Climate Change and American Foreign Policy

Climate Change and American Foreign Policy

Edited by Paul C. Harris

palgrave macmillan

CLIMATE CHANGE AND AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY

Copyright © Paul G. Harris 2000

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission. In accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS.

Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

Paperback edition published 2016. First published in hardcover 2000 by St. Martin’s Press.

The author has asserted his right to be identifi ed as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, RG21 6XS.

Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of Nature America, Inc., One New York Plaza, Suite 4500, New York, NY 10004-1562.

Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world.

ISBN: 978–1–137–57253–0E-PDF ISBN: 978–1–137–12080–9DOI: 10.1057/9781137120809

Distribution in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world is by Palgrave Macmillan®, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Climate change and American foreign policy / edited by Paul G. Harris. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Climate changes—Government policy—United states. 2. United States—Foreign relations. I. Harris, Paul. G.

QC981.8.C51138 2000363.738�747—dc21

A catalogue record for the book is available from the British Library.

Contents

Contributors

Preface

Preface to the Paperback Edition

I Introduction

Chapter 1 Climate Change and American Foreign Policy: An Introduction -Paul G. Hams

n Critiquing U.S. Climate Change Policy

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Climate Change: Is the United States Sharing the Burden?-Paul G. Harris

Upholding the "Island of High Modernity": The Changing Climate of American Foreign Policy -Peter Doran

m Politics of U.S. Climate Change Policy

Chapter 4 Governing Climate Change Policy: From Scientific Obscurity to Foreign Policy Prominence

vii

IX

Xl

3

29

51

-Jacob Park 73

Chapter 5 From the Inside Out: Domestic Influences on Global Environmental Policy-Neil E. Hamson 89

Chapter 6 Congress and the Politics of Climate Change -Gary Bryner 111

Chapter 7 Regulation Theory and Climate Change Policy -Andreas Missbach 131

Chapter 8 International Policy Instrument Prominence in the Climate Change Debate-Karen Fisher- Vanden 151

Chapter 9 Regime Effectiveness,Joint Implementation, and Climate Change Policy-jo/Xe Antunes 177

IV International Nonns and u.s. Climate Change Policy

Chapter 10 The United States and the Evolution of International Climate Change Norms-Michele M. Betsill 205

Chapter 11

Notes

Index

International Norms of Responsibility and U.S. Climate Change Policy-Paul G. Harris 225

241

299

Contributors

JORGE ANTUNES is deputy head of unit in "Economic analysis" at the Directorate-General for Health and Food Safety, European Commission.

MICHELE M. BETSILL is professor in the Department of Political Science at Colorado State University.

GARY BRYNER was professor of Political Science at Brigham Young University.

PETER DORAN is lecturer in the School of Law at the Queen's University Belfast.

KAREN FISHER-VANDEN is professor of Enviroml1ental and Resource Economics, College of Agricultural Sciences, Pennsylvania State University.

PAUL G. HARRIS is chair professor of Global and Environmental Studies at the Hong Kong Institute of Education.

NEIL E. HARRISON is founder and executive director of The Sustainable Development Institute and Research Associate at the University of Denver.

ANDREAS MISSBACH is head of the Commodity, Trade and Finance Department of the Berne Declaration.

JACOB PARK is associate professor of Business Strategy and Sustainability at Green Mountain College, Vermont.

Preface

T he Project on Environmental Change and Foreign Policy at Lon­don Guildhall University began in early 1998. The project began by examining environmental aspects of United States foreign pol­

icy. The core objectives were to show how environmental changes influ­ence the American foreign policy process; to analyze the actors and institutions-both domestic and international-that constrain and shape U.S. actions on environmental issues; to understand better the central role played by the United States in international efforts to address problems of global environmental change; and to critically assess American interna­tional environmental policies. Other objectives of the project are to "test the waters" of research in this field; to showcase research that has not been forced into traditional empirical, epistemological, or ontological boxes, in the expectation that new areas and issues will be illuminated; to give insight to governmental and nongovernmental practitioners and activists that may improve their understanding of environmental issues in American foreign policy; to get these ideas "onto the street" where they might have some positive effect on policy-making and scholarship; and to enlighten students and laypersons interested in international affairs, American foreign policy, and environmental protection.

Two dozen scholars from several countries contributed to the Project on Environmental Change and Foreign Policy in its first two years. In achieving our initial objectives they have examined American domestic politics and foreign policy generally, international environmental diplo­macy, theories and philosophies of international relations and the environ­ment, and U.S. leadership in the post-Cold War world. To date the project

x Preface

has resulted in .two manuscripts: this volume, dedicated to understanding the place of climate change in American foreign policy; and a second vol­ume, The Environment and American Foreign Policy, published by Georgetown University Press, which examines a host of environmental issues in the context of American foreign policy, ranging from ocean pollution and environmental security to whaling and environmental trade sanctions.

Some of the chapters in this book will be rather controversial in their arguments and conclusions. One objective of the project has been to include--or at least not exclude-alternative perspectives. These less main­stream views of U.S. climate change policy often "speak" to people outside the United States, whereas the mainstream interpretations and analyses fre­quendy do not. We hope that all readers learn from the work presented here, including the more unorthodox chapters.

I wish to thank the authors for their important contributions to this vol­ume and to the Project on Environmental Change and Foreign Policy. The contributors and I are grateful to the anonymous referees for their helpful comments, and to the kind, professional staff at St. Martin's Press, especially Ruth Mannes, for their diligence in bringing this book to readers.

Paul G. Harris London, England

Preface to the Paperback Edition

Climate Change and American Foreign Policy in the Twenty-First Century

W :en the first edition of Climate Change and American Foreign Policy was published in 2000, Bill Clinton was president and it was uncertain who would replace him. The main contenders in

that year's presidential election were his vice president and fellow Democrat, Al Gore-a politician who had made a career of promoting environmen­tal causes and had taken the lead on climate change during the Clinton administration-and George W Bush-a Republican oil executive hostile to

environmental regulation and, more to the point, someone who was openly skeptical about climate change. As it happened, the November 2000 election typified today's United States, with the electorate split down the middle, leav­ing political institutions in a muddle: Gore received more of the popular vote but Bush took the electoral-college vote following a controversial decision by the Supreme Court. Bush became president of a nominal democracy with­out having the most support among voters, revealing just one of challenges that the American political system would pose, and still does, for U.S.leader­ship in combating climate change. Indeed, so far in this century the divided Arnerican electorate has been routinely reflected in an even more divided Congress, ensuring that political institutions were routinely incapable of avoiding policy gridlock, let alone solving major problems. This is particularly true when it comes to issues-most definitely including climate change­

that involve industries, interest groups, and voters heavily invested in the status quo addiction to material consumption generally and fossil filelS in particular. This is not a recipe for U.S. leadership on climate change, to the frustration

xu Pr~face to the Paperback Edition

of a world hoping for much more from the United States and the American people to address a global problem substantially created by Americans.

The chapters that follow provide an historical snapshot of climate change and American foreign policy at the end of the twentieth century. One thing that is fascinating about reading the chapters now is how little has changed. When it comes to climate change, history is a very good guide for both the present and the future. It is a cliche but nevertheless apt: the more things change, the more they stay the same. While a Democratic president who seems to be genuinely concerned about climate change once again occupies the White House, Congress is as divided as ever on whether the United States should take a lead in addressing the problem. The Congressional elections of November 2014 created a divided govern­ment, with both the Senate and House of Representatives controlled by Republicans, including many prominent climate skeptics. Consequently, although there have been a number of US. bills and proposals for legisla­tive action, little of major consequence (at least relative to the scale of the problem) has resulted from Congress.

Insofar as American domestic and foreign policy on climate change has evolved since the turn of the century, it has been on the initiative of the presidential administration ofBarack Obama, not Capitol Hill. However, the American political system was expressly designed to prevent anyone branch of government from dominating the country's politics and policies, mean­ing that there is only so much the president can do without support from Congress. Today Obama pushes in one direction, for example, by imple­menting rules to make it very difficult to conunission new coal-fired power plants, while Congress pushes in the other, for example, by its continued refusal to support international agreements that would require the United States to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions, let alone to fully accept respon­sibility for the country's historical climate-changing pollution. And because Congress is not in tune with the administration, the system will allow the next president, if he or she so chooses, to reverse most of what Obama has done. Again, this is not a recipe for US. leadership on climate change.

