U.S. GLOBAL WARMING and climate change policy is a hotly contested issue, one fraught with partisan bickering throughout the course of at least the last three presidential administrations. The official U.S. position has vacillated considerably over the last two decades, swinging from initial global leadership displayed during the very first climate change hearings in the U.S. Congress during summer 1988, to a mixed bag of sorts during the tenures of President George H.W. Bush and President Bill Clinton, to periods of obstruction and outright suppression of scientific studies during the early 21st century under President George W. Bush.
Despite this checkered past, though, a previously politically hamstrung United States is now making considerable advances in climate change policy. Thanks in large part to the federalist model of a national government that shares some power with its individual states, as well as local municipalities, and a fundamental separation of powers among executive, legislative, and judicial branches at the national level, notable changes are underway.
Many analysts now believe that the United States has reached a tipping point in terms of public awareness of climate change. Scientific consensus on both the rising global temperatures and anthropocentric roots of that shift, combined with concerns about energy insecurity and its ties to international terrorism, have pushed climate change discourse to the forefront, particularly in the context of what some now label the post-Hurricane Katrina effect, the growing recognition among Americans that they too are vulnerable to the vagaries of climate change.
No longer is this a problem just for their children or grandchildren to consider, or a problem that threatens primarily the developing world or small island states. According to a survey commissioned by the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy in March 2007, 83 percent of Americans believe global warming is a serious problem. Analysts increasingly believe that a reasonable debate about the regulation necessary to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is possible in the United States and that this regulation makes good economic sense, much in the model of the 1987 Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer.
Yet, when the Kyoto Protocol, the only global treaty with binding measures to address climate change, finally entered into force on February 16, 2005, the United States was one of only two Annex I industrialized countries (Australia being the other) that did not ratify the protocol. In total, 175 states of the world joined together without the world’s leading economic engine, and its biggest polluter. United States resistance to the Kyoto Protocol rests firmly on this division between Annex I and Annex II countries, the developed and developing world, and the fact that Kyoto exempted Annex II states from any reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, at least until 2012.
While India is also a concern, American diplomats fear China most. China is the world’s largest and most populous country, one that has ranked among the world’s fastest-growing economies for two decades. China is also heavily coal-dependent and becoming ever more so, building an average of one new coal-fired plant a week. Its total energy-related carbon emissions have more than doubled since 1980, and it is widely regarded as on pace to pass the United States as the leading greenhouse gas emitter before 2020. Nevertheless, per capita emissions of carbon dioxide in China are still seven times less than that of the United States, according to the Sierra Club. With only 4 percent of the global population, Americans account for roughly 22 percent of the planet’s greenhouse gases. Because China was such a late entry into an industrialization process that has created the climate change problem, the ethics of reducing greenhouse gas emission there are spotty. However, the country’s economy and greenhouse gas emissions are growing at such a fast pace, reductions seem necessary.
The globalization argument as to dirty industry being able to relocate to China if it continues to be exempt from any global agreement is essentially a red herring. According to the nonpartisan Pew Center on Global Climate Change, the vast majority of U.S. greenhouse gases come from transportation, commercial, residential, and agricultural sectors that cannot leave the country. Only industry itself could potentially do so, which in 2004 accounted for 30 percent of U.S. greenhouse gases.
HISTORY OF CLIMATE CHANGE IN THE U.S.
The United States was an early leader in the field, dating at least to the aforementioned congressional climate change hearings during summer 1988. Experts such as National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Jim Hansen first sounded alarms as to the severity of the climate change problem. Four years later, at the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the United States continued to actively participate in climate deliberations on the international stage. President George H.W. Bush attended what was at the time the largest gathering of world leaders in history, signing the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), one of the five major agreements reached at what has since been referred to popularly as the Earth Summit.
But both President Bush’s presence and signature were couched within political compromise. Bush feared mandatory limits on greenhouse gas emissions would severely hamper the U.S. economy, and only agreed to attend if the final document would go no further than suggesting voluntary limits by each country. His famous saying was that America’s way of life was not up for negotiation. Popular opinion in the United States had yet to grasp the concept of sustainable development, the idea that economic development and environmental resource protection can go hand in hand.
Thus, the great irony of Rio is that a conference that was intended to firmly establish the 1987 Brundt-land Report’s definition of sustainable development, outlined in their publication Our Common Future as development that meets the needs of the present generation without sacrificing the needs of future generations, actually did the exact opposite. An entire cohort of American diplomats handcuffed themselves by bowing to the popular connotation that a tension existed between economic and environmental health. For the next decade and a half, American climate change politics would be shaped primarily by President Bush’s language, one that insinuated a trade-off between environmental protection and economic development and completely ignored the underlying foundation of economic health, namely a healthy environment.
