Abstract
For many years, climate change was a technical issue that only concerned a small number of scientists and policymakers.1 At the 1988 Toronto Conference on the Changing Atmosphere (arguably the first important policy-oriented global climate change forum), the prime ministers of Canada and Norway proposed a global “law of the air” and called for the 20 percent reduction in global emissions of carbon dioxide by the year 2005. Even at that late date, the United States dismissed the importance of this conference by sending only a mid-level government representative. While the United States did not think that the Toronto meeting warranted a higher diplomatic presence, the delegations of some countries were headed by their respective prime ministers or presidents. When the concluding resolution of the Toronto meeting called for a fundamental reassessment of global priorities and responsibilities, William Nitze, then the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Environment, Health, and Natural Resources, argued that it “would be premature at the current moment to contemplate an international agreement that sets targets for greenhouse gases.”2
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Notes
National Research Council, Reconciling Observations of Global Temperature Change (Washington, DC: National Research Council, 2000), <http://www. nap.edu /books/0309068916/html/>.
Robert A. Dahl, Who Governs: Democracy and Power in an American City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961).
“Bureaucratic politics” are an important factor in U.S. foreign policy. The Environmental Protection Agency and other government agencies have played an important role in U.S. climate change policy. For a general discussion of the role of bureaucratic politics in US. foreign policy, see I. M. Destler, Presidents, Bureaucrats, and Foreign Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972);
Graham Allison, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971);
and Morton Halperin, Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1974).
For an excellent introduction of the regulatory politics of environmental policy, see Walter Rosenbaum, Environmental Politics and Policy (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 1998).
David Apter and Louis Wolf Goodman, eds., The Multinational Corporation and Social Change (New York: Praeger, 1976).
Nazli Choucri, “Multinational Corporations and the Global Environment” in Global Accord: Environmental Challenges and International Responses, edited by Nazli Choucri (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993)
See American Petroleum Institute, Global Warming: The High Cost of the Kyoto Protocol (Washington, DC: API, 1998)
and Economic Strategy Institute, The Global Climate Debate: Keeping the Economy Warm and the Planet Cool (Washington, DC: ESI, 1997).
See Alliance to Save Energy et al., Energy Innovations: A Prosperous Path to a Clean Environment (Washington DC: Alliance to Save Energy, American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy, Natural Resources Defense Council, Tellus Institute, and Union of Concerned Scientists, 1997)
and Union of Concerned Scientists and Tellus Institute, A Small Price to Pay: US Action to Curb Global Warming is Feasible and Affordable (Boston: UOCS and the Tellus Institute, 1998).
Jessica Matthews, “Power Shift,” Foreign Affairs, 76, 1 (1997): 50.
Paul Wapner, “Politics Beyond the State: Environmental Activism and World Civic Politics,” World Politics, 47 3 (1995): 312.
Kal Raustiala, “States, NGOs, and International Environmental Institutions,” International Studies Quarterly, 41 (1997): 719.
Eugene Skolnikoff, “The Role of Science in Policy: The Climate Change Debate in the United States,” Environment, 41, 5 (1999): 19.
John Kingdon, Agenda, Alternatives, and Public Policies (New York: Harper Collins, 1995). For a general discussion of how policies get on the political agenda, refer to pp. 1–21.
Wayne Morrisey, Global Climate Change: A Concise History of Negotiations and Chronology of Major Activities Preceding the 1992 U.N. Framework Convention (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, 1999), <http://www.cnie.org/nle/clim-2.html>.
Norman Vig and Michael Kraft, eds., Environmental Policies in the 1990s (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly Press, 1997).
Peter Trubowitz, Defining the National Interest: Conflict and Change in American Foreign Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
As quoted in Eric Alterman, Who Speaks for the People: Why Democracy Matters in Foreign Policy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998).
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© 2000 Paul G. Harris
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Park, J. (2000). Governing Climate Change Policy: From Scientific Obscurity to Foreign Policy Prominence. In: Harris, P.G. (eds) Climate Change and American Foreign Policy. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-62978-7_4
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