This Changes Everything

“How Free Market Fundamentalism Helped Overheat the Planet” (Pages 64-69)

Klein discusses international trade law and how in recent years, she has noted several examples of green-energy programs being challenged under World Trade Organization (WTO) rules. She cites several examples of nations challenging and counter-challenging each other’s green programs as forms of protectionism, which is illegal under free-trade rules.

Klein shares the case of Silfab, an Italian solar panel manufacturing firm that set up a factory in Ontario, Canada, in 2010. By 2014, it was on the brink of closure. It was the ambitious 2009 Green Energy and Green Economy Act in Canada that had drawn the company to Ontario. The act set up measures to significantly cut Canada’s coal dependency and support renewable energy providers by giving them a sustainable local market to sell their energy into, so long as they sourced 40-60% of their workforce and materials locally. It won international acclaim and was dubbed “the most comprehensive renewable energy policy entered anywhere around the world” (67).

The program was doing very well up until 2014 when Japan and the EU challenged its “buy-local” provisions under WTO laws, and the WTO ruled against it. Without this part of the agreement market, confidence was lost, and foreign investors pulled out of Silfab's Canadian operation, leaving closure imminent.