Part III
Anthony Luzzatto Gardner1
(1)
London, UK
Anthony Luzzatto Gardner
Cooperation on the environment, especially relating to the combat against climate change, has been one of the most successful and noble aspects of the US-EU partnership. The US Mission to the EU played a subsidiary role in this partnership during my diplomatic mission because the experience and negotiating power on the US side resided with the State Department and with several specialized government agencies in Washington. But during my regular interactions with the technical experts on the environment and climate who formed part of the US Mission staff, I witnessed the breadth and depth of the US-EU partnership to save the planet. As a result of various EU treaty changes in the 1990s that gave the EU increasing authority to take domestic and international actions in these areas, the key EU players have been the European Commission’s directorate-generals for the environment (created in 1981) and for “climate action” (created in 2010).
I have had a specific interest in environmental issues, resulting from my father’s long involvement in them. One of my early memories is as a nine-year-old sitting with my sister in the public gallery of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm in June 1972. My father was a delegate to the conference and apparently thought this would be a great way to start the family’s summer holidays. (Two decades later he was a delegate to the UN Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.) Bringing the family to an environmental conference was in keeping with my father’s regular habits of enlivening dinner table conversations at home with topics such as the Antarctica Treaty, air and maritime pollution, deforestation, wildlife protection, and ownership of the world’s oceans.
In the mid-1980s, my father introduced the family to a young senator from Tennessee—Al Gore—whose passion for the environment was infectious and who soon became a close family friend. When I regularly met with him as Vice President one decade later during my service in the White House, I would marvel at an enormous picture on the wall of the earth taken from outer space. Seen from afar, the earth seemed such a small, brittle, and beautiful creation (Fig. 11.1).
Fig. 11.1
Ambassador Gardner, his father Richard Gardner, and Vice President Gore in the Vice President’s office, spring of 1995
(Source From author’s own collection)
The challenge of rising temperatures, largely the result of fossil fuels burned by human activity, is obviously an existential issue for all of us. There is no “Planet B.” The challenge is also horribly complex for many reasons. Nearly every human activity emits greenhouse gases that contribute to an atmospheric “greenhouse effect” trapping infrared radiation that warms the earth’s surface and its oceans. Addressing the challenge therefore implicates most aspects of daily personal life and economic activity, requiring individuals to change their habits and corporations to take expensive actions. At the same time, the threat to our planet remains clouded by some uncertainty and is rather distant, at least beyond the planning horizons of governments and individuals. To many governments, taking tough choices now seems less appetizing than kicking the can down the road for future generations to deal with. Since emissions everywhere contribute equally to the problem, unprecedented international cooperation is required, even among countries that have radically different levels of development and views about who is responsible for implementing solutions.
Perhaps the thorniest aspect of the climate change problem is that it involves a conflict between what is required and what is fair. Developed and developing countries have clashed about this topic for decades. Developing countries insist that there is a “carbon debt” that must be paid. According to this view, developed countries put most of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere during their process of carbon-powered industrialization that made them rich and therefore must shoulder the burden of saving the planet from global warming. Developing countries have grudgingly accepted to take actions to address global warming only if they are consistent with poverty reduction and economic growth. While conceding the point that they bear a special responsibility, developed countries argue that the planet cannot be saved if developing countries, now responsible for well over half of global emissions (and growing fast), don’t share in the pain of emissions reductions. The most significant example is China: Its emissions were about one-third the size of the United States’ in 1992 but are now about twice the size. The emotional depth of this divide is particularly strong between the United States and the developing world:
A billion Chinese and a billion Indians want to live like middle class Americans, and they see no reason why they should put their dreams on hold when the Americans are unwilling to give up their SUVs and shopping malls.1
Complicating these resentments and geographical divides, the rules governing climate action in the key international forum, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), remain based on consensus with every country having veto power. That makes decision-making devilishly complicated when over 190 countries are represented and each, no matter how small, carries the same weight as all the others. The body overseeing the work of the UNFCCC, the United Nations, is often criticized for being bureaucratic, unwieldy, and ideologically laden—not the ideal traits required to take quick, complex, and bold decisions. In short, rapidly decarbonizing the world economy while ensuring global growth to fuel rising standards of living for a growing population is perhaps the most difficult task humanity has ever faced.
The US and the EU have not been the only key actors in shaping policies to address this task: Others, especially China but also Brazil, South Africa, and India (known as the BASIC countries), have emerged as important players in the past decade because of their traditional opposition to ambitious binding cuts in global emissions. The influence of developing countries has been growing, reflecting not only their growing share of global emissions (around two thirds), but also their growing economic and political clout. The US and EU shares of world population, GDP, and emissions have been steadily declining at the same time. A host of sub-federal governments (such as cities and regions) as well as national and international non-state actors, including corporations, grassroots movements, and NGOs, have increasingly shaped the climate policy debate and implemented important measures to reduce emissions.
