Against the Grain: The United States and the Global Climate Change Regime

The uncompromising stance currently taken by the US in the international climate change regime is well known. While remaining a party to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and still taking the issue of climate change ‘very seriously’, the administration of George W. Bush has decided not to ratify the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. Since announcing its repudiation of the Protocol in March 2001, the US has repeatedly reconfirmed and reinforced this position through policy actions on the international stage. In doing so, the US has isolated itself from almost all of the rest of the world; 129 countries have ratified the Kyoto Protocol and, with the recent ratification by the Russian Federation, the treaty will enter into force on 16 February 2005. The stance of the Bush administration goes against the grain of most of its allies in the international community in two important ways: first, in denying that climate change is sufficiently serious to warrant meaningful action beyond longterm research and development; and, second, in challenging the view that multilateralism is the tool of choice for managing cross-border problems, a challenge also raised on many other issues. Although much more pronounced in the Bush administration than under previous presidents, going against the grain in this way on international climate change cooperation also reflects broader structural themes in US politics, associated both with deep-seated political, economic and cultural traits and with the hegemonic position of the US in the international arena. Such structural features, which predispose the US to adopt a rather recalcitrant position, help explain why, even under the much more engaged Clinton administration (1993– 2000), the US was unable either to ratify the Kyoto Protocol or to take meaningful domestic action to address the problem. The aim of this paper is to critically describe and analyse US participation in the global climate change regime. It begins with a reminder of the national circumstances of the US with respect to the climate change issue, including structural features of US political culture that help explain the country’s underlying reluctance to take strong mitigation action and engage in multilateral efforts to address the problem. It then explores US (dis)engagement with the global climate change regime, and how this has changed over