With a generation of climate politics as backdrop, in this new preface I update Part I of Climate Chm1,'!,e and American Foreign Policy, sunmurize some recent developments in scientific knowledge about climate change, look briefly at US. climate policy since 2000, and consider whether the analyses by contributors can still help us to understand and anticipate US. actions in the future. My aim is to help readers see what the following chapters continue to say not only about American climate politics and foreign policy in past decades, but also what they tell us about why the United States is behaving as it does now and what this suggests about its behavior in coming

Preface to the Paperback Edition X111

years. If the past is any guide, u.s. international leadership on climate change internationally will require a level of cooperation among the president and Congress, and a degree of support by the American people and u.s. industry, that is very rarely displayed nowadays in Washington or across the country. Future American leadership in the world's efforts to finally reduce the global pollution that is causing climate change, to take robust steps to cope with the impacts of climate change already set in motion, and to accept and act upon the historical responsibility for greenhouse gas pollution is not very likely.

The Politics of Clitnate Science

Since the publication of the first edition of Climate Change and American Fore~Rn Policy in 2000, both the science and the diplomacy of climate change have evolved. Scientists and diplomats have been hard at work, although the latter have failed to negotiate the kind of action needed finally to stem the growth in greenhouse gas pollution. Very significantly, the reality of climate change is now beyond any doubt among the experts-not that it was in much doubt late in the last century, at least among atmospheric scientists and reasonably informed persons free of political or ideological biases. Building and improving upon earlier findings, scientists have become more precise in their predictions about what climate change will look like and how particular regions and countries will likely be affected, although uncertainties about precise details remain and always will do for such an astonishingly complex environmental problem. Alas, one consequence of improved science is awareness that many of the scariest past predictions of climatic changes are increasingly likely to come true.

Two important themes in the evolving science of climate change are that scientists have become more certain about the problem and, in part due to ineffective politics, they are now more willing to say what they think about it. Predictions from the 1980s and 1990s have not changed very much in broad terms; scientists still predict a warming planet, melt­ing ice on land and sea, increasingly ferocious storms and unpredictable weather, more floods and droughts, spreading pests and extinction of spe­cies, ocean acidification, and a litany of adverse problems for world food production, human health, and infrastructure. 1 What has changed is the precision of what scientists are saying and the certainty with which they say it, even in international forums where consensus normally prevails. This is being reflected in the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). For example, at the end of the last century, policymakers were working from scientific findings in the IPCC's first and second assess­ment reports. 2 In the first report, published in 1990, the IPCC consensus

XIV Preface to the Paperback Edition

was that human causes of global warming might be largely attributable to natural variations. By the time of the second report in 1995, the consensus was that there was a link between global warming and human activities, but how much of a role humanity played was left quite vague, at least in the panel's recommendations to policymakers. However, by the time of the third assessment report, issued in 2001, the link between human activities and global warming was described as "likely," which in IPCC terminol­ogy meant a probability of 66 percent. 3 The fourth assessment report of 2007 was much more forthright, declaring that global warming was "very likely" of human origin-meaning 90-percent probability.4 Even this was not enough for many climate skeptics and many politicians. To resolve any realistic doubt among those who believe in science at all, in the fifth scien­tific assessment from the IPCC, issued in late 2013, the consensus among scientists was that the likelihood that humanity is causing climate warm­ing is "extremely likely," which in translation meant 95 percent certainty among scientists. 5 This seems to be about as certain as scientists, at least in this kind of forum, are ever likely to be given that the IPCC operates by consensus and, importantly, that its membership comprises scientists nomi­nated by governments, including governments that wish to prevent total agreement at all costs.

Very importantly for u.s. climate change policymaking, the u.s. gov­ernment has produced three national climate assessments. In 1990 Congress mandated that such assessments be reported every four years, and the gov­ernment's Global Change Research Program did so in 2000, 2009, and 2014. (The two-term administration of President George W Bush did not comply with the Congressional mandate to produce national climate assessments.) The third u.s. national climate assessment, released in May 2014, was arguably even more forceful in its findings than was the fifth IPCC global assessment, concluding that "evidence tells an unambiguous story: the planet is warming, and over the last half century, this warming has been driven primarily by human activity."6 The national assessment con­cluded that climate change is already underway, with major adverse impacts being felt throughout the United States by individuals and the economy as a whole, with the adverse consequences increasing as time passes, the degree of severity depending on how the country responds. The national climate assessment has potential political significance (perhaps explaining why the George W Bush administration refused to produce one) because it gives an American imprimatur to climate science (which probably matters to more than a few members of Congress who are suspicious of foreign­ers) and because it effectively connects the impacts of climate change to particular U.S. states-that is, to the places that members of Congress are

Preface to the Paperback Edition xv

supposed to represent and from which they derive political support, and specifically votes, to remain in office.

Until recently, most scientists were unwilling to be outspoken about the urgent need for policies to address climate change. They tried to be impartial and unbiased, despite attacks by climate skeptics who find even disinterested science they do not agree with to be "political."This is chang­ing. Reflecting their frustrations with decades of weak policies, more scien­tists are speaking out. Indeed, those who were first to go public with their concerns, notably NASA's former top scientist James Hanson, have focused more of their comments directly on policymaking, in the process suggest­ing concrete alternatives to the status quo and even going so far as to join in environmentalist-inspired demonstrations demanding effective climate change policies.7 One reason that scientists seem more willing to speak out is that the causes of climate change-emissions of greenhouse gases-are growing, and growing at an increasing rate. When the IPCC issued its first assessment of climate change in 1990, carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere had reached 353 parts per million (ppm), compared to the historical average of about 280 ppm.~ By 2013 they had jumped to nearly 400 ppm and were increasing at a rate that will bring them toward 500 ppm within a few decades. 9 Thus carbon dioxide pollution has already far exceeded levels-around 350 ppm-above which many scientists believe the world cannot avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change. 1O

Put another way, the scientists' early findings have gone unheeded, and the pollution causing climate change is J{roUJin,!{ much UJorse, meaning that the effects of climate change in the future may very well be vastly worse than what most observers had imagined as recently as at the turn of the century.

Clearly, the relationship between science and policy is not direct. In many ways, the actual science of climate change has limited impact on policymaking. There are those citizens, businesses, officials, and legislators in the United States who believe what scientists are saying; they are in the majority. This makes sense because listening to science and scientists is the normal way of understanding the world, especially when issues are complex, and the normal way to derive the knowledge that is necessary for effective policymaking. But there is a large and very powerful minority of citizens, businesses, officials, and especially American legislators who either do not believe, or at least say that they do not believe, in much (and in some cases any) climate science. We can call these folks the climate skeptics. And there is a vital subgroup of climate skeptics that works actively to cast doubt on the science of climate change so as to prevent effective policy responses.We might call these individuals, and the groups that support them, the climate deniers. Domestic lobbying against U.S. action on climate change has been

XVI Preface to the Paperback Edition

coupled with a pernicious and effective industry-funded campaign to foster climate skepticism and denial, leading to confusion among both the public and policymakers. 11

The skeptics are supported by right-wing media outlets, and they are able to take advantage of "balanced" media coverage from reputable news outlets that until recently gave equal weight to both the consensus among the world's scientist and the tiny minority of fringe groups and doubters who question the reality of global warming. 12 Many of the climate skeptics and deniers in the United States see action on climate change as a route to undermining personal and economic freedoms; their efforts to sow doubt are not always about climate science per se but instead about promoting and protecting an extreme free-market ideology that brooks no restraint by government. 13 This cultivated American doubt about climate change, and indeed active denial of it as a real problem, helps to maintain business as usual, and specifically continuing dependence on fossil fuel energy, as the default national interest in the minds of many U.S. politicians. This is criti­cally important because voters have a role in U.S. policy choices. If they are skeptical about climate change, their representatives in government have little incentive to implement policies to combat it.