Notwithstanding the growing universe of actors addressing climate change over the past three decades, the willingness and ability of the US and the EU to adopt leadership roles domestically and internationally have proved crucial. As the world’s leading economic and political power, the nursery of high-tech innovation, the largest source of emissions per capita and the only country capable of influencing Chinese policy, the United States has arguably been the indispensable actor on climate change.
But the EU has also been instrumental because it has stood virtually alone (since the 1990s) among industrialized nations in its persistent commitment to aggressive global action to address climate change. Moreover, measures within the EU (such as an emission trading system and promotion of renewable energies) have provided an important policy laboratory for the world. The EU has provided “leadership by example” by undertaking deep emissions reductions (often unilaterally) and providing significant funding to developing countries to assist their transition to lower carbon intensity economies. As the world’s largest internal market and one of the top destinations for foreign direct investment, the EU has exercised significant influence over global regulations relating to environmental policy. Its historic and cultural links with many developing countries, especially in Africa and island states that are especially vulnerable to the effects of global warming, have been instrumental in achieving global consensus on the way forward.
Differences in Transatlantic Views on the Environment
The US-EU partnership on environmental issues has been complicated by transatlantic divergences in attitudes toward the environment. Generalizations contrasting a more enlightened Europe caring about the fate of the world with a selfish, individualist United States oblivious to the environmental consequences of its current consumption are obviously simplistic. Nonetheless, there are some valid contrasts that may be drawn. While there certainly are many environmentally conscious voters in the United States (and not just on the coasts and in urban areas), it is generally true that concerns about the environment rank more highly in Europe than in the United States in polls about voter priorities. The open spaces and abundant natural resources in the US breed a view that natural resources are inexhaustible. In a recent poll conducted by the Pew Research Center, only two in ten Republicans believe that climate change should be a top priority (two-third of Democrats think so).2 Europe’s higher population density and relative resource scarcity encourage greater concern about the environment.
It is also generally true that Europeans are more trusting of government intervention, as well as the opinions of experts and bureaucrats, than their American cousins. Moreover, Europeans are generally less confident in technological or market-based solutions. They have largely seen climate change as a moral issue involving responsibility for planetary stewardship, fairness to future generations and developing countries rather than primarily as an economic issue focused on short-term costs and benefits (even though these have had to be taken into account in extensive impact assessments). According to the EU, technological innovations and flexible solutions promoted by the United States, such as “carbon sinks” (reservoirs that store carbon extracted from the atmosphere), setting a price on carbon emissions through the trading of permits, or paying third countries to make emissions reductions, should not detract from the primary goal of reducing emissions and changing lifestyles at home.
There is also some merit in the view that Europeans are more risk averse, at least regarding the climate, than Americans. According to the precautionary principle, enshrined in EU treaties, the lack of full scientific certainty, including with regard to environmental risk, should not stand in the way of action to avoid the risk when there is reason to believe that it is serious and/or irreversible. US regulations typically depart from a reverse burden of proof: A policy or action should be permitted unless it is proven to be unsafe. Unlike the US, Europe has never been willing after the early 1990s to postpone regulations limiting emissions on account of incomplete scientific consensus about climate change or require that these regulations be cost-effective as long as there is a threat of serious and potentially irreversible environmental damage.
While the US has been the champion of several international environmental treaties, especially in the 1970s and 1980s, the history, size, and geography of the United States have often led many Americans to be skeptical about international law and multilateral efforts that impinge on US sovereignty. With the federal government sometimes unwilling or unable to negotiate international measures on the environment, sub-federal actors such as states and cities have filled the void by showing leadership on issues such as automotive fuel standards and building codes.
In addition to its genuine concern about the planet, the EU has had many other motivations to be a leader on climate change. As the world’s biggest importer of hydrocarbons and because of its high degree of import dependency (90% for oil and 60% for gas), the EU has naturally sought to promote energy efficiency and renewable energies within the bloc. At the same time, European industry has been eager for the EU to level the playing field globally to ensure that it is not at a competitive disadvantage with industries from countries not subject to rigorous environmental standards. Some EU companies may have seen a competitive advantage in adopting tighter standards within the bloc (at least for a while) in order to achieve leading market positions in certain environmental goods and services for export.
