacity and increase economic growth, themes that consistently helped define his trade agenda politically as President. But what about the environment? When NAFTA was finalized early in the Clinton Administration in 1993, North American environmental groups insisted that the agreement address their concerns that liberalized trade and investment would lead to environmental dumping, environmental backsliding, weak environmental enforcement and scale effects (i.e., more trade equals more environmental impact). The environmental provisions of NAFTA and its environmental side agreement, the North American Agreement on Environmental Cooperation (NAAEC), responded to many of those concerns, at least on paper, and set the broad contours of United States trade and environment policy ever since.\nIn this article, I will first review, analyze and critique the key changes that NAFTA’s replacement made to the environmental provisions of NAFTA and the NAAEC. I will then explain why the environmental provisions of CUSMA-USMCA and its ancillary Environmental Cooperation Agreement (ECA), like the environmental policy approach typical of post-NAFTA trade and investment agreements, are woefully inadequate for helping to solve urgent challenges, like climate change and loss of biodiversity, that the human enterprise faces in these ecologically dire times.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".