It would be easy to dismiss the climate deniers as crackpots, as individu­als who willfully ignore science to justify political and economic ideolo­gies that contribute to environmentally harmful government policies, or as lackeys of the oil companies. But it would be wrong to dismiss them so easily. While it does seem to be true that these people base their beliefs on faith rather than science-no amount of data on global warming seems able to shake them of their belief that it is not happening-it is also true that doubt, skepticism, and outright denial of climate change have enabled and empowered politicians who are promoting the interests of the oil industry and those companies that profit from the status quo, and thereby prevented much more robust action in Washington, especially in Congress. This was manifested in the November 2014 elections, which enabled Senator James Inhofe, author of a book calling climate change "the greatest hoax," to become chairman of the Senate's Committee on Environment and Public Works. 14 Faith in an unchanging world is almost as powerful in the United States, at least in this issue area, as is faith in a higher power. In this sense, the widespread American tendency toward putting religion before sci­ence greatly influences both domestic politics and foreign policy related to climate change. (Having said this, there are Christian and other religious groups in the United States who believe that U.S. failures to combat climate change are immoral. However, these groups' influence on actual policy has not been great. It is left to the reader to decide whether this reveals anything

Preface to the Paperback Edition XVll

about the true religious faith of many American legislators.) The upshot is that denial and skepticism about the reality of climate change have had enormous impact on both domestic and foreign policies of the United States. 1 j

Climate Diplomacy since 2000

As the science of climate change advances in leaps and bounds, reaffirming the profound threats posed by climate change, U.S. policies at home and in the international arena move along at a relative snail's pace, arguably going in the right direction, more or less, but taking an interminably long time to get where they need to go. More generally, even as actual policy action to combat the problem has been relatively limited given the seriousness and urgency of the problem, climate diplomacy has matched climate science in its vigor. It has involved what seems like countless international conferences to discuss the problem and to arrive at all manner of diplomatic statements, accords, agreements, conventions, and protocols. Indeed, climate change has already involved more international negotiation than any issue in human history over a similar amount of time, and it is a near certainty that these negotiations will stretch into the future for many decades to come. Whether this diplomatic activity has so far moved the world very much toward cli­mate solutions is at best highly debatable. What is beyond doubt is that the problem continues to grow worse, especially as developing countries, most notably China, expand their economies and match and even exceed the developed world in polluting the atmosphere.

It is tempting to lose sight of the forest for the trees, the forest being real progress toward limiting climate change and coping with it, the trees being the complex diplomacy that leads to agreements that seem to have too little impact on the ground, and hence are quite easily forgotten. In a real sense such developments mirror what has happened with American foreign policy on climate change: the United States has been very actively involved in international negotiations, but it has not shown any leadership that does more than (figuratively) plant more trees, which in turn further obscure the forest. Some American diplomats might claim that the United States has been a leader on climate change, even the leader, no doubt point­ing to all of the agreements it has influenced. However, insofar as there has been much actual movement by the United States toward genuine action to affect significantly the U.S. impact on future climate, it has more often been at home, albeit probably not in the way that many might anticipate, as changes in U.S. policies during the administrations of Presidents George W Bush and Barrack Obama reveal (see further ahead).

XVlll Preface to the Paperback Edition

At the turn of the century, the most significant development in climate diplomacy was negotiation of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (the climate conven­tion) and efforts to get it ratified by states. By the time that Climate Change and American Foreign Policy went to press, goverml1ents were diligently debating how to implement the protocol. They had done it through five "conferences of the parties" to the framework convention (see chapter 1). However, as noted in chapter 1, at that time there was little prospect that the u.s. Senate would ratify the protocol. This was affirmed by the advent of President George W Bush, who quickly withdrew all support for it. The United States never did ratify the Kyoto Protocol.

What has happened in the international negotiations since 2000?16 The sixth conference of the parties met in Bonn in July 2001. The resulting Bonn Agreement clarified plans for using "flexible mechanisms," such as emissions trading, carbon sinks, and aid to developing countries, to achieve the protocol's objectives. The seventh conference of the parties, which met in Marrakech in 2001, produced the Marrakech Accords, a complicated mix of proposals for implementing the Kyoto Protocol largely designed to garner ratifications from enough countries to enable the protocol to enter into force. To satisfy developing countries, diplomats agreed at Marrakech to increase funding for the climate convention's financial mechanism, the Global Enviroml1ental Facility, and to establish three new funds: the Least Developed Countries Fund, the Special Climate Change Fund, and the Adaptation Fund. However, the implementation measures that were agreed upon at Marrakech meant that actual cuts in greenhouse gas emissions by developed countries would be far less than the already inadequate 5.2 per­cent agreed in Kyoto. 17 The scale of actual financial assistance through the various funds has been very small indeed.

Perhaps realizing a certain level of futility about the prospects for major greenhouse gas cuts, at the 2002 eighth conference of the parties in New Delhi the focus of diplomats shifted away from mitigatin,\{ (cutting) emis­sions, and thereby reducing the impacts of climate change, toward adapt­in,\{ to climate change, with affluent countries agreeing to help developing countries cope with the impacts. This would allow the developed countries to avoid heavy reductions in their greenhouse gas emissions-meaning few changes to the way they provide energy to their economies-while mak­ing it less likely that large developing countries would be required to do so one day. This also meant that the problem would only grow worse. Also at the New Delhi meeting, as well as at the ninth conference of the parties held in Milan, Italy, in late 2003, diplomats discussed ways to implement the Marrakech Accords and to prepare for ratification of the protocol. At

Preface to the Paperback Edition XIX

the 2004 tenth conference of the parties in Buenos Aires, discussion again focused more on adaptation to climate change than on efforts to mitigate it through emissions limitations. Yet more pledges were made by developed­country diplomats to provide additional financial assistance to those poor countries most affected by climate change, albeit without firm commit­ments on making access to that assistance any easier. Importantly, it was also in 2004 that Russia ratified the Kyoto Protocol, allowing it to finally go into force in February 2005-without the United States onboard.

Differences between developed and developing countries have always been central to international negotiations on climate change. Most of the former have called for emissions commitments from the latter, and most of the latter have called for serious greenhouse gas cuts and development assistance from the former. This was manifested at the climate convention's eleventh conference of the parties, which was also the first simultaneous "meeting of the parties" to the Kyoto Protocol, held in Montreal in late 2005. Despite attempts by American diplomats to derail the meeting, it formalized rules for implementing the protocol, streamlined and strength­ened the Clean Development Mechanism, began negotiations for further commitments by developed countries beyond the Kyoto Protocol's com­mitment period (2008-2012), set out guidelines for the Adaptation Fund, and initiated a process for negotiating long-term action to combat cli­mate change. Several developing countries, while still opposed to binding obligations-in keeping with the principle of "common but differentiated responsibilities"-suggested at this conference that they might be willing to adopt voluntary measures to limit their greenhouse gas emissions.

Reflecting the failure of diplomacy to make much progress toward achieving the climate convention's objectives, at the 2006 twelfth confer­ence of the parties in Nairobi, then United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan characterized the international climate negotiations up to that point as displaying a "frightening lack of leadership" from governments. 18 But there was more of the same at the thirteenth conference of the parties, held in Bali in 2007: European diplomats pushed for deeper greenhouse gas cuts, the United States opposed them, and developing countries again argued for more financial and technological assistance. 19 In exchange for a streamlining of the Adaptation Fund and sourcing it with a new 2-percent levy on Clean Development Mechanism projects, some developing countries again agreed to consider adopting unspecified future actions to mitigate their green­house gas pollution. Developed-country diplomats accepted new emissions targets and timetables, although, as with the developing countries' pledges, nothing was set in stone. The Bali conference was noteworthy for diplo­mats' near-universal and vehement opposition to efforts by U.S. diplomats

xx Preface to the Paperback Edition

to put a stop to negotiations on a post-2012 agreement, intended to succeed or extend the Kyoto Protocol, that would obligate developed countries to adopt new limits on their greenhouse gas emissions and to provide more aid to developing countries. Diplomats adopted yet another, supposedly more powerful, plan for more diplomatic efforts-the so-called Bali Roadmap. This roadmap was supposed to guide discussions leading to a new, more comprehensive post-Kyoto agreement in time for the fifteenth conference of the parties two years later in Copenhagen.