While there have been important differences between the EU and the US approach toward climate change, these differences pale in comparison with the areas of agreement and the gulf between the positions of developed and developing countries. It is certainly not true, as some critics have suggested, that the EU has always been flag bearer of progressive climate policies while the US has always been a reluctant and even obstructionist laggard. Each has exercised leadership, albeit at different times and in different ways. During the 1970s and 1980s, the US was clearly more active in implementing tough domestic environmental regulations and in pushing for international treaties. During the period from the early 1990s until the election of President Obama in 2008, the US withdrew from its leadership role (albeit continued to shape the climate change debate) and the EU became the most vocal player pushing for aggressive action. During Obama’s two terms, the US and the EU jointly exercised leadership in the climate change debate, before the US once again withdrew under the presidency of Donald Trump.
In order to appreciate just how unusual and impactful it was for the US and EU to exercise joint leadership during President Obama’s two terms in office, it is worth reviewing how they alternated leadership on the atmosphere and climate change during the prior three decades.
US Leadership in Protecting the Ozone Layer
During the 1970s, environmental pressure groups wielded considerable political power in the United States. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), founded in 1970, started responding to widespread concerns about the environment by proposing tough regulations in many areas, including relating to air and water quality, controls on lead-based paint and gasoline, and the phase-out of ozone-depleting chemicals such as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) that were being used as aerosol propellants. The regulatory activity on the environment, begun in the first half of the 1970s under the Republican administrations of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, sped up under the Democratic administration of President Jimmy Carter and continued right through the 1980s, despite President Ronald Reagan’s relatively laissez-faire approach to business and skepticism about environmental issues.
With the US adopting environmental standards that were more restrictive than in any other industrial nation, businesses and government sought to promote these standards internationally in order to avoid a loss of competitiveness. The United States played key roles in shaping the 1972 Stockholm Conference, that I observed as a teenager, as well as many international environmental conventions. The most dramatic example of US leadership on international climate issues is the 1987 Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer.
The ozone layer in the atmosphere shields the earth from the sun’s harmful ultraviolet radiation. Evidence that CFCs contributed to the depletion of the ozone layer emerged in 1974, with subsequent research demonstrating that CFCs used in common consumer products such as aerosols, refrigerants, foam blowing agents, solvents, fire extinguishers, and pesticides are major culprits. The problem of ozone depletion received significant media and public attention in the United States thanks to the vivid image of a thinning planetary protective shield and warnings about skin cancer.
Consumers responded by rapidly decreasing their consumption of products containing CFCs, partly because these products were not central to daily life and switching to products with similar but safer characteristics did not impose large costs. Chemical manufacturers in the United States, most notably DuPont, softened their opposition to regulation because they considered it inevitable and because they had identified environmentally friendly alternatives to CFCs that were not costly to adopt and even offered export opportunities. As a result of the EPA’s order in 1978 to ban the use of fluorocarbon gases in “non-essential” aerosol propellants, US production of aerosol quickly dropped by nearly 95%.
US pressure on European governments to pass equivalent legislation was not successful at first. EU member states accounted for 40% of global CFC production and about 30% of global CFC consumption, generating a significant surplus for export. European chemical manufacturers, such as the UK’s Imperial Chemical Industries, generated significant profits from the sale of CFCs worldwide and had not moved as quickly as their US competitors to identify alternatives. Until the mid-1980s, European public opinion remained relatively indifferent to the fate of the ozone layer. In a foreshadowing of similar arguments that the United States would make about efforts to address climate change one decade later, European governments largely adopted the view of their chemical industry that concerns about CFCs were not based on “sound science,” that it was best to “wait and learn” rather than be rushed into action by “scaremongering,” and that restrictions on CFCs would impose high costs and job losses in return for speculative benefits. But with new evidence in the mid-1980s that the ozone layer over Antarctica had declined by 40% over the past three decades and that the resulting “hole” had grown to the size of the United States, European public opinion, governments, and industry began to shift toward accepting the need for domestic and international regulation.
Although the Reagan administration had harbored reservations about further restrictions on CFCs, a groundbreaking study by the President’s Council of Economic Advisers in 1987 concluded that the depletion of the ozone layer would cause millions of cancer deaths in the United States and helped establish definitively that the costs of non-action dwarfed the costs of action. The US Senate voted, by an overwhelming majority, that same year to ask the president to take aggressive measures against all ozone-depleting substances (ODS). While the analysis of domestic costs and benefits suggested that even unilateral action to reduce CFCs would have been worthwhile, the United States considered an international agreement to be preferable in order to level the international regulatory playing field and because the health benefits would be substantially higher. The fact that only about thirty nations participated in the negotiations (compared to more than six times as many in the subsequent climate change negotiations) certainly facilitated a rapid and successful outcome.
