Tuesday, September 28, 1993 Chair and Member of Sierra Club Economic Committee Back NAFTA * Raymond Mikesell and C. Ford Runge of the Sierra Club's Economic Committee, released a statement yesterday stating: "As Chair and a member of the Sierra Club's Economics Committee, we recommend NAFTA's passage, and reject the positions that environmental opponents of NAFTA have taken. The environment will be better protected with NAFTA than without it." Messrs. Mikesell and Runge state that the recent attack on NAFTA by some environmental groups "does serious violence to the facts and the credibility of those involved. By allying themselves with groups whose agenda has little to do with environmental protection and much to do with protect- ionism," they conclude, "they have lost their bearings in the environmental community." Mikesell and Runge refute the central claim of a recent full-page ad that ran in the New York Times signed by some environmental groups that "NAFTA will seriously stifle representative democracy by making local, state or national laws subject to an unelected NAFTA bureaucracy that citizens cannot control." Mikesell and Runge state categorically: "We could not disagree more. Our own careful evaluation of the NAFTA text and the newly negotiated environmental side agreement indicates that local, state and national environmental laws will not only be protected, but that a new mechanism, the trilateral Commission on Environmental Cooperation, will act to assure that these laws are coordinated so as to raise and help enforce environmental standards, especially in Mexico." They also address the claim that the Commission is a "unelected NAFTA bureaucracy", by pointing out that this ignores the role of public participation with the Commission, and that "[t]he U.S. representative to the United Nations Human Rights Commission is not elected either, but that does not commend its elimination." * That same day, a New York Times editorial praised the NAFTA's environ- mental provisions, stating: "No previous trade agreement tackles as many pollution issues as NAFTA does." The editorial noted the split among environmentalists, and wrote that "NAFTA's critics are even more jittery" now that the ruling requiring an environmental impact statement before sending the agreement to Congress was over- turned. "A careful reading of NAFTA," the editorial asserted, "should ease their worries. ... NAFTA will not turn Mexico, Canada or the U.S. into a preindustrial paradise. It simply seeks to protect the environment against the economic explosion that NAFTA is supposed to let loose. Those who claim otherwise haven't done their reading." NAFTA Fact * The NAFTA Environmental Agreement sets up a pathbreaking citizen com- plaint process -- any citizen of a NAFTA country can petition the trilateral Environ- mental Secretariat to investigate a country's failure to enforce its environmental laws.