deal

Negotiators trying to develop a strong climate agreement in Paris face significant hurdles. The goal of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 21st Conference of the Parties is to produce an international agreement that will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by an amount necessary to prevent a 2-degree Celsius rise in global average temperature in this century. The conference is likely to fail to meet this goal.

In something of a joke, President Barack Obama says Americans should actually read the Transpacific Partnership Agreement. The agreement itself consists of 30 chapters, with 144 annexes (43 of which are imbedded into specific chapters). Assuming the average American reads 200 pages a day, it would take a month. The length and complexity of the TPP Agreement signals that it is not fundamentally a free trade agreement, but is rather a managed trade agreement. As Obama has said, “I know that if you take a look at what’s actually in the TPP, you will see that this is, in fact, a new type of trade deal.”

The reaction to the Skilling sentence reduction has been almost uniformly negative. That is regrettable because there were serious problems with Skilling’s conviction.