As a result of US leadership, twenty nations, including most of the major CFC producers, reached a binding agreement in Montreal in 1987 to protect the ozone layer. The Montreal Protocol, which entered into force two years later, required immediate and substantial reductions in numerous ODS, with phase-out schedules shortened and further restrictions introduced on an expanding list of substances during eight subsequent treaty revisions.
One of the incidental effects of the Montreal Protocol was that CFCs were rapidly being substituted by hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), ozone-friendly chemicals that are up to 4000 times more powerful than carbon dioxide in promoting climate change. In response to this development, the signatories to the protocol agreed an amendment in Kigali in 2016 that requires the reduction of HFC use by 80–85% by the late 2040s and that will therefore help the planet avoid a half-degree centigrade of warming by the end of the century. The amendment came about in large part thanks to US diplomacy with China and India and to EU diplomacy with other developing countries, especially in Africa.
The Montreal Protocol is one of the most remarkable examples of international cooperation for several reasons. The treaty has been ratified by 197 parties (196 states and the European Union), making it the first universal treaty in United Nations history. Moreover, only 14 years elapsed between the scientific evidence of the risk of ozone depletion and decisive action to address it. By contrast, the world community is still struggling after three decades to implement a durable and ambitious climate change regime to address global warming.
The protocol came about because all the large emitters of ODS undertook to take strong action. Most of the ODS reductions occurred in Western industrialized countries that have on average complied with, and sometimes even exceeded, their international commitments. Once a reluctant follower of the United States on ozone protection, the EU joined the US in pushing for the total elimination of CFC use by 2000; both achieved the goal several years early, partly because the costs of doing so were smaller than anticipated due to rapid technological innovation.
Developed countries overcame objections among developing countries, especially China and India, by guaranteeing them financial assistance to pay for the costs of implementation and by giving them a ten-year grace period before assuming any obligations to reduce their production and consumption of CFCs (both were low but were projected to increase substantially).
Finally, as a result of the treaty, global emissions of nearly one hundred ozone-depleting chemicals have been reduced by 95% and atmospheric concentrations of such chemicals have been declining since 1994. Climate projections indicate that the ozone layer will return to 1980 levels between 2050 and 2070. Global savings from the agreement’s public health benefits have been estimated to be over one trillion dollars. In the US alone, approximately 280 million cases of skin cancer (including 1.6 million skin cancer deaths) and more than 45 million eye cataracts have been avoided.3
The EU Emerges as the Leading Global Actor on Climate Change
With international efforts to curb ozone depletion well on their way, attention turned to how human activity was contributing to the threat of global warming. In 1988, the United Nations established, with the active support of the United States and the European Union, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to provide periodic scientific assessments about climate change. Its regular publications, based on ever greater and more detailed data, have served as an important catalyst for action. A few years later, the European Union and small island states that fear being inundated by rising seas joined together to call for mandatory reductions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases responsible for global warming. The international debate about climate change has focused ever since on whether national emissions targets are necessary and, if so, whether they should be voluntary or binding and how they should be implemented.4
In the negotiations leading to the adoption of the UNFCCC at the Rio Summit in June 1992, the EU called on all industrialized countries to take binding measures to stabilize their greenhouse gas emissions at 1990 levels by the year 2000. But the United States and other developed economies resisted. President George Bush, who was up for re-election in November, had promised: “The American way of life is not up for negotiations. Period.” As a result, the convention only refers to the stabilization of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere at levels that would prevent “dangerous” climate change as a voluntary goal, without specifying any measures or timetables necessary to achieve it. Moreover, the convention merely states (in rather fuzzy prose) that the goal should be achieved “within a time frame sufficient to allow ecosystems to adapt naturally to climate change.” Having succeeded in diluting climate change goals and bowing to international pressure, President Bush signed the convention and the United States was the first industrialized country to ratify it.
The UNFCCC set the stage for all subsequent international negotiations to address climate change. Despite its purely voluntary nature, the convention has grown in significance because its membership is universal and because it has established some guiding principles for future discussions. It drew a firewall between developed countries, named in an annex to the convention, and developing countries, with the former expected to assume the lead in combating climate change under the principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities” (CBDRRC).
According to that principle, all states have a shared obligation to protect the environment and developed countries assume special responsibilities because of their greater historical role in generating pollution and their greater economic and technological capacities. Not only should developed countries take the lead on emissions reductions, for example, they should assume responsibility for assisting developing countries to adapt to climate change and to respond to natural climate-induced disasters.
