The Institute for Trade, Standards, and Sustainable Development (ITSSD) advocates sustainable development without absolute protection of natural resources and discounts anti-global warming measures as not scientifically or economically justified.

Headquartered in Princeton, New Jersey, the ITSSD is a nonprofit organization dedicated to educating government, industry, and the public about science, technology and innovation policy, private property rights, and international trade. It is operated by its chief executive officer-president, vice president, and secretary and has a seventeen-member advisory board (Botterill, 2003). The officers write white papers and articles, serve on a variety of discussion panels, administer an internship program for university students, and publish journals on economic freedom, intellectual property rights, trade barriers, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, "pathological communalism," and women's property rights.

The ITSSD's principal policy calls for positive sustainable development, which, it argues, has a general capacity to create well-being for present and future generations (Axelrod, 2004). This sustainable development is positive in that it eschews regulation "devoid of scientific and economic benchmarks" and "disguised trade barriers premised solely on cultural preferences" in favor of strongly protected property rights, free market (neoliberal) economics, decentralization, economic growth, and local, regional, or national (rather than supranational) institutions encouraging individual initiative. The ITSSD contends that regulations and standards must be developed "based on empirical science and economic cost-benefit analysis" under public scrutiny and free of the dominating influence of scientific fashion or sociopolitical ideology.

Informing its stance on climate change, ITSSD relies on the arguments of global warming critics, including (according to ITSSD) "established scientists." Most prominently cited is British businessman, politician, and inventor Christopher Monckton, who argues that global warming derives from natural cycles and is misrepresented by the scientific community. In the white paper "Europe's Warnings on Climate Change Belie More Nuanced Concerns" (2007), ITSSD president Lawrence A. Kogan accuses leaders of sidestepping what he portrays as the ongoing scientific debate. This debate concerns the extent to which certain human activities can be shown to cause measurable global warming or merely to correlate with a barely observable rise in global temperatures that may or may not prove to be cyclical in nature. The failure of European leaders to discuss this issue in the ITSSD's eyes suggests a nuanced effort to base intergovernmental regulatory policy on popularly fanned fears about largely hypothetical, unpredictable or unknowable future natural and anthropogenic hazards that have not yet been shown to pose direct ascertainable risks to human health or the environment.

References

1. Axelrod, Regina S., David Leonard Downie, and Norman J. Vig, eds. The Global Environment: Institutions, Law, and Policy. 2d ed. Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2004.

2. Botterill, Linda C., and Melanie Fisher, eds. Beyond Drought: People, Policy, and Perspectives. Collingwood, Vic.: CSIRO, 2003.

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