5 - The USA and Climate Policies

Summary

In the face of its international reputation for intransigence and foot-dragging on climate warming policy, combined with its deserved reputation for profligate fossil fuel consumption, the USA has actually reduced its greenhouse gas emissions since 1990. Continued compounded muddling, consisting of stricter national administrative regulation of energy efficiency and pollution control, new state and local government initiatives, further non-governmental governance developments and market-driven economic responses are together likely to support extending the current trends of reduced energy intensity and reduced greenhouse gas emissions over the next few decades, perhaps even to accelerate it. But a U.S. commitment to doing the right thing – whether conceived as doing what it would take to achieve the level of zero net emissions by 2050, or to accomplish the even more draconian reductions needed to soon halt global temperature rise – is unlikely in the absence of something that causes coalescence of a new normative political landscape.