Harvesting experience: A reappraisal of the U.S. Climate Change Action Plan

For mitigating climate change and adapting to whatever impacts we cannot avoid, there are no politically feasible alternatives to improvements in the U.S. Climate Change Action Plan at this time or for the foreseeable future.Yet improvements in the Action Plan have been obstructed by the diversion of attention and other resources to negotiating a binding international agreement, to developing a predictive understanding of global change, and to documenting the failure of the Action Plan to meet its short-term goal for the reduction of aggregate greenhouse gas emissions. Continuous improvements depend upon reallocating attention and other resources to the Action Plan, and more speci¢cally, to the many small-scale policies that have already succeeded by climate change and `no regrets' criteria under the Action Plan. Sustaining the e¡ort over the long term depends on harvesting experience from these small-scale successes for di¡usion and adaptation elsewhere on a voluntary basis. In October 1993, President Clinton and Vice President Gore announced the Climate Change Action Plan, a policy to ful¢ll the voluntary commitment of the U.S. to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases to 1990 levels under Article 4(2) of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. The Framework Convention was opened for signature at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992, and went into e¡ect following rati¢cation by ¢fty countries in March 1994. The ultimate objective of the Framework Convention, as stated in Article 2, is `stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.' The two goals of the Action Plan are to strengthen the U.S. economy and to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. According to its Executive Summary, the Action Plan `meets the twin challenges of responding to the threat of global warming and strengthening the economy. Returning U.S. greenhouse gas emissions to their 1990 levels by the year 2000 is an ambitious but achievable goal that can be attained while enhancing prospects for economic growth and job creation, and positioning our country to compete and win in the global market' (Clinton and Gore, 1993). The Action Plan gathered together over forty existing and new federal programs and o¡ered voluntary, £exible, and cost-e¡ective partnerships between the government and other organizations, primarily businesses, to realize the two goals. The Action Plan was projected to cost the federal government $1.9 billion over six years, with most of the funds to be reallocated from existing budgets of federal agencies. Policy Sciences 32: 133^161, 1999. ß 1999Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.