Environment DA 2AC Frontline

1. Non-unique: Mexicos already a signatory to NAFTA and is

drilling for oil; any impacts from BioD loss should have
already happened.
2. Non-unique: Were already in the middle of a mass

extinction, so the impacts should already be happening

Vidal 10 [John Vidal. 8/16/2010. Protect nature for world economic security,

warns UN biodiversity chief. The Guardian. Online:

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/aug/16/nature-economic-security]
Industrialisation, population growth, the spread of cities and farms and climate
change are all now threatening the fundamentals of life itself, said Djoghlaf, in
London before a key UN meeting where governments are expected to sign up to a
more ambitious agreement to protect nature.
"Many plans were developed in the 1990s to protect biodiversity but they are
still sitting on the shelves of ministries. Countries were legally obliged to act, but
only 140 have even submitted plans and only 16 have revised their plans since
1993. Governments must now put their houses in order," he said. According to
the UN Environment Programme, the Earth is in the midst of a mass
extinction of life. Scientists estimate that 150-200 species of plant, insect,
bird and mammal become extinct every 24 hours. This is nearly 1,000
times the "natural" or "background" rate and, say many biologists, is greater
than anything the world has experienced since the vanishing of the dinosaurs nearly
65m years ago. Around 15% of mammal species and 11% of bird species are
classified as threatened with extinction.

3. Link Turn: The US proposals for the TPP include strong

multinational environmental regulations, increasing

biodiversity protection
Linscott 10 (Mark Linscott, Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for
Environment and Natural Resources, Written Testimony Before the Senate
Subcommittee on International Trade, Customs, and Global Competitiveness,
July 14, 2010, available at
http://www.finance.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/071410mltest.pdf).
An environment chapter in the TPP should strengthen country
commitments to enforce their environmental laws and regulations,
including in areas related to ocean and fisheries governance, through the
effective enforcement obligation subject to dispute settlement. With

respect to potential areas for marine-related obligations, a few of

the ideas percolating and still in the early stages of development include,
obligations and commitments that would address harmful subsidies
for fishing, protect critically endangered marine species, combat
illegal fishing and improve fisheries management, ensure safety of
seafood imports and exports, and improve compliance with
domestic and international programs and agreements, all or some
of which could potentially be considered as elements of a TPP
environmental agreement. We are also prepared to explore these issues
within the context of an environmental cooperation package to enhance
commitments made by governments in the environment chapter of a TPP
agreement
4. Non-unique and link turn: International agreements to

promote biodiversity are generally unworkable, but the

U.S. is the biggest backer of environmental protection in
the TPP
Mead 1/16 [Walter Russell Mead, Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow in U.S. Foreign
Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, Green Outrage at New TPP Leak, at the
American Interest, Jan. 16, 2014, available at http://www.the-americaninterest.com/blog/2014/01/16/green-outrage-at-new-tpp-leak/]
To be sure, some of the issues these green groups are concerned about are
important. Overfishing is a serious problem, as is the international trade of
endangered species. That countries cant agree on binding efforts toward
these ends (in this instance, the United States is pushing for stronger
environmental protections while the TPPs other parties balk) underscores
the difficulty of green policymaking at the international level. Its hard to
put in place regulations that will often restrict economic growth for the
sake of concepts like biodiversity; obtaining an international consensus on
natures value is understandably hairy.

5. Link Turn: The TPP presents a great opportunity to

address environmental issues and decrease pollution

Meltzer 13 (Joshua Meltzer, fellow in Global Economy and Development at the

Brookings Institution, The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, the Environment
and Climate Change, September 2013, available at
http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2013/09/trans-pacific-partnershipmeltzer)