The discussions at Bali were probably pushed to a substantial degree by the IPCC's fourth assessment report (see earlier). One consequence was a substantial increase in diplomatic activity around climate change, manifested in many international meetings and national discussions to prepare for the Copenhagen conference. One step toward Copenhagen was the 2008 fourteenth conference of the parties held in Poznan, Poland. The Poznan conference was noteworthy in one respect: with the global financial crisis hitting national economies hard, even European diplomats, who had for a number of years been pushing for more action on climate change, were less supportive of deeper greenhouse gas cuts. However, the financial crisis did not dampen the enthusiasm that built up among both climate diplomats and environmentalists in the run up to the 2009 conference of the parties in Copenhagen. Indeed, the Copenhagen conference involved nearly every country and more than half of their leaders-192 countries and 119 heads of state-making it probably the largest gathering of world leaders in mod­ern history?O The Copenhagen conference was supposed to be the confer­ence that would break the logjam that had, up to then, prevented aggressive international action on climate change. It wasn't. The main product of the conference-the Copenhagen Accord-showed that progress on combat­ing climate change was inversely proportional to the enthusiasm ofleaders to attend. The accord was pulled together in the final hours of the confer­ence by a small group of diplomats and leaders, including President Obama. It did a number of things: it reaffirmed the science of climate change, rec­ognized the need to bring the rise in global greenhouse gas emissions to a halt and to keep the global temperature increase to less than 2 degrees Celsius (an objective that prevails today), and pledged to protect forests as important carbon sinks. Perhaps most significantly, the accord promised that developed countries were committed to "mobilizing jointly" $100 billion per year by 2020 to help developing countries address climate change, and it established a Green Climate Fund to administer aid to help those countries adapt to climate change?1

Despite these pledges, the Copenhagen Accord lacked ambition; it was barely more than an incremental move beyond the wording of the climate

Preface to the Paperback Edition XX!

convention signed 17 years earlier. While thousands of nongoverml1ental representatives and activists outside the conference venue called for action to address climate change aggressively, inside the meeting rooms what mattered was the perceived national interests of a relatively few countries, the United States among them. The Copenhagen Accord represented "a lowest common denominator agreement with questionable long-term effectiveness."22 Even most of the diplomats at the conference character­ized it as weak and lacking practicality. 23 What is more, the accord was vol­untary, just like the original climate convention. Leaders and diplomats at Copenhagen were unwilling to do anything that might substantially affect their short-term national (economic) interests. There was much diplomatic activity following the Copenhagen meeting, but governments remained unable to agree on robust greenhouse gas commitments, means for ensur­ing that they would be implemented, how to finance the Green Climate Fund over the long term, or even what level of global warming all of these efforts should aim to prevent. Some small-island countries argued that the nominal international goal oflimiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius (by then probably an almost impossible target to achieve) would mean cer­tain catastrophe for their communities. 24 These differences were reflected in the December 2010 sixteenth conference of the parties in Cancun, Mexico, which nominally recognized that much more needed to be done to combat climate change, proposed yet more action to protect forests in developing countries when doing so, and continued negotiations on how to implement the Green Climate Fund-all while failing to decide on whether or how to replace the Kyoto Protocol with a stronger agreement.

The seventeenth conference of the parties, which met in Durban, South Africa, in late 2011, produced the "Durban Platform for Enhanced Action." This platform was essentially more of the same: pledges to continue negoti­ations on implementing previous agreements for achieving the objectives of the original climate convention. The outcomes of the conference were an agreement to move toward implementing the Green Climate Fund and to continue steps toward financing it, albeit without saying where the money would come from; agreement to keep the Kyoto Protocol commitments alive for several more years; and a commitment to negotiate a new treaty by 2015 that was supposed to include legal commitments for greenhouse gas emissions limitations by all countries, in time for ratification (and thus implementation) by 2020.25 During the Durban conference the European Union was willing to accept an extended commitment period under the Kyoto Protocol in exchange for an agreement that would include legally binding emissions commitments from large developing countries, the latter being a long-standing objective of the United States. The Europeans were

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pitted against China and India, which expressed dismay at the continued unwillingness of developed countries to implement past agreements, argu­ing that a new treaty would be premature without more action from the historical polluters. China's chief negotiator implied that his country might be willing to accept legally binding commitments "after 2020" if a number of preconditions were met-essentially requiring developed countries to meet all of their past commitments and obligations even as China's emis­sions continued to grow. 26 The United States eventually joined this consen­sus, many of its delegates no doubt hoping that their own country would take more action in the not-too-distant future.

As with so many other climate conferences, these pledges to reach and implement new agreements were not legally binding; they were promises to be kept by future governments. The Durban action plan reaffirmed the need to restrict global warming to no more than 2 degrees above normal, but diplomats simultaneously recognized that warming of at least double that was on the cards under existing national commitments, even as sci­entific reports released around the time of the conference-showing large increases in global carbon emissions and the virtual inevitability of much greater global warming27-suggested that the skepticism of developing­country diplomats and environmental groups was justified.28 What the Durban conference made clear that there was little prospect of governments agreeing to the major cuts in greenhouse emissions that would be needed to avert dangerous climate change, least of all agreeing to them before 2015. What is more, those new commitments, whatever they might be, would not be implemented until after 2020. The Durban conference also revealed the fundamental problem with climate change conferences: diplomats routinely put their own countries' short-term interests, or at least the interests of those with influence in their home countries, well ahead of the long-term interest that the world has in averting catastrophic climate change. Indeed, within hours of returning from the Durban conference, Canada's environment minister announced that his country would become the first to withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol, renouncing legally binding commitments that Canada had accepted years before.29 He justified this action on the grounds of cost and the lack of participation in the protocol by the world's largest polluters-including the United States.

Such skepticism seemed to be justified by the outcomes of the 2012 eighteenth conferences of the parties, which met in Doha, and the 2013 nineteenth conference held in Warsaw. It was, generally speaking, more of the same: agreement to have more negotiations and agreement on the need to settle the perennial, apparently unsolvable, problems of developed-country obligations, growing pollution from the developing world, and questions of

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equity and poverty that make action on either nigh impossible. During all of this, US. diplomats rarely budged from their long-standing positions, know­ing full well that whatever they agreed to internationally would have to be sold back in Washington. The White House and the State Department surely wanted cuts in American pollution. This would demonstrate US. global leadership on climate change. However, much of Congress, including the Senate-which would be required to ratify any new climate treaty before the United States could join it-would welcome just the opposite.

Much as the world had expected the Copenhagen conference in 2009 to bring breakthroughs, many no doubt expected the same from the twentieth (twentieth!) conference of the parties, held in Lima, Peru, in December 2014. Shortly before the conference there were reasons to be optimistic that action to address climate change more aggressively might come from it. Potentially pushing diplomats to agree to such action, new predictions from scientists reaffirmed that climate change would have dire effects on the environment, societies, and economies,30 and it was anticipated that 2014 would be "the warmest, or one of the warmest years on record."3! There were also new and prominent warnings that urgent action was needed to reverse the growth in greenhouse gas pollution within a decade, to at least halve it before mid-century, to end carbon emissions completely by 2070 and to eliminate all types of greenhouse gas pollution before century's end. 32

Unusually, there were new pledges by a number of developed countries to, at long last, put substantial funds into the Green Climate Fund, potentially nudging more developing countries to take steps to limit their emissions. 33

Very significantly, or so it seemed just before the conference, at a China­US. summit in Beijing, the president of China pledged that his country's carbon emissions would peak by 2030 and the US. president pledged (see further ahead) that his country's emissions would fall by a quarter or more by 2025.34 There was also awareness among diplomats that the Lima confer­ence would be vital for setting the framework for the 2015 conference of the parties, to be held in Paris, where it was anticipated that a new global agreement would be reached for cutting climate pollution after 2020.

