Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
policy was not a turn away from a deep faith in the power of science to
define rational policy on global warming, but rather an extension of it. In
the 1990s, economics became the lingua franca
of climate change policy.
Just as scientists had expected the forcing function of knowledge to force
rational policymakers' hands toward climate mitigation plans in the 1970s,
so too did environmentalists, industrial leaders, politicians, and diplomats
suggest that their particular hard-nosed economic analyses would dictate
a rational and obvious course of action in the 1990s. Even more so than in
debates about the science of global warming, in debates about the econom-
ics of global warming, advocates on all sides relied on numbers to determine
winners and losers. Conflicting economic scenarios like those propounded
by Al Gore, who argued that climate mitigation would save money and cre-
ate jobs, and Mitch McConnell, who argued that climate mitigation would
ruin the U.S. economy and cost jobs, perhaps did a poorer job than scien-
tific debates at hiding their political motives. But ultimately, the language
of science and the language of economics masked a constellation of moral
and political concerns in artificially rational, objective terms.
It may be uncharitable to the United States to neglect the intransigence
of developing-world emitters like China and India in stalling negotiations
at the Kyoto conference, but ultimately the failure of the Kyoto Protocol
was an American one. Most obvious, despite its responsibility for a quarter
of the world's emissions at the time, the United States was the only indus-
trialized nation that failed to ratify the agreement, and this after months
of negotiations meant to tailor the protocol to U.S. specifications. Perhaps
more important, however, both the Clinton administration's goals and the
Senate's resistance stemmed from the characteristically American effort to
externalize both the problem of global warming and its potential solutions.
Americans' focus on the role of the developing world reflected a desire to
deal with the problem primarily there, in the developing world, rather than
in Pittsburgh or Dallas or Detroit. Kyoto's flexibility mechanisms ensured
that Americans could meet their commitments to the agreement without
any real, dramatic changes to U.S. modes of production or lifestyles of
consumption.
This was a new twist on the problematic primacy of science in global
warming politics, in a new post- Cold War context. Scientists worked
tirelessly to communicate the global nature of the sources, mechanisms,
and impacts of CO
2
and global warming, and they codified this global
