Noetherville

[deleted]

Ethyl V Canda:

According to Lori Wallach:

Ethyl Corporation, a U.S. chemical company, launched a NAFTA investor-state case in 1997 over a Canadian ban of MMT, a toxic gasoline additive used to improve engine performance. MMT contains manganese − a known human neurotoxin. Canadian legislators, concerned about MMT’s public health and environmental risks, including its interference with emission-control systems, banned MMT’s intra-provincial transport and importation in 1997.

According to /u/x2Infinity

To summarize, in 1997 the Canadian government passed a bill that banned the substance MMT in use as a fuel additive on the grounds of health safety. Sounds reasonable right? Ethyl Corp used the ISDS from NAFTA to sue the the Canadian government. Obviously media loved it, big American corporation sues poor Canadian government just trying to protect its citizens from toxins. What came out in the court documents however was that Health Canada and the E+CC had both done studies on MMT use in fuel and came to conclusion that there were no health or environmental risks that they could identify from the use. Keep in mind MMT is still used in other industries and Canada had already existing exposure limits but chose to ban it only in fuel. So the government had passed this law with no evidence to support it, which "just so happened" to single out the lone foreign company in their domestic market.

According to /u/SavannaJeff

I guess the obvious case would be the Ethyl case, where Health Canada had conducted numerous analyses including a year or two before the ISDS case, and came to the conclusion that there was no harm in having MMT as an additive in petrol. It's a bit hard to justify a ban on the grounds of health concerns when a government's own health department doesn't support the ban. I mean, you guys don't even mention the Health Canada report, despite it being central to the case!

Vattenfall V Hamburg:

According to Lori Wallach:

Vattenfall, a Swedish energy firm, launched a $1.9 billion investor-state claim against Germany in 2009 under the Energy Charter Treaty over permits delays for a coal-fired power plant in Hamburg. According to Vattenfall, delays of required government permits started when the state’s environmental ministry established “very clear requirements” for the plant, due to “the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change having alerted the public to the impending climate change. [...] After Vattenfall litigated in domestic courts, the coalition government issued the permits to Vattenfall, but with additional requirements to protect the Elbe River. [...] Rather than comply with these requirements, Vattenfall launched its investor-state claim against Germany, arguing that Hamburg’s environmental rules amounted to an expropriation and a violation of Germany’s obligation to afford foreign investors “fair and equitable treatment.

According to /u/SavannaJeff:

ELI5 (and hence, simplified version) is that Vattenfall signs a memorandum of understanding with the city of Hamburg to build a coal power plant. Hamburg then asks them to expand it while it's still under construction. Elections occur, and the CDU (Merkel's party, but on a local level) doesn't gain a full majority. They enter into coalition talks, and eventually form government with the Greens as minority partner. Throughout the entire coalition forming process, the Greens were stating that their chief goal was to stop the power plant being built. Vattenfall applies for the permits that they'd met the conditions to receive, only to find that the guy handing out these permits in the city government is a political appointee from the coalition and not a regular civil servant, who keeps arbitrarily raising the environmental requirements in an effort to make the plant uneconomic, and hence have Vattenfall abandon the investment. Vattenfall actually complied with a number of these increases in regulations, but eventually was forced to go through ISDS proceedings.

and

What happened was that the Hamburg government fucked up in two respects. The first (relating to what you're saying) is that they should've looked at alternative methods of dealing with the heated water - which they didn't, rather they attempted to implement other regulations that would cause a negative economic impact on the power plant. The second is that they shouldn't have been arbitrarily increasing those other regulations to try and prevent the Vattenfall investment. If the Hamburg government had been handling this in a depoliticized and empirically driven fashion, with a professional civil servant in charge, they could've ticked all the correct boxes and neither case would be proceeding now. Instead, they appointed a politico to the job that was supposed to be overseeing it, and they fucked up.

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I think the main mischaracterisation is that, in Lori Wallachs accounts, the validity and motivation of the disputed government policies are never questioned. The complexity between legitimate policy goals and pure protectionism that undermines trade agreements are never addressed. It is assumed that the government is always doing the right thing for its people, and have their best interest at heart, in contrast to greedy corporation. However, the cognitive dissonance is striking; on the one hand, they are accusing governments to be corrupt by selling out democracy for profit by conducting trade negotations in secret, on the other hand, as in their "case studies", good and honest governments are being overrun by corporations.

Hello Dr. Balcombe!

I have almost zero knowledge about fish so I apologize for rather basic (i.e. stupid) question. I was wondering whether your studies include marine mammals like whales and/or molluscs like octopuses?

I became aware that octopuses are considered exceptionally intelligent when I read an article last year about an octopus that made a glorious escape from the national aquarium in New Zealand. But, then, in the same family, bivalves are not even considered sentient. Have you done research on molluscs? Are bivalves sentient? How intelligent are octopuses?

Favourite marine animal?

Thank you!

[deleted]

I'm sorry if that came across as insensitive. NSFW doesn't mean it's something unnatural nor something to be ashamed of. Just to warn people at work that it's a semi-naked pic. I was a bit caught off guard I think because proof pics are usually some dude with a silly face and a sign with their name on it. This pic probably doesn't warrant a NSFW tag, but I wasn't sure.