The trade and environment relationship is complex and presents both

challenges and opportunities. For instance, trade can lead to increased
economic efficiency, productivity and growth. But economic growth can result in
increased consumption of non-renewable resources and greater environmental
harms, such as increasing air pollution and worsening water quality. On the other
hand, increased economic growth can generate the resources to address

environmental damage and provide a pathway for countries to transition

out of polluting industries into more service-oriented ones that are less
polluting and damaging to the environment. Trade agreements can also
strengthen the capacity for governments to respond to environmental
concerns. For instance, reducing trade barriers on environmental goods
can reduce the costs of green technologies, thereby supporting efforts to
address global challenges such as climate change.
International trade can also be a pathway for the transmission of weaker
environmental policies from one country to another. For instance, a countrys lax
environmental standards that fail to internalise the social costs of environmental
harms, such as pollution from the production of goods, can provide an unfair
competitive advantage to its exports, raising concerns that this will create economic
and political pressures in the importing country to also lower their environmental
standards. Additionally, a number of environmental harms, such as illegal logging
and overfishing, can be magnified by international trade, which expands the market
for these goods. Yet trade agreements can be used to reinforce existing rules
prohibiting trade in these products, thereby strengthening conservation efforts.
Trade agreements also raise concerns that a governments capacity to respond to
environmental harms in ways that restrict trade will become constrained by trade
rules that are enforced by legally binding dispute settlement procedures with
penalties such as trade sanctions. Finding an appropriate balance between trade
rules that promote liberalised trade and maintaining policy space for governments
to respond to environmental concerns is another challenge.
As a twenty-first-century trade agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership
Agreement (TPP) presents an important opportunity to address a range of
environmental issues, from illegal logging to climate change and to craft
rules that strike an appropriate balance between supporting open trade
and ensuring governments can respond to pressing environmental issues.
Moreover, the ambition of the TPP parties is for the TPP to become the building
block for a Free Trade Area of the Asia-Pacific (FTAAP). Accordingly, the rules that
are agreed in the TPP could set the rules for trade and investment in the broader
Asia-Pacific region for years to come.

6. Link turn: Statistical analysis proves free trade is good for

the environment
Taylor et al 98 [Werner Antweiler, Brian R. Copeland and M. Scott Taylor. Is
Free Trade Good for the Environment? American Economic Association. July 1998.
http://siti.feem.it/gnee/pap-abs/antweil.pdf]
This paper sets out a theory of how openness to trading opportunities affects
pollution concentrations. We started with a theoretical specification that
gave pride of place to scale, technique and composition effects and then
showed how this theoretical decomposition is useful in thinking about
the relationship between openness to international markets and the
environment. In our empirical section we adopted a specification directly linked
to our earlier theory. We then estimated this specification paying special attention
to the potentially confounding influences introduced by the panel structure of our

data set. Our results consistently indicate that scale, technique and composition
effects are not just theoretical constructs with no empirical counterparts. Rather
these theoretical constructs can be identified and their magnitude measured.
Moreover, once measured they can play a useful role in determining the likely
environmental consequences of technological progress, capital accumulation or
increased trade. These estimates may also be useful in aggregate CGE modeling of
the effects of various free trade agreements and other trade reforms [see for
example, Ferrantino et al.,1996]. Overall the results indicate that increases
in a countrys exposure to international markets creates small but
measurable changes in pollution concentrations by altering the pollution
intensity of national output. While our estimates indicate that greater trade
intensity creates only relatively small changes in pollution via the composition
effect, economic theory and numerous empirical studies demonstrate that trade
also raises the value of national output and income. These associated increases in
output and incomes will then impact on pollution concentrations via our estimated
scale and technique effects. Our estimates of the scale and technique
elasticities indicate that if openness to international markets raises both
output and income by 1%, pollution concentrations fall by approximately
1%. Putting this calculation together with our earlier evidence on
composition effects yields a somewhat surprising conclusion: freer trade
is good for the environment.

7. No link: Neg has no evidence that the TPP in particular

will damage Mexican biodiversity, just generic trade

bad evidence.
8. No brink: Neg has no evidence that the TPP does enough

damage to threaten human survival.

9. No impact or non-unique impact: Their Raj 12 card talks

about global biodiversity loss; their link only talks about

biodiversity loss in Mexico.
Impacts outweigh: Their DA is linear and talks about
increasing a slight risk; our plan stops multiple more
immediate extinction scenarios

10.