The Trans Pacific Partnership already looks like standing up for our right to continue smoking. It might also champion our right to keep burning fossil fuels.
Last month the Trans Pacific Partnership agreement (TPP) came to town.
That is to say it came to Dunedin in the form of a seminar by Prof Jane Kelsey, of the Auckland Law School, and Dr Josh Freeman, of OraTaiao, the NZ Climate and Health Council, and a march along George St the following Saturday.
As reported by the Otago Daily Times, Prof Kelsey and Dr Freeman explained the TPP was being negotiated in secret and would not be subject to parliamentary scrutiny in any of the 12 participating countries - including New Zealand - with the exception that the US Congress will get to vote on the agreement, once negotiated.
What we know about the terms of the TPP comes via Wikileaks.
More privileged are the 600 ''cleared advisers'' with access to the negotiations who, according to Prof Kelsey, are mostly representatives of large global corporations.
A salient feature of the TPP is the extension to corporations of the right to sue sovereign governments for damage to their commercial interests through so-called investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS).
As an example of what to expect, Philip Morris is suing the Australian Government for loss of brand value following the introduction of plain packaging legislation as a curb on tobacco use.
The Kelsey-Freeman seminar naturally focused on the impacts of TPP on health policy and outcomes in New Zealand, but the same concerns apply to the biggest health risk of all: a changing climate.
Suppose New Zealand chose to restrict emissions of carbon at a rate faster than other TPP partners.
The 10 largest oil and gas-producing companies within the TPP - seven of them US, three Canadian - had a market capitalisation of exactly $US1trillion at the end of 2013.
This gives us a measure of the amount of value put at risk by government attempts to curtail and eventually cease emissions of carbon.
As with tobacco, we can surely expect these firms to fight to reclaim as much of that lost value as they can.
If New Zealand were to face these appeals alone, it would be facing 10 adversaries with combined 2013 turnover five and a-half times New Zealand's 2013 GDP of $US182billion.
At a minimum, a TPP that includes these provisions would greatly increase the costs to New Zealand of pursuing an independent attack on the emissions that threaten a sustainable future.
Hence it is more likely that governments within the TPP would have to make common cause in the fight against climate change.
This would spread the cost of compensating high-carbon emitters, but it would likely also limit the pace of change to one that suited the interests of the most powerful members of the partnership.
If what we suspect about the TPP turns out to be true, we can expect its provisions to lock in a set of asset valuations that belong to a carbon-emitting global economy, valuations which will have to be radically changed as that economy dies away and a sustainable, low-carbon economy takes its place.
It seems the ''cleared advisers'' that have access to TPP negotiations are largely representatives of that historical value system and will surely argue to see its interests prevail for as long as possible, using ISDS to recoup lost asset values and raising the cost to us all of making the changes that will have to be made.
As a business school professor, I am also bound to point out that these attempts to protect the value of what economists call ''stranded assets'' sit uncomfortably with the principles of capitalist competition, in which profit is justified as a return on the risks investors take when they commit investments as ''hostages to fortune'', to use Sir John Hicks' phrase.
Anyone investing in fossil fuel industries today, knowing what we know about the damage emissions do to the climate, is making a poor investment decision and should not expect society to compensate them for their error.
• Colin Campbell-Hunt is an emeritus professor in the Otago Business School. Each week in this column, one of a panel of writers addresses issues of sustainability.