What did the Lima conference achieve? From the perspective of the U.S. government, the answer is that it achieved quite a lot. American diplo­mats-including Secretary of State John Kerry-went into the conference aiming to get an agreement on major cuts in greenhouse pollution globally. One assumes that they did not hold out very much hope for substantial progress in this respect, which is what happened. More realistically, they would have been hoping to achieve two long-standing US. objectives: first, to finally break the calcified distinction between developed and developing countries that had always characterized climate change negotiations and

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agreements, and second to get an agreement that future emissions commit­ments would be tailored to the individual circumstances of each country, both in the extent of emissions cuts or limitations and in the manner in which they would be implemented. The agreement that emanated from the conference-the Lima Accord-did both of these things, albeit not without much acrimony, as manifested, for example, in China's veto of efforts to give outsiders authority to monitor each country's national emissions pledges.33

Most worryingly, the Lima Accord did what most previous climate agree­ments of all kinds had done: kick the can down the road. It did not contain any legal requirements for countries to cut global greenhouse gas pollu­tion. The expectation was that national governments would craft their own pledges for how much each of them would limit, and ideally cut, their emissions after 2020. These pledges were to be declared in 2015, and they were then to become part of the new climate agreement to be drafted for the Paris conference of the parties at the end of that year. At least one thing was certain: the Paris agreement would not do nearly enough to prevent dangerous climate change. One major reason for this can be found in the politics of climate policy in the United States.

American Policy from George W. Bush to Barack Obama

The policies and actions of the United States on climate change have not changed very substantially since the issue came onto the international agenda in the 1980s.36 The US. government's rhetoric has varied in sig­nificant ways, but the declared concern about climate change from some presidents and officials has routinely exceeded actual policy responses and behavior. Nevertheless, improved automobile efficiency, air quality regula­tions that have restricted the use of coal, as well as major increases in domestic natural gas production, have helped to limit US. emissions significantly. By 2012 they were almost back to where they were in 1990, meaning that the United States has more or less done what the government pledged in 1992 (when it signed the climate convention) to do by 2000: bring US. emissions back to 1990 leve1s.37 Alas, these reductions in US. greenhouse gas emis­sions fall far short of what is required. It is also important to point out that most of the limitations in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions were motivated or caused by things other than concern about climate change, whether these be the slowdown in economic activity following the 2008 financial crisis or the gas "fracking" revolution that has diminished the business rationale for burning coal to produce electricity. There are relatively few robust national policies in the United States that will enable the country to make the major

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shift away from fossil fuels; these policies are necessary to achieve the objec­tives of the climate convention-avoiding dangerous climate change-and to prevent the dire predictions of scientists from becoming a reality in the coming decades.

As noted in the chapters to follow, the official position of the United States when it signed the climate convention in 1992 was that, to use words attributed to President George H.W Bush at the time, "the American way of life is not negotiable."38 The administration of Bill Clinton took cli­mate change much more seriously, and Vice President Gore participated in the Kyoto Protocol negotiations in 1997. However, as described in sev­eral chapters in this volume, Clinton had his hands tied by Congressional opposition that prevented him from doing much to restrain U.S. green­house gas emissions. In contrast to Clinton's presidency, the George W Bush administration, including the president himself, was vociferously opposed to any U.S. action on climate change. Within two months of taking office, Bush withdrew the US. signature from the Kyoto Protocol and dismissed the science of climate change as being inconclusive. All of this was part of the administration's wider opposition to envirom11ental regulation and to restraints on energy use in particular, positions championed by Bush's vice president, Dick Cheney, and possibly reflecting that both men had close ties to the petroleum industry.39 As a means of raising doubt about the validity and accuracy of climate science, the administration "mastered the politi­cal manipulation of science" by advocating what it called "sound science," thereby implying that the work of climate scientists was unsound, and it even went so far as to actively suppress climate scientists.40

For two presidential terms, the George W Bush administration did all that it could to protect the fossil-fuel industry from having to change its ways. Consequently, U.S. emissions continued to increase. Internationally, in keeping with the administration's very strong opposition to international regulation, it used its influence in the United Nations and in the climate change negotiations to oppose action whenever it could, to the point where the US. delegate was uniformly booed by fellow diplomats at the 2007 con­ference of the parties in Bali. It would take some years before President Bush yielded to basic facts and came around to the view that climate change was a reality, but the damage had been done. To this day, the bulk of Republican lawmakers, and indeed most Republican voters, remain highly skeptical of mainstream climate science and of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in particular. 41 Put simply, from the perspective of action to combat climate change, the eight years under George W Bush were wasted, with no major progress at the national level. Bush severely hobbled US. efforts to do something about climate change, let alone take on a leadership role in

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solving the problem internationally. He made the job that much harder for the administration of his successor, Barack Obama.

When he took office in January 2009 there was much hope that Obama would finally engender the leadership on climate change that had been so lacking in Washington. To take a step in that direction, the Obama admin­istration set a goal of reducing U.S. greenhouse gas emissions 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020. This was modest given the 1992 pledge of the George H. W Bush administration that u.s. emissions would fall to 1990 levels by 2000. That said, the Obama administration's pledge was realistic given the continued opposition in Congress to reducing U.s. reliance on cheap coal and oil. As happened during the Clinton administration, Obama faced opposition from powerful interest groups seeking to maintain the status quo, and other issues were given priority, not least of which entailed coping with the widespread economic recession that began in 2008.42

Despite much-improved knowledge of climate change, widespread support for action among scientists, significant public support for doing more, and even calls for action from defense experts concerned about the threats to U.s. interests posed by climate change and the country's reliance on petro­leum (much of it imported from volatile regions of the world), the Obama administration found it nigh impossible to act concertedly to address the problem legislatively. In 2010 Congress abandoned attempts to pass the Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act, which would have started down the path of tackling us greenhouse gas pollution.

The Obama administration did much more than nothing, however. It responded to climate change domestically by implementing national envi­ronmental regulations and standards that did not require new Congressional approval. Obama went around Congress by having the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant under existing laws. One of the administration's most significant actions was cre­ation of stricter standards for automobile fuel efficiency. Using authority given to the president by the 1970 Clean Air Act to regulate emissions deemed to harm or endanger human health, the administration required automakers to double fuel efficiency, potentially cutting national automo­bile emissions in half, and it developed more stringent standards for heavy­duty trucks. Furthermore, the administration proposed federal rules to cut carbon dioxide emissions from new coal-fired electricity plants, potentially halting new construction of such facilities, and it sought to regulate more heavily emissions from existing coal-fired plants.43 In 2012 a federal appeals court upheld the right of the EPA to regulate emissions of greenhouse gases, although members of Congress, most often Republicans, and indus­try groups allied with them tried every tactic to block the implementation

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of these regulations. 44 The most visible policy of the Obama administra­tion came in November 2014 when the president pledged that the United States would reduce its carbon emissions by 26 to 28 percent by 2025 (compared to 2005), and he promised that the United States would con­tribute $3 billion to the Green Climate Fund.4j Inconveniently, Obama made these declarations the same month that American voters handed control of the Senate to Republicans, adding to their control of the House of Representatives. Republican members of Congress promptly criticized Obama's pledges, declaring that they would, for example, try to block his energy policies. 46

One important change in US. climate policy during the Obama administration was an effort to show some pro-environmental leader­ship in international negotiations. President Obama himself attended and actively participated in negotiations at the 2009 conference of the parties in Copenhagen. He was instrumental in negotiating the Copenhagen Accord, but he greatly disappointed envirom11entalists by being unwilling to put US. weight behind strong new initiatives to strengthen the climate change agreements and, in particular, to require developed countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions substantially. The accord pledged to provide addi­tional financial assistance to developing countries to help them cope with the inevitable impacts of climate change, but it was unclear where that money would come from in the U.S. government's diminished foreign aid budget, or whether Congress would change direction and approve climate­related spending during difficult economic times. The Obama administra­tion dealt with this through quiet efforts, behind the scenes in Washington, that substantially increased foreign assistance funding for climate change adaptation and mitigation. The assistance was cleverly characterized as "green" or" clean" energy assistance so as to temper Congressional hostility to foreign aid generally and climate-related assistance in particular.47

The administration tried other tactics to push stronger climate policies, sometimes using creative methods to overcome Congressional opposition to doing more. For example, while administration officials mentioned cli­mate change frequently in public speeches during their first year or so in office, by 2009 they had mostly stopped referring to it directly.48 This may have been intended to avoid the taint of the term" climate change" among the most extreme Republicans in Congress. However, avoiding direct ref­erence to the problem may have had the effect of reducing the president's ability to shape public opinion and in turn that of US. legislators. This tactic was abandoned after a few years, and reversed when John Kerry became Obama's second secretary of state. As a long-serving Democratic Senator, Kerry had a reputation for being concerned about climate change and for

