The Foreign Service Journal, February 2008

But there are also some hard sells, and there the job was an uphill battle. This was made more difficult by Washington’s abdication of a leader- ship role on climate, which was re- placed by a policy of denial and re- fusal to take meaningful action dom- estically. To describe our challenges, I’d divide the issues into three categories: the good, the bad and the ugly. The Good This is the easy part. By and large, U.S. policy on the science end of climate change and environment is something to crow about. We spend more money than anyone (except the Japanese, who only recently sur- passed us) on research into alternative energy sources. Initiatives to develop a viable biofuel industry, encour- age the use of solar energy and make hydrogen power affordable are just three examples of the things we are doing right in this field. U.S. research on developing carbon sinks and carbon sequestration is also state of the art. Admittedly, it took Washington a long time to come around to agreeing that climate change is a reality that leaves a large human footprint. This reluctance to accept the need for policy change is reminiscent of the 1970s and 1980s, when our response to the campaign to “stop acid rain” was a rejoinder to “study acid rain.” Nevertheless, even though until recently Washington officially questioned the evidence that climate change was caused by human activity, our research into the phenomenon has been first-rate. For instance, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s project to establish a globally comparable system of climate and weather measurement is a superb undertaking, for which the U.S. has provided leadership and resources. Another area where the U.S. can take credit is its establishment of numerous multilateral partnerships to share scientific research and improve cooperation on finding solutions to many of the problems we face. These organizations add value to the work we are doing domestically. For example, the Carbon Sequestration Leadership Forum brings together researchers from around the world to share ideas on finding a way to store carbon safely. Likewise, the International Partnership for the Hy- drogen Economy offers opportunities for scientists working on hydrogen fuel cells. Groups researching methane capture, clean coal and other projects to curb carbon emissions are also adding to our knowledge and ability to solve climate problems. Finally, the most recently established group, the Asian Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate, marks an effort to engage major developing-country polluters (e.g., China and India) in cooperative programs to reduce their carbon emissions in basic industry and overall energy consump- tion. Finally, the U.S. has put in place a mechanism to encourage developing-country polluters to clean up their act, and to assist them in doing so. This is a great leap forward from our position vis-à-vis Kyoto that we would not make any binding commitments to cut emis- sions unless the developing countries did so as well (with no particular help from the developed world). The Bad In many cases, America’s failure to act or even agree to international actions has, in my perception, slowed the progress that could have been made. The prime example is our failure to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. The U.S. negotiated the protocol in good faith and made many important contributions to the text. We also offered many suggestions that were not included in the final treaty but have found a life outside the protocol itself (most significantly, carbon trading). Yet we ulti- mately decided not to become a party to the accord. While the Clinton administration made that decision, it did so at least partly because of Senate opposition that would have made ratification difficult. The reasons for that decision are well-known, cen- tering on the economic costs of compliance and the lack of binding targets for the developing world. In the clas- sic dilemma of whether something (however limited and flawed) was better than nothing, we not only chose the latter, but then walked away from the process. A diplomatic colleague (from a Kyoto-signatory country) once told me that the greatest loss from the U.S. pullout was not the loss of our 7-percent carbon reduction target, but the fact that we were no longer contributing to the process. As a result, the other parties F O C U S F E B R U A R Y 2 0 0 8 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 33 U.S. policy was sometimes hard to defend, but we did our best.