"The World Trade Organization's chief is on a mission to put #ClimateChange at the heart of its work.
But at a biennial #WTO meeting in Abu Dhabi where negotiators hope to fix new rules for global commerce, the sole paragraph in a 56-page draft agreement that explicitly addresses the topic is stuck in an annex - with an explanatory note referring to "deep divergences" among members."
There's a great throwaway line in 1992's Sneakers: Dan Aykroyd, playing a conspiracy-addled hacker/con-man, feverishly tells Sydney Poitier (ex-CIA spook) about a 1958 meeting between Eisenhower and aliens where he said, "look, give us your technology, and we'll give you all the cow lips you want."
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These bargains - which started as a series of bilateral and then multilateral agreements like #NAFTA, and culminated in the #WTO agreement of 1999 - were the most important step in the reordering of the world's economy around rent-extraction, cheap labor exploitation, and a brittle supply chain that is increasingly endangered by the polycrisis of climate and its handmaidens, like zoonotic plagues, water wars, and mass refugee migration.