U.S. Wins WTO Case to destroy India's Solar Power Industry [View all]

[Bubzer]

We can expect actions like this, only 10 times worse, all across the globe, should the TPP pass...

The World Trade Organization has decided for the United States in its case to use trade rules to crush India’s nascent solar industry. Climate be damned, national sovereignty be damned, trade rules come first. Protecting multinational corporations is the highest priority to the U.S. government Saving the planet from catastrophic climate change is not. India had been successfully implementing plans to shift rapidly from dirty climate killing coal to clean solar by building a domestic solar panel production industry, but the U.S. trade representative, working in the interests of multinational corporations, will not allow it.

India's power system, predominantly fueled by coal, is notoriously unreliable, but solar power is coming to the rescue. Locally generated rooftop and industrial scale solar is empowering communities across India while reducing pollution and creating local jobs. But the U.S. trade office took offense that India had buy local provisions to protect their investments in developing their domestic solar power industry and filed a complaint with the World Trade Organization (WTO). The WTO found against India’s buy local provision to provide a reliable market for India's nascent solar power panel production industry. Ironically, the big winner in this case is China, the lowest cost producer of solar panels, not the United States. Moreover, buy local provisions have been used by U.S. states to build up local industries. This case could ultimately be turned against businesses in the United States that benefit from buy local rules if China went to the WTO fight for its manufacturers.

U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman was positively giddy about his successful effort to stifle growing competition in the developing world that might challenge the dominance of large multinational corporations in the energy industry.

"Today, the WTO panel agreed with the United States that India's 'localization' measures discriminate against US manufacturers and are against WTO rules," Froman said. The US and India "are strong supporters of the multilateral, rules-based trading system and take our WTO obligations seriously," he said. "This is an important outcome, not just as it applies to this case, but for the message it sends to other countries considering discriminatory 'localization' policies." "The United States strongly supports the rapid deployment of solar energy around the world - including in India," Froman said. "But discriminatory policies in the clean energy space in fact undermine our efforts to promote clean energy by requiring the use of more expensive and less efficient equipment, raising the cost of generating clean energy and making it more difficult for clean energy sources to be competitive," he said. The US had challenged the Government of India's imposition of domestic content requirements for solar cells and modules under India's National Solar Mission.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/02/26/1491700/-U-S-Wins-WTO-Case-to-Stomp-India-s-Nascent-Solar-Power-Industry?detail=facebook