Policy, U.S.

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.

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