While the US and the EU have endorsed the concept, they have consistently opposed suggestions that current generations of US and EU citizens should accept potentially unlimited liability for the actions of their ancestors, that developing countries are exempt from any legally binding commitments to take action, or that there should be a static division between countries based on historical responsibilities rather than evolving economic circumstances and contributions to global pollution.
This CBDRRC firewall almost immediately became a source of enormous controversy because it did not reflect the reality that many countries classified as “developing” (such as Singapore, South Korea, and Qatar) were in fact among the richest in the world and did not need special assistance. As the emissions of developing countries surged ahead (with China becoming the world’s biggest emitter representing one-quarter of global emissions in 2012), many countries (especially the United States) felt that the firewall needed to be modified.
The convention set science-based procedures for determining what constitutes a dangerous accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Over time the parties to the convention have determined that this means limiting global average temperature increases to less than 2 degrees centigrade compared to “pre-industrial” levels (an undefined term but one some experts understand as referring to levels existing just before the industrial revolution). The convention was also significant because it allowed, in line with US preferences, individual countries to adopt and implement their own measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. At the same time, the UNFCCC establishes a collective procedural obligation to report publicly on these measures so that they can be reviewed by other nations. The purpose of the system is to exert peer pressure and to enable parties to the convention to take “appropriate action,” including tougher measures in subsequent protocols if commitments are insufficient.
Around the time of the negotiations relating to the UNFCCC, the United States and the EU started swapping positions as leader and follower, respectively, on climate change. Several environmental issues in the 1980s, such as the death of forests due to acid rain, radioactivity due to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and the thinning ozone layer over Antarctica contributed to the European public’s awareness of humans’ negative impact on the planet. Environmental issues regularly topped the list of voters’ concerns in numerous opinion polls. The Green political movement, that had started in 1983 as a fringe phenomenon in Germany, quickly grew and spread to the rest of the continent, not just Scandinavia but also Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg and elsewhere, where they became part of the mainstream by the early 1990s. Green parties were not only represented in national parliaments and in the European Parliament, but were also winning cabinet posts (typically the ministry for environmental affairs).
Several EU member states, especially Germany, the Netherlands, and Denmark, moved quickly to adopt strict environmental standards. Seeking to avoid exposing their businesses to a competitive disadvantage compared to firms in other less regulated EU states, they looked for allies in the European Commission and the European Parliament to export their higher standards throughout the EU. The European Commission acted to harmonize environmental standards when more stringent national standards threatened to create non-tariff barriers that would fracture the common market. At the same time, revisions to the EU treaties shifted decision-making from unanimity to qualified majority. The accession of Sweden, Austria, and Finland (three fervently Green countries) in 1995 helped tip the balance in the Council, representing the ministers of the member states, toward strict EU-wide policies on the environment.
In the United States, however, concerns about the environment had dropped far down the list of voter concerns. The Clinton–Gore administration that took office in 1992 was unable to pass much federal pro-environmental legislation, especially after both houses of Congress flipped from democratic to republican majorities in the 1994 mid-term elections. And although it shared the EU’s support for an international agreement that would contain legally binding emissions targets for developed countries, while exempting developing countries, the administration repeatedly failed to persuade Congress. Faced with no domestic pressure to reduce its carbon emissions, US industry was also opposed to having obligations imposed by treaty.
Transatlantic Frictions Over the Kyoto Protocol
Negotiations to establish such a treaty began in Berlin in 1995 and were concluded two years later in Kyoto. The United States, and Vice President Gore in particular, shaped many of the aspects of the1997 Kyoto Protocol, including several “flexibility mechanisms.” One of these mechanisms was the establishment of five-year commitment periods, the first scheduled for 2008–2012, to meet targets for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. The five-year period allowed countries to average their yearly reductions to smooth out fluctuations due to unusual weather or economic conditions. Market-based mechanisms included the ability of developed countries to achieve their emissions reduction targets by buying emissions allowances from countries emitting less carbon than they were entitled to and by investing in emission reduction projects in the developing world where they were cheaper to achieve than at home. Moreover, developed countries could offset carbon emissions with the extraction of carbon from the atmosphere and its subsequent sequestration in forests and underground reservoirs.
The EU provided the leadership in seeking bold and binding targets for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. It initially proposed a 15% reduction of such emissions by 2010 compared to 1990 levels on condition that others would follow. The United States argued in favor of stabilization of emissions at current levels; even such a modest commitment required a significant reduction below projected increases in emissions according to forecasts of business as usual. In the end, the EU did win the argument for a more ambitious target but settled for an average reduction by developed countries of 5% during a five-year commitment period ending in 2012. The EU and the US assumed commitments to reduce their emissions by 8 and 7%, respectively.
