'Gatting' the New Climate Treaty Right: Leveraging Energy Subsidies to Promote Multilateralism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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 few renewable energy subsidies through which some nations are apparently seeking to reduce their emissions. I then argued that an effective climate change treaty should counteract the impact of trade and trade rules. In this Article, I argue that nations should negotiate a plan to phase out harmful subsidies, particularly fossil fuel subsidies. The idea of eliminating subsidies is not new. It has been considered an important solution to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and one that can complement WTO rules. This Article adds another dimension to this solution, i.e. leveraging subsidies within the new climate change treaty to encourage multilateralism. Multilateralism is essential to address the leakage and competition problems arising from the nonparticipation of all major greenhouse gas emitters. Effective unilateral measures to counter leakage violate WTO rules. I argue that nations can counteract this problem by incorporating into the new climate change treaty a mechanism to phase out harmful subsidies in exchange for a right to provide beneficial subsidies as one policy tool that would promote climate change mitigation efforts significantly. This proposal would complement, and not replace, existing provisions; would comply with WTO rules; would mimic other international environmental treaties, notably CITES, the Basel Convention, and the Montreal Protocol, which have addressed tensions between trade and an environmental problem by incorporating trade measures within the treaty.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".