The following year, President Bill Clinton, after defeating President Bush in his reelection bid, was faced with precisely this type of obstacle in public sentiment. Despite placing perhaps the most qualified environmental politician of his generation in the number two slot of the Democratic ticket in 1992, President Clinton was unable to generate much political traction when it came to the climate change debate during the eight years in office with Vice President Al Gore, Jr. Two key examples bear out this point. The first is the attempt early in Clinton’s first administration to institute a British thermal unit (BTU) tax, one that would raise taxes for a family income of $40,000 by approximately $17 a month and those making under $30,000 by none at all. This proposal failed in short order and reinforced the perception in American politics that the public will not pay to solve a long-forming, distant problem with uncertain consequences. There are simply too many more immediate concerns the average American faces on a day-to-day basis.
The second major example rests squarely upon the foundation of the international climate change debate, the Kyoto Protocol. In the lead-up to the United States signing that international treaty in December 1997, Clinton Administration officials took a central international role. With the preceding April 1995 Berlin Mandate, for instance, the United States was a passionate supporter of the argument for differentiated responsibilities, where the industrialized world would agree to restrict its emissions on the average of 5 percent below its 1990 levels before the developing world would do so, much like the Montreal Protocol had divided the world between developed and developing world.
But well before Vice President Gore left for Kyoto in late 1997 to join the U.S. delegation led by former senator Tim Wirth (D-CO), the U.S. Senate passed the bipartisan Byrd-Hagel Resolution, which stated that body would only support a treaty that included all countries of the world. Touting what would come to be labeled global apartheid, the Byrd-Hagel Resolution demonstrated an overwhelming sentiment, passing by a vote of 95-0. Thus, despite signing Kyoto, Clinton never submitted the treaty for ratification in the Senate, a constitutional requirement that dictates any international treaty must receive two-thirds Senate support before becoming force of law.
THE GEORGE W. BUSH ADMINISTRATION
Such failures pale in comparison to the politicization of climate change during the successor administration of President George W. Bush. Over his two terms, borrowing in large part from the tobacco industry playbook, President Bush has overseen a White House that first vociferously discounted the science of climate change, and then turned to outright suppression of its evidence. Thus, while President Bush has developed a combination of modest bilateral and regional initiatives such as the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate, International Partnership for a Hydrogen Economy, and the Carbon Sequestration Leadership Forum, the lasting legacy of President Bush in terms of climate change will be a decidedly negative one.
He has ignored scientific consensus on climate change and its human-induced links in the form of the widely regarded assessments by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He has withdrawn the United States from Kyoto, citing the familiar refrain on lack of participation by China. And most egregious of all, he has obstructed and even deleted the dissemination of information from his own Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and other governmental scientists. The most publicized of these was reported by the New York Times in its coverage of e-mails obtained by Greenpeace under the Freedom of Information Act, which depict the White House Council on Environmental Quality chief of staff Phil Cooney, a former oil industry lobbyist, as actually doctoring science by editing climate scientist reports to render them innocuous in 2002.
Despite these actions by the Bush Administration, separation of powers in the United States has allowed both the legislative and judicial branches to weigh in regarding climate change. In April 2007, for example, the U.S. Supreme Court, in the landmark 5-4 decision of Massachusetts et al. v. EPA et al., sided with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in its suit of an EPA that had heretofore ignored whether greenhouse gas emissions cause or contribute to climate change. The Court declared Massachusetts, as well as the supporting states of Connecticut, Illinois, Maine, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont, and California, had every right to request the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases.
Six months prior, the sweeping midterm elections of November 2006 saw a redistribution of party lines in the U.S. Congress, with Democrats gaining advantages in both the House and Senate (with the two Senate independents in Vermont and Connecticut, respectively, agreeing to caucus with the Democrats) for the first time since 1994. While that election was primarily driven by sentiment over the war in Iraq (and climate change debate in Congress is by no means divided solely along partisan lines, with western coal interests and mid-western automobile labor interests often influencing Democrats more than Republicans), the tangible results within congressional committees were nearly immediate, as at least five different greenhouse cap and trade bills began circulating in Congress when it returned to session in January 2007.
Most notably, the newly minted chairwoman of the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) replaced James Inhofe (R-OK), who held a grand total of five hearings on climate change in four years as head of that committee, including science-fiction writer Michael Crichton as his star witness. Senator Inhofe was also well known for labeling global warming as the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people. Senator Boxer promptly held five hearings on climate change in her first three months at the helm and proposed what will likely become the centerpiece of a renewed national debate with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT). This bill, formerly known as S-309 but more popularly referred to as the Global Warming Pollution Reduction Act, requires emissions reductions in the United States to the 1990 level by 2020, 27 percent below 1990 by 2030, 53 percent below 1990 by 2040, and 80 percent below 1990 by 2050.
