Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
European Community's commitments to targets and timetables more gen-
erally. German chancellor Helmut Kohl voiced his disappointment in what
he saw as the failure of U.S. leadership on the climate issue. The French
threatened to abandon the UNFCCC altogether.
Ironically, the trouble in the European Community only reinforced
arguments from American conservatives to avoid what William Reilly
called “an economic straight-jacket” of binding commitments.
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The
United States, Buff Bohlen explained, took these types of international
commitments very seriously, and binding financial arrangements and emis-
sions reductions might leave the United States holding the bag when other
nations— and here he alluded condescendingly to the Europeans and the
Japanese— defaulted on their responsibilities.
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As William Reilly argued,
binding commitments might prove counterproductive anyway. Surely a
more toothsome UNFCCC would make many of its 154 signatories recon-
sider their decision to come on board. Moreover, Reilly contended, the
United States could work just as well to combat climate change without
targets and timetables. The Clean Air Act of 1990— one of Bush's most
prized environmental achievements— had already set in motion changes
that would, along with other recent conservation legislation, achieve most
of the UNFCCC stipulations without limiting the flexibility of U.S. eco-
nomic policy or the profitability of U.S. businesses.
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This last objective— maintaining the flexibility and profitability of
U.S. business interests— defined the American approach to international
climate change policy through the remainder of the decade. It was an
approach that the United States codified by securing a commitment to
“least-cost solutions” in the language of Article III of the UNFCCC itself.
And it was an approach that established economic growth as the primary
rubric against which to balance scientific uncertainty and environmental
risk.
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the trouBle With kyoto
When William Reilly presented the text of the UNFCCC to the U.S.
Senate in September of 1992, he framed it as a great success for both the
Bush administration and the world at large. And as with the U.N. Con-
ference on the Human Environment twenty years earlier, it would be a
mistake to overlook the extent to which the Rio Earth Summit and the