The reluctance of the United States to embrace the EU’s aggressive emissions reduction proposals may be explained by their different economic circumstances. EU emissions had declined after 1990 in large part due to the UK’s switch from coal to gas and Germany’s closure of inefficient East German plants after unification; neither of these decisions had anything to do with climate change. Moreover, the US had experienced faster economic growth than the EU in the 1990s. As a result, the Kyoto targets arguably required the United States to make a much greater effort than the EU to reduce emissions. A major reason why the EU wanted the US to accept deep binding emissions reductions, and why it opposed US efforts to introduce market-based “flexibility mechanisms,” was that the EU wanted to reduce the competitive advantage the US enjoyed in energy prices.
It was clear on both sides of the Atlantic from early in the negotiations that the Kyoto Protocol was going to have a very tough time in the US Senate, where it needed to be approved. Even though the United States had succeeded in achieving many of its goals, the negotiating process had an air of unreality because the US could not join the Protocol as drafted. In 1997, the Senate adopted a unanimous non-binding resolution asking President Clinton not to agree to any agreement limiting greenhouse gas emissions if it would harm the economic interests of the United States. The resolution found that exempting developing countries from obligations to reduce emissions was “inconsistent with the need for global action on climate change” and “environmentally flawed.” As it was highly unlikely that developing countries would agree to any burden-sharing, the resolution essentially demanded that the United States should reject any commitments at all. Bowing to intense international pressure, the Clinton administration signed the Protocol in September 1998 but sought to mollify the Senate with a promise that it would not take any steps to implement the Protocol before ratification and that it would not seek ratification unless it had obtained “meaningful participation” from developing countries.
The arrival of the George W. Bush administration in 2000 turned the United States from a reluctant architect of the Kyoto Protocol to an open antagonist. While the fate of the Protocol in the United States had been in limbo, it was now declared effectively dead. According to the United States and other critics, the Kyoto Protocol was fatally flawed even when it was signed because it left over 50% of the world’ emissions unregulated. By the time the protocol entered into force in 2005, developing country emissions, especially in China, India, and Brazil, accounted for over 60% of global emissions and were rising every year. The firewall between developed and developing countries, in which only the former assumed obligations, and the artificial division of the world into one of the two groups appeared increasingly archaic.
The Bush administration disengaged the United States from climate change negotiations and promoted a different vision from the one of the Clinton administration. It advocated a “wait and see” approach, similar to the one Europe adopted before the Montreal Protocol, and invoked scientific uncertainties about global warming as an excuse to reject meaningful action. The US would only undertake voluntary measures to reduce its “greenhouse gas intensity” (measuring greenhouse gas emissions per dollar of economic output). Those measures would simply confirm what was already occurring in the US economy and would result in emissions increases.
Despite its flaws, the Kyoto Protocol has provided several important contributions. While the promise by developing countries to reduce their emissions by an average of 5% below 1990 levels was rather modest, the protocol is the first time that developed countries have agreed to reduce emissions from a wide range of greenhouse gases generated by numerous economic activities. Whatever its flaws, the protocol represents a first step in a serious effort to address a serious problem and as such was no small achievement. 192 countries signed and ratified the protocol; only the United States, Afghanistan, and Sudan failed to do so. Moreover, the protocol reflects the reasonable view held by most countries (except the United States) that developed industrial countries should take the lead in combating climate change given their contribution to the problem and their ability to fix it.
As noted above, the protocol also enshrines market-based “flexibility mechanisms,” most notably providing a framework for a global market in emissions trading for the first time. While the EU was initially wary of such an emissions market, it launched the world’s first (and biggest) international emissions trading system in 2005. The system operates in 31 countries, limiting emissions from roughly 11,000 heavy energy-using installations and airlines operating among these countries, and covers more than 40% of the EU’s greenhouse gas emissions. Initial teething problems due to an oversupply of carbon emissions allowances, resulting in a carbon price too low to incentivize reductions in emissions, were fixed in 2014–2016.
Negotiations leading to the Kyoto Protocol also provided some valuable lessons that ultimately shaped the future evolution of climate change negotiations. They showed that legally binding emissions reductions targets are not always worth much in practice, especially without a credible enforcement mechanism. Such targets might also scare away some countries, such as the United States, that regard them seriously as obligations that they must fulfill, rather than as commitments that they should achieve.