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advocating policy action to address it. As secretary of state, he made climate change a major part of his rhetorical diplomacy, and he attempted to use his good offices to garner cooperation from other governments, including China, for the post-2015 international climate agreement. 49

In 2015 President Obama used the bully pulpit of the presidency to high­light the urgency of addressing climate change. In several speeches, and in a visit to Alaska that was stage-managed for maximum media attention, he highlighted the dangers of climate change for Americans and for US. national interests. He described the problem as one that is happening here and now, called for urgent global action, and acknowledged US. responsibility:" ... the United States recognizes our role in creating the problem, and we embrace our responsibility to help solve it."5(l At the same time, senior administration officials warned of the impacts of climate change. For example, Secretary Kerry pointed to an ongoing crisis of refugees fleeing troubles in the Middle East and moving in large numbers into Europe: "You think migration is a challenge to Europe today because of extremism, wait until you see what happens when there's an absence of water, an absence of food or one tribe fighting against another for mere survival [as a result of climate change]."51

Overall, despite great hopes that the United States under Obama might become the world's clear leader in tackling climate change, there was a high degree of practical continuity between Obama's and his predeces­sors' climate-related policies. 52 The major objectives of US. foreign policy on climate change remained largely unchanged: efforts to persuade large developing countries, such as China and India, to join in global emissions limitations (and ultimately cuts), and reliance if possible on "flexible," market­based measures, catered to the abilities and circumstances of each country, through a bottom-up "pledge and review" approach whereby each country pledges what it can do and the international community then evaluates those actions. Indeed, this approach is more or less what the new climate agreement, to be agreed in Paris at the end of 2015, was likely to endorse. Domestically, while the president was able to use his regulatory powers to improve energy efficiency and limit carbon emissions from power plants, his push to increase domestic energy production-including opening up new areas for offshore oil and gas-had the paradoxical effect of making fossil­fuel energy less costly than it might have been (albeit less polluting insofar as natural gas replaced coal in electricity production).

The cumulative effect of the Obama administration's policies, along with major increases in the use of natural gas as a source of energy, will be signifi­cant reductions in U.S. carbon dioxide emissions, bringing them down below 2005 levels as Obama promised and, short of his successor actively reversing course, could see them fall by a quarter or more within two decades. This

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sent a message to other countries that the United States, at least at the level of the president, was more serious about meeting its international obliga­tions to limit greenhouse gas pollution from within its borders. That said, reductions in U.S. emissions remain far short of what is required to combat climate change, and arguably what is required to comport with US. ethical obligations to take responsibility for its past emissions. The reductions in US. climate pollution are also greatly disguised by emissions that result from manufacturing all of the products that Americans import from abroad, with the accounting for those emissions being attributed to the countries where the products are made, not where they are consumed-the United States.

This is not to diminish the importance of what the United States has done to address climate change since 2000. Certainly agencies of the federal gov­ernment, such as the Enviroml1ental Protection Agency and the Department of Defense, have shown that they understand the dangers of climate change. Some actions by these agencies, federal support for scientific research, and occasional efforts by US. diplomats (during Democratic administrations) in support of stronger international agreements have had some effect. But where action is really starting to happen-often in response to the failure of the U.S. central goverml1ent to do much more-is at the local, state (i.e., US. states, such as California and Massachusetts), and regional (e.g., the U.S. Northeast) levels.53 A number of U.S. states have enacted greenhouse gas emissions targets, including for automobiles and power plants, and at least half of the states have strengthened renewable-energy standards that require electric utilities to generate a portion of their power from renewable sources. Several U.S. states have joined regional cap-and-trade programs with Canadian and Mexican provinces. Leaders and legislators in some U.S. states view climate change as a bigger threat than do many national policymakers, and many state officials, along with local communities and industries, see economic opportunity in moving toward renewable energy. Having said this, these subnational endeavors will not take the United States very far toward the level of cuts in greenhouse gas emissions that are necessary if the country is to get its emissions down to where scientists say they need to be.

Reconsidering u.s. Climate Policy

What do events since the turn of the century say about the analyses and conclusions in the contributions to this volume? What do the chapters tell us about what is likely to happen in years to come? Part II of the vol­ume critiques U.S. climate change policies, and it seems that these critiques remain valid for the most part. If anything, the contributors may not have been critical enough. In chapter 2, Paul G. Harris asks whether the United

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States was sharing the burden of climate change. He considers some of the principles of social and distributive justice that scholars, activists, and even diplomats have used to guide international responses to climate change, and he shows how these principles appear in the wording of climate change agreements among countries. This has not changed: principles of equity and justice are still central to international negotiations on climate change. In particular, they reflect the need for developed countries to cater to the demands of developing countries-bearing in mind that the meanings of "developed" and "developing" have evolved substantially in recent decades as many countries that were quite poor at the start of the climate change negotiations a generation ago are now relatively well off and consequently contributing more to the problem through growing emissions. Indeed, it is these features of many large "developing" countries, notably China, that have exercised u.S. policymakers so much: they want China and other for­merly poor countries to playa much greater role in tackling greenhouse gas emissions. But key to them doing so is whether they see the United States taking on its fair share of the burden. The conclusion to Harris's chapter-that U.S. rhetoric and some of its policies reflect an understand­ing of the need to share the burden, but not nearly enough to demonstrate US. leadership or to fully meet its obligations-still holds true. As such, demands around the world for the United States, and for Americans, to act on their obligations to reduce their greenhouse pollution and to help those countries most affected by climate change remain a consistent refrain in international negotiations. This will not change anytime soon.

A similar conclusion can be reached when assessing the arguments in Peter Doran's chapter on the role that modernity and economic globaliza­tion have played in US. foreign policy on climate change, and indeed on the wider debate about the globalization of the "American way of life." The deeply rooted production and consumption patterns of the twentieth century show no signs of abating in the twenty-first. Indeed, things are growing worse. Much as US. climate policy goes a little bit toward meet­ing the country's international obligations in this context, there are small shifts away from the high-consuming American lifestyle. One sees this in communities where Americans, perhaps stung by the post-2008 financial crisis, have sought to reassess whether "having it all" and "shopping 'til you drop" is really worth it, and whether material overconsumption really is a good way of life. That said, there is no sign at all that the wider American obsession with fossil-fueled capitalist economic growth is about to change. Indeed, new sources of domestic energy, notably from shale gas and tech­nological advances that enable more oil to be squeezed from underground reserves, have fed the traditional American affection for economic growth

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and material consumption. One paradox is that much of U.S. foreign policy on climate change consists of financial assistance and expert cooperation on "green energy," which sometimes means devoting resources to spreading the American coal industry's quixotic insistence on a future of "clean coal" and carbon sequestration (sucking carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and magically storing it underground). A central observation from Doran's chapter is that the American preoccupation with a "modernity" premised on material economic growth powered by polluting sources of energy is not being officially questioned. Until this changes, US. economic, energy, and climate policies will continue to send the wrong message to the world, as have the highly polluting lifestyles of most Americans. If anything, the "Island of High Modernity" that Doran laments is no longer an island; it is evolving from the American way of life to the whole world's way of life.

Part II of the volume critiques US. climate change policies. Part III is intended to help us explain them. It does this by examining American cli­mate politics from a number of perspectives. In chapter 4 Jacob Park looks at the politics of climate science. As implied before, one really cannot overstate the importance of how climate science is interpreted as it moves through the American political system before being translated into domestic and foreign policy. Science of course serves as a basis for policy; without the science, we would not know that climate change is a threat to our C0l111110n future, nor would we have any idea of how to respond to the problem. But the science of climate change and its pervasive politicization are not the whole story. As Park shows, a variety of actors, ranging from corporations and environ­mental nongoverml1ental organizations to the executive (presidential) and legislative (Congressional) branches of government, have been involved in shaping American foreign policy on climate change. It is the constellation of these actors, the ideas that motivate them-enviroml1ental protection on one end of a spectrum, selfish economic growth on another-and the pluralistic nature of American politics that come together to decide what the U.S. gov­ernment says, even more what it does by way of policy, and also how actors outside government behave to make the problem worse or to mitigate its causes and effects. As Park notes, the processes of American foreign policy are "highly politicized and notoriously inefficient." He concludes that it will be extremely difficult for American policymakers to arrive at a consensus that will make US. climate leadership possible. Little has changed over the last decade and a half, so that leadership remains elusive.

