Local Meets Global: The Low Carbon Fuel Standard and the WTO
27 Pages Posted: 20 May 2010
Date Written: 2009
Abstract
Unexpected side effects sometimes sabotage our efforts to design solutions to the problem of climate change. So it is with the Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS) that has been adopted in California and elsewhere, which has the initial goal of reducing the carbon intensity of California's transportation fuels by at least ten percent by 2020. To succeed, the LCFS anticipates widespread substitution of gasoline with biofuels. However, there is evidence that increased demand for biofuels leads to destruction of forests and wetlands, themselves important carbon sinks. California's regulatory response, intended to avoid this type of indirect land use change, may be limited by international trade rules. California's LCFS illustrates how regulators may be confounded by the web of policy considerations and interwoven legal regimes that link the World Trade Organization (WTO), farmers and cattle barons in Brazil, the European Commission in Brussels and orangutans in Borneo to transportation fuel in California.
Keywords: trade, energy
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have a job opening that you would like to promote on SSRN?
Recommended Papers
-
Culture and Individual Judgment and Decision Making
By Elke U. Weber and Christopher K. Hsee
-
Asymmetric Discounting in Intertemporal Choice: A Query Theory Account
By Elke U. Weber, Eric J. Johnson, ...
-
Aspects of Endowment: A Query Theory of Value Construction
By Eric J. Johnson, Gerald Häubl, ...
-
Mindful Judgment and Decision Making
By Elke U. Weber and Eric J. Johnson
-
Affect, Risk, and Decision Making
By Paul Slovic, Ellen Peters, ...
-
Constructing Preferences from Memory
By Elke U. Weber and Eric J. Johnson
-
Making Better Decisions: From Measuring to Constructing Preferences
By Eric J. Johnson, Mary Steffel, ...
-
Culture and Judgment and Decision Making: The Constructivist Turn
By Elke U. Weber and Michael Morris