US failure to ratify the protocol not only undermined the effectiveness and durability of the agreement in and of itself, it also made it highly unlikely that China, India, and other significant emitters in developing countries would ever sign up to any commitments. The United States was not alone: Canada simply walked away from the treaty in 2012 once it became clear it would never meet its obligations; Russia, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan didn’t sign up to a second commitment period lasting between 2013 and 2020. Only the EU, Norway, Iceland, and Switzerland delivered on their obligations in the first period between 2008 and 2012 and assumed new ones in the second.
The flaws of the Protocol suggested that a more promising avenue to build a durable and ambitious climate change regime in the future would be built incrementally and modestly from the ground upon the foundation of public support. Domestic policy had to lead international policy, rather than the other way around, especially in the United States.5 In the late 1990s and throughout much of the following decade, many politicians and voters in the United States continued to question the scientific certainty that human activity contributes to climate change. Polls during the period showed that climate change ranked far below the economy and health care as priorities. The Kyoto Protocol seemed to present the reverse situation from the Montreal Protocol ten years earlier: In the latter case, the benefits of action (even unilateral action) by the United States to reduce ozone-depleting emissions clearly outweighed the costs; in the former case, it seemed that the United States would have to shoulder disproportionate costs compared to other countries, disrupting its citizens’ way of life, while it had less to fear than many other countries from climate change.
US opposition to accepting carbon emissions reductions caused outrage around the world about perceived US selfish exceptionalism. But it also galvanized the EU to embrace its new role as the leading climate change evangelist on the world stage. Representing half of non-US industrialized country emissions, the EU was destined to have an important voice. Notwithstanding the US formal withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol in March 2001, the EU kept fighting for it, spearheading an international agreement in Marrakesh to implement the Protocol and ratifying the Protocol itself in 2002. The EU also convinced Russia to do so in 2004, in return for supporting Russian entry to the World Trade Organization. Since Russia represented 11% of global emissions, this was an important milestone toward reaching the threshold necessary for entry into force in 2005—ratification by parties representing 55% of total 1990 CO2 emissions from industrialized countries. Moreover, the EU launched an emissions trading system in 2005 and rapidly expanded its climate legislation that promoted, for example, electricity produced from renewables, the improved energy performance of buildings, the use of biofuels in transport, and combined heat and power production. By the end of the Kyoto Protocol’s first commitment period in 2012, the EU had overachieved its target of reducing its emissions compared to 1990.
A report by the IPCC in 2007 injected a sense of urgency about climate change, even in the United States. The report pointed to increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising average sea levels as further evidence of global warming due to an unprecedented concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere from human activities. In order to prevent catastrophic consequences from global warming, the IPCC concluded that global greenhouse gas emissions would have to peak in the following ten to fifteen years and by 2050 would have to be reduced to less than half of the level of emissions in 2000. The United States continued to refuse any binding emission reduction targets and to insist that any future emission reduction commitments would have to be accompanied by similar commitments from the developing world. But it now appeared willing to contemplate long-term action on climate change under the auspices of the UNFCCC.
The EU continued to take the lead. In 2007, the European Commission stated that the EU should adopt the necessary measures and spearhead an international effort to ensure that global average temperatures do not exceed 2 centigrade compared to “pre-industrial” levels. That target became the foundation for subsequent global climate change negotiations. EU heads of state acted on that recommendation the following year by committing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 20% compared to 1990 levels, irrespective of what other countries might choose to do. Moreover, they committed to increase the percentage of renewables in the energy mix to 20% and endorsed a target to improve energy efficiency by 20%, both by 2020 compared to 1990 levels. The legislative package was formally adopted in 2009, several months before negotiations in Copenhagen to find a way forward on climate change that would command greater support than the Kyoto Protocol.
Barack Obama’s victory in the US presidential election of 2008 heralded a new beginning (at last) for US support of environmental protection, and measures to curb global warming, both at home and internationally. Abandoning his predecessor’s conviction that any measure to protect the environment would necessarily undermine the economy, Obama believed that reduced reliance on imported fossil fuels would contribute to national security and that significant further global warming represented not only a direct threat to the homeland because of flooding of coastal areas but also a series of indirect threats such as the increased fragility of developing countries, radicalization, and mass migration that could destabilize US allies and interests. As early as 2009, the Department of Defense started identifying climate change as a key factor affecting national security challenges.
