Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
pillars of scientific uncertainty and economic precaution. First, according
to political conservatives' reading of the IPCC first assessment, the science
was not yet “in.” Conflicting theories suggested that climate change may
not be that big of a problem if the rise in global temperatures occurred at
the low end of the predicted range (which conservatives suggested was
likely); that climate variation might simply result from “natural” environ-
mental processes, not anthropogenic increases in greenhouse gas concen-
trations; and that the global climate system might have a self-correcting
mechanism that would counteract the more extreme cases of greenhouse
warming. The IPCC had addressed and largely dismissed each of these
issues in turn; but IPCC recommendations notwithstanding, many con-
servatives argued that in reality scientists just did not know.
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Second, opponents of strong domestic action on global warming argued
that because of these scientific uncertainties, climate change did not merit
what they characterized as an economically disastrous crash course to
reduce emissions. In very testy congressional testimony in 1992, for exam-
ple, a combative Senator Mitch McConnell from Kentucky predicted that
the fight against global warming, “the most expensive attack on jobs and the
economy in this country,” would cost America more than a million jobs.
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This argument extended to the international arena, where binding targets
and timetables would limit the flexibility of U.S. foreign policy and com-
promise the American business community's international transactions in
the face of growing Chinese and Indian economic power. The inauguration
of a Democratic president in 1993 temporarily put the Republicans on the
defensive, but for the most part the terms of the debate over an interna-
tional treaty on global warming remained the same in the mid-1990s.
The Kyoto Protocol did introduce a few new elements, however. The
first was a foreign policy wrinkle, another artifact of the end of the Cold
War. Bill Clinton had won the presidency in part by making domestic
social and economic promises in a new era of American foreign policy-
making. With the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the first Iraq war,
the central objectives of twentieth-century American diplomacy— pro-
moting liberal democracy, protecting U.S. markets abroad, and stemming
the tide of Soviet influence and communist expansion— seemed either
irrelevant or mostly accomplished.
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As a result, Clinton's first adminis-
tration proposed mostly limited foreign policy initiatives that built upon
his domestic policies and upon the liberal approaches espoused by his
