WTO to enforce Kyoto restrictions?(World Trade Organization)(Protocol to the Framework Convention on Climate Change, 1997)

"How's this for the lead sentence of a news article from the near future: 'The World Trade Organization has ruled that the United States broke international trade rules by failing to curb carbon emissions,'" wrote Andrew Leonard in the February 24 issue of Salon. In this fashion, the World Trade Organization would essentially become the body responsible for enforcing the UN's Kyoto treaty on so-called greenhouse gases.

This scenario is hardly as fanciful as it may seem at first. It plays off a suggestion made by Joseph Stiglitz, the former chief economist for the World Bank and a former member of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

According to a February 20 report in the Independent of London, Stiglitz believes that "the US could be forced to take action on climate change using world trade laws.... The [European Union] and others should apply to the WTO for a ruling which declares that America's refusal to participate in carbon curbs constitutes a de facto subsidy to US industry, which is illegal under trade rules."

The WTO, a Geneva-based body that presently has 148 member nations, is--in effect--the UN of global trade. Unlike the UN itself, the WTO actually has the power to enforce its decrees. When a country or region wins a case before a WTO arbitration panel, it is authorized to impose punitive trade sanctions against the loser. The ...