Can we do more to explain this elusiveness? In chapter 5 Neil E. Harrison goes some way in that direction by focusing on domestic influences. He uses the case of stratospheric ozone depletion-a problem that the United States helped to address internationally through its diplomatic leadership and

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effective policies at home-as a backdrop for understanding responses to climate change. Unlike ozone depletion, the solutions to which affected rela­tively few corporate actors, as climate change has grown in prominence it has engendered growing concern from countless actors whose interests may be undermined by policies to address it. There is much greater pressure from interest groups and corporations to maintain the status quo and specifically to thwart robust policies to reduce U.s. greenhouse gas emissions. Indeed, as this implies, the issue of climate change has been dominated by economic considerations: from the perspective of most domestic actors, it is more of an economic issue than an enviroml1ental one. This means that even when one branch of government, whether the president or Congress, supports more action on climate change, the other is able to work the political system to veto major policy change. This in turn greatly influences U.S. foreign policy on climate change. Hence when a president wants to demonstrate U.s. cli­mate leadership, Congress holds him back; when members of Congress push for leadership, the president and his administration have usually been unwill­ing to go along. Even when American diplomats are sympathetic (as they often are) to demands from other countries for the United States to do more, they have had to be realistic: they cannot negotiate international agreements that Congress, especially the Senate, does not support. This helps explain what must be an ongoing frustration with the Obama administration, which many around the world no doubt hoped would finally show U.S. leadership, but whose climate diplomats have more often been left to explain how their hands are tied by domestic politics. As Harrison affirms, domestic American politics cannot be ignored. Again, little has changed. It is very unlikely to do so anytime soon, despite the multiplying dangers of climate change.

In chapter 6, Gary Bryner digs deeper into domestic American politics by focusing on the role of Congress, in particular its "recalcitrance" in the face of growing knowledge and scientific certainty about climate change. Bryner argues that Congress is the primary barrier to effective U.S. policy responses. As he shows, and consistent with arguments made by Harrison, Congress (especially the House of Representatives) has its eyes and ears pointed inward toward domestic politics, the national economy, and the economies of local constituencies. Members of Congress are highly sensitive to pressure from interest groups, especially if those groups can get out the vote or provide financial resources that members use during their almost-perpetual cam­paigus for reelection, especially in the case of members of the House (who face voters every two years). This effectively means that business interests have inordinate influence in Congress, reflected in consistent and ongoing resistance by legislators to seriously consider, let alone pass, bills that would require industry and the wider economy to reduce substantially activities

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leading to greenhouse pollution in the United States. This process continues, and it will be a major part of the story of future American climate policy. For this to change, climate change will have to grow in salience among the public and in turn among members of Congress. At times, such as following major hurricanes, wildfires, or other "natural" disasters, it ahl10St seems that the public and Congress might get the message, that they may finally be will­ing to accept robust policies that will at least slow climate pollution. But to say that this step is hard to take in the United States would be to understate the problem. This is because Congress consists of 535 members with 535 different interests. It is not a unified branch of goverml1ent and it lacks a uni­fied legislative leadership and hierarchy that could work with sympathetic presidential administrations that want the United States to battle against cli­mate change. The only answer seems to be new and greater pressure from the wider country-from businesses that want to address climate change and from voters who want the country to stop making the problem worse, and indeed for it to do as much as possible to prepare for climatic changes to come. This pressure exists, but it is not nearly strong enough to overcome the strong Congressional bias in favor of the status quo.

Building on Bryner's analysis, in chapter 7 Andreas Missbach undertakes a case study of regulation theory to highlight how industrial lobbies have influenced the Senate in American climate policy. The Senate is central to whether and how the United States responds to climate change because approval by a super-majority in the Senate is required for ratification of treaties signed by the executive branch. The importance of this constitu­tional power was amply demonstrated when the Senate refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol to the Framework Convention on Climate Change. The reasons that Senators gave for doing this, notably their fear that the protocol (or similar international agreements) would harm the U.S. economy while not adequately requiring other countries to limit greenhouse gas emissions (to say nothing of many Senators' skepticism about climate change per se), remain pressing concerns-even as evidence grows that not implementing policies to combat climate change will be much more costly to the U.S. economy, federal and state governments, and indeed the welfare of mil­lions of Americans, than would adopting such policies as soon as possible. Missbach's analysis shows again how the national economy is intimately tied up with legislative action, and in turn that domestic political and eco­nomic considerations of the United States are intimately tied up with the world's responses to climate change. Missbach highlights the "hegemonic" power of the Fordist model of mass production (and consumption) that has been exported around the world through a U.S.-led international regula­tory structure largely premised on energy from fossil fuels. He argues that it

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will be impossible for the United States to playa leadership role in address­ing climate change while American politicians defend and further entrench the highly polluting American lifestyle. American leadership in the global economy has engendered the spread of this lifestyle, working in the opposite direction to that needed to stem and eventually greatly reduce carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions. Even if presidents wish for an American "ecological transformation" away from mass consumption and pollution, the industrial lobbies and wider economic forces in the United States will push the legislature, notably the Senate, to hold the president back inter­nationally. At the very least, the underlying polluting model at home and abroad is unlikely to change. It will persist for many years to come.

Continuing with the book's focus on climate politics, in chapter 8 Karen Fisher-Vanden looks at the role of "policy instrument prominence" in U.S. climate policies at home and internationally. She shows how and why the different "instruments" that politicians and policymakers consider are priori­tized, and which among them bubble to the surface to become actual policy options. As she shows, the process is not straightforward. For example, sci­entific understanding about the causes and consequences of climate change does not directly result in policy instruments for addressing it effectively. Many considerations, not least economic and political conditions mitigating against aggressive policy action, usually mean that older and less effective policy instruments (if any) become prominent and are chosen over more innovative instruments that many scientists, environmentalists, and indeed even many politicians-not to mention the public-would prefer. Only when the constellation of economic, political, and other factors, includ­ing public awareness and concern, come together can innovative policies become prominent enough to be adopted. This seldom happens in difficult, controversial, or costly policy environments. Put another way, politicians are risk averse: they prefer to avoid action on difficult issues or at best to take small steps toward solving them rather than run the risk of being blamed for "failed" policies that do not solve the problem or, in the process, are costly for citizens or industry. 54 This is precisely the policy scenario facing U.S. politicians: they can take action now to limit adverse climate change in the future, but most of the likely benefits will be felt in the future, after they have retired from political life. This means that they are less likely to benefit politically (especially through votes at election time) from climate­protection policies than they are to suffer politically from those actors (vot­ers, political donors, and the like) who oppose those policies. This does not bode well for the advent of effective climate change policies emanating from Washington, least of all policies that are highly innovative and aggres­sive in tackling the problem.

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Another example of this limitation is found in Jorge Antunes's chapter, which examines U.S. foreign policies on 'Joint implementation"-processes whereby governments or other entities (usually businesses) are allowed to invest in, and thus to obtain credit for, emissions reductions (such as closing dirty power plants) or carbon sinks (such as planting trees) in other countries. By this methodology, a country that is required to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions can achieve this, at least on paper, by facilitating reductions abroad. This makes sense because the atmosphere is affected regardless of where greenhouse gas pollution originates, and through this approach enti­ties may be able to obtain reductions at lower cost, potentially making those reductions more likely. The "flexible" approach to finding opportunities for emissions limitations has always been the preference of the United States, and such flexibility has been a key feature of its foreign policy in interna­tional negotiations on climate change. Antunes's chapter uses the American penchant for flexibility as a case study for analyzing whether the US. role in the international climate change regime has been effective and to deter­mine what has driven it. What may be most significant about his analysis is that it illustrates the importance of ideas about climate policy, especially how US. officials and politicians perceive the problem. For them, climate policy has to be as efficient as possible (assuming they accept any need for such policy). This translates into a preference for flexibility to allow individual countries-the United States itself included, of course-to adopt the policy approaches that politicians believe are most efficient in achieving promised emissions limitations or cuts. Americans are unlikely to accept specific, preor­dained climate policies emanating from international agreements or organi­zations, and in turn they do not expect other countries to be subject to them. This fits very nicely with the broader American preference for freedom of action and indeed free market approaches (such as emissions trading) to solv­ing enviroml1ental problems. To a substantial degree, US. foreign policy on climate change has been, continues to be, and will be in the foreseeable future an attempt to persuade other countries to accept this and other more "business-like" policies. To an extent it has worked, with many other govern­ments preferring this approach because it allows them to maintain sovereign control over how climate change is addressed within their borders.

