Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
understanding in the IPCC. But the primacy of science in global warming
politics meant that scientists' descriptions of the problem also defined the
scales at which the global community sought to solve the problem. From
a global scientific perspective, reductions in CO
2
emissions from India or
China or Japan provided the same benefit as equal reductions from the
United States. In an interconnected global world, economic calculations
of least cost could supplant the difficult discussions about development
priorities, social equity, and historical responsibility that came with geo-
graphically specific emissions targets.
Americans' predilection for economic analysis as a guide to policy—
especially foreign policy— was by itself nothing new in the 1980s and
1990s. In his classic
Tragedy of American Diplomacy,
for example, Wil-
liam Appleman Williams demonstrated the extent to which policies of
economic expansion abroad designed to support economic prosperity at
home have guided the U.S. approach to diplomacy since the 1890s. But
the triumph of global capitalism at the end of the Cold War helped to
establish the unabashed primacy of economics in international climate
negotiations unique to the end of the twentieth century. The debate over
the Kyoto Protocol in the United States was less a debate over whether this
economics-first approach was the right one than it was a debate over what
the right economics-first approach would look like. For Stuart Eizenstat
and the Clinton administration, the flexibility mechanisms built into the
Kyoto Protocol— joint implementation, the CDM, and emissions trading—
made it possible to use foreign investment and development aid to insulate
Americans against potential economic shocks resulting from domestic cli-
mate mitigation. As proponents of cap and trade argued, the new system
would actually create new markets for American investors. For anti-Kyoto
members of Congress and their allies in business, industry, and organized
labor, however, the threat of competition from developing-world manufac-
turers, unfettered by the strictures of a greenhouse gas regime, threatened
to overwhelm these potential opportunities. It was a case of new markets
against free markets. In the Senate, free markets won. Meanwhile, on the
Keeling Curve, CO
2
continued to rise.