Law Commons^™

In a previous paper, Trading Up Kyoto: A Proposal for Amending the Protocol, I argued that not only do international trade rules, specifically the operation of the World Trade Organization("WTO") agreements, hinder international climate change treaty negotiations, but also that applying exceptions to circumvent trade rules is doctrinally difficult and normatively unsettling, primarily because of WTO jurisprudence, the colorable intent of nations that are violating WTO rules in the guise of mitigating climate change, and the challenges to creating environmental exceptions to trade rules to facilitate emissions reduction. To illustrate this point, I focused on ongoing trade disputes involving a …