Part IV of the book turns our attention to whether and how international norms have influenced American climate policies, and vice versa. In chapter 10, Michele Betsill argues that newly evolved international climate change norms have influenced the United States in significant ways. The United States itself had a role in shaping an international norm calling on developed countries to stabilize (stop increasing) their greenhouse pollution. However, newer norms demanding that developed countries reduce their greenhouse gas emissions

XXXVI Pr~face to the Paperback Edition

were established, and indeed codified in the Kyoto Protocol and other features of the climate change regime, despite US. opposition. Betsill attributes this to the ability of the improved science of climate change, including its impacts, to influence other countries' conceptions of the problem. In particular, for those countries climate change has become an increasingly urgent problem deserv­ing of action, first and foremost by developed countries. Betsill's findings are affirmed by Paul Harris in the final chapter of the book. To a great extent, the US. policy establishment has accepted that developed countries, the United States included, have a responsibility to act to reduce their own causes of cli­mate change and to help poor countries to deal with it. They have accepted the principle of conmlon but differentiated responsibility: all countries are responsible for responding to climate change, but the developed, most afflu­ent anlong them have the responsibility to act first and to do more. The result in US. foreign policy over the last decade and a half has been some modest action by the United States to meet its obligations according to these new norms while U.S. officials repeatedly and increasingly point to the common responsibility of other countries to act, particularly those countries (China especially) that have experienced major economic growth in recent decades. To a substantial extent this describes current and probably future US. cli­mate policy: pushing other countries to do more even as they understandably demand that Americans live up to their unmet obligation to cut their green­house gas pollution. This may not be a recipe for complete inaction on the part of both developed and developing countries-all of which want to see the United States do far more to address climate change, including its causes and consequences-but it is certainly not a recipe for doing nearly enough.

Conclusion

A number of factors explains why the United States has been a laggard in climate politics globally. 55 The US. policymaking process requires major con­sensus or a large majority in favor of action in Congress to pass legislation, but this is impossible due to the increasingly partisan politics between those who want the United States to address climate change (many Democratic lawmak­ers, excepting those from coal-mining and automobile-manufacturing states) and those who view action on climate change as a threat to economic growth or do not believe in the problem at all (most Republicans, particularly those on the radical right).56 Pressure to implement strong regulations that would bring US. greenhouse gas emissions down is not high in Washington due to concern among policymakers and lawmakers about US. international com­petitiveness,Americans' addiction to cars and inexpensive gasoline, and limited concern about climate change in the United States as compared to many other

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countries. The situation is made much more difficult by extremely powelful interest groups, including lobbyists for the petroleum, coal, and automobile industries, which have fought to maintain the benefits of business as usual, including enormous government subsidies that reduce the cost of fossil fuels and thereby feed the u.s. dependency on them for most of its energy.

It is especially significant that American political institutions seem almost designed to enable and empower actors and interests that prevent action on cli­mate change. This is not unique to the United States. Climate policies in most countries have tended to be "negative," meaning that they have predominantly involved denial that the problem is serious enough to justify robust policy responses (or that the problem exists at all), attacking proponents of policy action or the science (and scientists) revealing the nature and extent of the problem, and/ or weak policies that incrementally move in the right direction but do so without upsetting the status quo addiction to fossil fuels and the mate­rial consumption that drives climate-changing pollution. 57 The very hot sum­mer of2012 in the United States, and Hurricane Sandy on its East Coast that autul1111, raised concern about climate change among Americans, with more of them believing that it was a serious threat to the country. 5~ More members of Congress seemed to agree. In March 2014 two-dozen Democratic senators conducted an all-night "speechathon" in an attempt to heighten awareness, particularly anlong their Senate colleagues, to take climate change much more seriously. Predictably, the right-wing press labeled the event a waste of time.59

No doubt more than a few Americans agreed. Research shows that Americans' political orientation, rather than objective climatic conditions, determine their views on climate changeY1What cannot be denied is that the predicted and felt impacts of climate change are not adequately translating into deep and consis­tent public concern or more significant concern among members of the U.S. Congress. Perhaps only a string of devastating storms, floods, and droughts will persuade Americans and their representatives in Congress to worry enough about climate change to take major action.

What can we conclude about the future of American foreign policy on cli­mate change based on the analyses of contributors to this volume combined with events since 2000? The answers probably depend on one's perspective. American foreign policy on climate change has been incredibly consistent since the first edition of Climate Chm1/(,e and American Fore~RI1 Policy was published. If one is focused on the gradual evolution of policies to address the problem, there is reason for optimism. In 2000 the climate skeptics in Congress were in ascendance and they were about to have like-minded pol­iticians in the White House.They had a lock-hold on policy, preventing any meaningful move toward mitigating, let alone reducing, U.S. greenhouse gas emissions at home and internationally. The climate skeptics and the fossil-

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fuel lobby still greatly influence policy. However, greatly improved science is gradually filtering through to the policy process-it helps that the science is getting better and more precise, and that scientists are starting to be more outspoken about the dangers of climate change coming our way-and, at least at the time of this writing, there is support for climate action in the executive branch to balance opposition in Congress. The president is acting, for example, by putting in place regulations to improve automobile effi­ciency substantially, even as Congress dithers. The move toward natural gas has also helped to reduce u.s. greenhouse gas emissions, at least temporarily. And it seems fair to say that the us. government is doing what it can, given the major domestic constraints, to cooperate with other countries in inter­national climate negotiations and in bilateral relations. None of this will result in major reductions in American and other countries' emissions-and certainly not in overall global emissions-anytime soon, but it can be char­acterized as incremental movement in the right direction.

If one looks at us. climate policy development from the perspective of real-world climate change-what is causing the problem and how those causes are growing much worse as the world develops, what is being experienced already by way of climate change, what impacts are expected for the future given the historical and inevitable future greenhouse gas emissions-the pic­ture is nothing short of dreadful. Awareness of the problem in the United States is up among policymakers. Many of them do take the problem seriously and recognize that the United States has obligations to reduce its greenhouse gas pollution in major ways, and even that it should help other countries to limit emissions and to cope with present and future impacts of climate change. But policy does not match this awareness or this growing sense of responsibil­ity.American greenhouse gas emissions will have to come down by orders of magnitude more than what they are headed toward now. Because the United States (like other countries) has put off action so late, it is inevitable that doing what is necessary to avert catastrophic climate change (assuming this is still possible) will require radical changes in the US. economy, for a start includ­ing a reversal of energy policies that currently subsidize the fossil-fuel industry rather than taxing it mightily, as is necessary, and more than a little change in the way Americans live, meaning by ending material overconsumption. Insofar as the conclusions in the contributions to this volume still obtain­and my argnment here is that they are as germane today as when they were written-the prospect of this happening is remote. Put another way, while the United States joins the world in muddling along toward more action to fight the scourge of climate change, including its causes, things are set to get much worse before they get better. American leadership on climate change in this century remains almost as elusive as it was in the last.

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I wish to thank acquisitions editors at Palgrave Macmillan for asking me to write this update of Climate Chan,'!,e and American Foreign Policy. I remain indebted to the contributors. It is satisfying that their analyses remain valid and their predictions prescient, thereby helping us to gain a better under­standing of American climate policies of today and tomorrow. As always, I am grateful to K. K. Chan for companionship at home during all of the years since the first edition appeared.

Paul G. Harris Hong Kong