CLIMATE POLICY: STATE AND REGIONAL LEVELS
The most significant advances in U.S. climate policy to date have actually occurred at the state level. It is in these laboratories of democracy where federalism has allowed a number of enlightened governors and their respective legislatures to forge ahead where the federal government has floundered. Where the United States is flexing its muscle most is in California under Republican governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. As the eighth-largest industrial engine on the planet, California’s 2006 law targeting a 25 percent cut in carbon dioxide by 2020 is more than mere lip service to climate change.
Furthermore, as the first U.S. law imposing mandatory caps on carbon dioxide, it turned heads all the way up to the Potomac and beyond. This was not California’s first foray into the climate change debate. Four years prior, in 2002, the state passed legislation creating vehicle emissions standards that required reductions of 22 percent in tailpipe greenhouse gas emissions from new vehicles by the 2012 model year and 30 percent by the 2016 model year. Governor Schwarzenegger and California are responding to the increasing loss of Sierra mountains snowpack, their primary source of drinking water, and believe they must compensate for a federal government that has dragged its heels on the issue of climate change for far too long. They also believe their economy is large enough to force others to sit up and take notice.
That logic appears to be on target. In February 2007, governors of Arizona, New Mexico, Oregon, and Washington joined California in signing an agreement establishing the Western Regional Climate Action Initiative, a joint effort to tackle climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions with a market-based system. This set-up mimics that of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), which became the first mandatory U.S. cap-and-trade program for carbon dioxide in December 2005. Negotiated by the governors of seven northeastern and mid-Atlantic states (Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, and Vermont) with Maryland joining in April 2007, RGGI sets a cap on emissions of carbon dioxide from power plants at current levels in 2009, and then reducing emissions 10 percent by 2019.
U.S. BUSINESS INTERESTS
Aside from state and regional initiatives, the business community is making perhaps the most significant inroads regarding climate change policy. Echoing the logic and business acumen that drove DuPont Chemical from its position as a stiff opponent of domestic regulation of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) in the late 1970s to that of a staunch supporter of the globally-reaching Montreal Protocol in the mid-1980s, an incredibly diverse cross-section of corporations now stands in favor of mandatory limits on carbon dioxide emissions.
A business-NGO alliance, the U.S. Climate Change Action Partnership (USCAP), which touted 33 different members in September 2007, six of which are environmental non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and 27 of which are corporations, is a prime example. These businesses cover a broad spectrum of the economy, including several from the fossil-fuel industry and transportation sector as well as energy and electric power interests, including BP America Inc., Chrysler LLC, ConocoPhillips, Duke Energy, Ford Motor Company, General Electric, General Motors Corp., and Shell.
As Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) CEO Peter Darby explained in his congressional testimony in February 2007, these companies worry that a motley collection of different U.S. state regulations will emerge if no national direction is given, making their day-to-day operations much more complicated and expensive than they need to be. And they fear a United States that has abdicated its global leadership in this area risks handicapping their financial interests even further in the global marketplace. This is the driving rationale of USCAP and the reason its January 2007 publication, A Call for Action, calls for mandatory, market-driven cap and trade programs in carbon dioxide emissions. In short, USCAP outlines a proposal to first slow, then stop, and ultimately reverse emissions on the order of 60 to 80 percent below the current level by 2050.
CONCLUSION
Thus, on numerous levels, from both the governmental to the business sector, climate change policy in the United States has enjoyed a rebirth of late. The IPCC first noted a discernible human impact on climate change in 1995. In the 2005 aftermath of a devastating Hurricane Katrina and its utter destruction of the truly unique American city of New Orleans, Americans finally concurred. And according to NASA’s chief climatologist Jim Hansen, this public opinion tipping point is about to encounter its scientific brethren. Hansen believes there are only 10 more years to act before it is too late, before the phenomenon of irreversibility enters the complex climate models. Others hope the time horizon to be a bit longer, but concur that we are talking about only a two degree C rise before the threat of irreversibility arises.
It is here that a third sector of democratic policy-making, that of civil society, becomes all the more relevant. Since the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville first visited the United States in the 1830s, democracy scholars have singled out the United States as a unique bastion of civil society. De Tocqueville’s De la democratic en Amerique (1835, 1840) found American individualism and its dominant moneymaking ethic supported the unusually high level of civic interactions outside official government structures. This is part of what handicapped the Bush and Clinton administrations in the 1990s and their efforts to face climate change policy seriously: Americans do not like to be told what they can and cannot do, especially when it limits earnings potential. But it is also what explains the burst of grassroots activity now underway regarding climate change. Americans see great financial loss if action is not taken soon.
Al Gore’s 2007 Academy Award-winning film An Inconvenient Truth is but one piece in the puzzle galvanizing action. Environmental NGOs from the Sierra Club and Environmental Defense to the National Wildlife Federation and Natural Resources Defense Council to The Nature Conservancy and World Resources Center continue to beat their advocacy drums, and are now showing results. American public opinion surveys over the past decade show a decided maturation of understanding that climate change is real, is in large part human-induced, and, perhaps most notably, actually impacts their own lives in the United States.
