Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
conflict. This is one of the major themes of global warming's history. In the
two years between the IPCC first assessment report in 1990 and the intro-
duction of the UNFCCC in 1992, however, this dominant international
political paradigm unexpectedly and quite suddenly vanished.
3
And just
as the Cold War had shaped the key institutions and problems of climate
science in the 1950s, so too did that conflict's sudden, unexpected, and
mostly nonviolent end profoundly influence the politics of climate change
in the early 1990s. The end of the Cold War changed the nature of the
international system within which debate about CO
2
and global warming
unfolded.
The different U.S. responses to two developments in 1990s inter-
national climate change policy underscore the impact of this changing
foreign policy situation. The first development was the U.N. Framework
Convention on Climate Change in 1992. A treaty signed by a moderate
Republican president, George H. W. Bush, at the U.N. Conference on
Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro and quickly ratified by a
Democratic Senate, the UNFCCC reflected the optimistic spirit of inter-
national cooperation that Leggett sensed in the immediate post- Cold War
world. But the nonbinding nature of the treaty and the compromises lead-
ing to its ratification also laid bare emerging tensions in both the domestic
and international politics of climate change. These tensions involved the
priorities of domestic economic stability and environmental protection
over both international development and the proper role of the United
States in international environmental leadership.
Five years later, a second confrontation over binding targets in interna-
tional climate change policy had a very different outcome. That confron-
tation occurred at a Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC held in
Kyoto, Japan, in 1997, and it revolved around exemptions from responsibil-
ity for carbon mitigation for the developing world. A Democratic U.S. vice
president, Al Gore, salvaged the conference from deep divisions between
Europeans and Americans over the role of markets in mitigating carbon.
His colleagues in the Senate, however, resolved unanimously to reject any
treaty that failed to include the developing world in a regime of CO
2
miti-
gation. The Kyoto Protocol was never introduced to Congress for ratifi-
cation.
4
The rejection of the Kyoto Protocol stemmed in large part from
changes in how politicians understood CO
2
and global environmental
governance after the demise of the Cold War.
