Climate Change Politics in North America: The State of Play

tHIs RepoRt Contains papers from a two-day conference on Climate Change Politics in North America, organized at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, May 18-19, 2006. The conference papers and participants endeavored to critically examine key aspects and issues of North American politics and policymaking related to climate change. In 1992, 172 of the world’s governments gathered at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. There they adopted the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which set the goal of the “stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.” Five years later, in 1997, the much-debated Kyoto Protocol was negotiated among national representatives from around the world, setting mandatory greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reductions for industrialized countries and countries with economies in transition, but not for developing countries. The Kyoto Protocol entered into force in 2005, and countries with emission reduction requirements that have ratified the agreement are required to reach their targets no later than 2012. By mid 2006, 164 countries had ratified the agreement. Currently, climate change related policy initiatives are developing in many countries based on an acceptance of the science demonstrating important changes to the global climate system and a warming trend largely caused by human release of GHG emissions (Fisher, 2004; Harrison, 2004; Schreurs, 2002; Weart, 2003; Houghton, et al., 2001). In recent years, climate change