President Obama did not believe that a healthy environment comes at the expense of a healthy economy. As I repeatedly noted in my own speeches around Europe, landmark environmental legislation in the 1970s and 1980s did not prevent the US from doubling the size of its economy, improving technological innovation, creating numerous well-paying middle-class jobs, and generating many billions of dollars in economic productivity. As the president liked to argue:
The old rules may say we can’t protect our environment and promote economic growth at the same time, but in America, we’ve always used new technologies – we’ve used science; we’ve used research and development and discovery to make the old rules obsolete.6
Achieving technological leadership in renewable energies offered enormous scope to dominate important export markets. New environmental legislation could be justified, not because it was necessary despite damage to the economy, but because it would generate significant benefits in health, energy savings, and avoided damages.
In the face of national polls indicating that few Americans considered climate change to be a national priority, the president moved quickly to take action. In 2009, the EPA ruled that greenhouse gases pose a danger to human health, thereby creating its authority to regulate them. The president issued executive orders, thereby bypassing Congress, that required federal agencies to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and enhance their use of renewable energies. He also unveiled new national standards for automobile fuel economy and the first-ever federal greenhouse gas emissions standards for cars and trucks. US emissions were already declining as demand shifted from coal to natural gas. That shift was due in part to the surging supply and declining prices for natural gas resulting from a boom in fracking.
The Copenhagen Conference
Within months of his inauguration, President Obama launched a Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate to facilitate a candid dialogue among major developed and developing economies and to drive a convergence of views before a major international climate change conference in Copenhagen at the end of 2009. On the eve of the conference, the president made a pledge to reduce US greenhouse gas emissions by 17% by 2020, with the ultimate goal of an 80% reduction by 2050, compared to 2005 levels. The pledge pushed drastic action further into the future than the EU’s pledge, but the promise of a significant shift in US climate change policy invested the United States with renewed authority.
President Obama’s actions meant that the United States had finally returned as a key player in the international climate change debate after one decade’s absence. During that decade, the EU had been the preeminent player even though it lacked the economic or political power to force major emitters like the US, China, India, and Brazil to take action and despite its declining share of global emissions. It exercised influence as an exemplary standard setter undertaking deep unilateral emissions reductions and as a thought leader regarding strategies for climate change action. The new engagement of the US and the fact that climate change action clearly required active participation of the most significant developing countries (over whom the United States had far greater influence than the EU) meant that the EU lost its preeminent role.
Several factors further undermined the EU’s influence on the eve of the Copenhagen summit. Internal divisions among EU states became far more marked after the entry of ten new members in 2004. While Scandinavia, the UK, and the Netherlands continued to push for aggressive action, including unilaterally by the EU, Poland and the Czech Republic were far more skeptical. The Czech Republic, holding the six-month rotating presidency of the EU during the first half of 2009 on the eve of the Copenhagen summit, wanted the EU to focus on energy security rather than climate change, described by President Vaclav Klaus as a “dangerous myth.” Poland and the Czech Republic vetoed an effort to increase the EU’s unilateral commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 30% by 2030 compared to 1990 levels. They also help block an EU proposal to make a significant financial commitment to climate mitigation efforts on the ground that the manner of allocating the contribution among member states should be based primarily on their ability to pay, rather than their responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions.
EU efforts to project a coherent position during the Copenhagen negotiations were also undermined by its institutional framework. Under the EU treaty rules then in effect, the EU was represented at Copenhagen by a “troika”—the European Commission, the EU member state currently holding the EU presidency, and the EU member state scheduled to hold the EU presidency for the following six-month period. This troika negotiated on the basis of a mandate adopted unanimously by heads of state. This meant that coordination meetings had to be held at every major stage of the negotiations, substantially reducing the EU’s ability to respond quickly and flexibly to events. The decision of several member states to participate and negotiate independently also fostered confusion among other countries about the EU’s position.
The EU’s difficulties to project a single voice on the international stage were addressed in part in early 2010 when the European Commission tasked a single Commissioner, the well-connected former Danish Minister for Climate and Energy Connie Hedegaard, to represent the EU on climate change. The influence of the EU increased further when European Commission President Juncker combined the role with the energy portfolio and tasked the highly capable former Spanish Minister of Agriculture, Miguel Arias Cañete, to take charge.
There were two other actors, in addition to the United States and the European Union, that made their presence felt. The first was a grouping consisting of an Alliance of Small Island States, as well as African and least developed countries. This grouping possessed little economic or political power, but nonetheless wielded significant moral authority, in part because of a very vocal contingent from civil society. The second actor was a powerful BASIC bloc of countries, consisting of Brazil, South Africa, India, and China. The bloc’s influence was not only a reflection of its economic power and percentage of global emissions, but also a result of its ability to speak with a single voice. The most important issue uniting the bloc’s members was the view that developed countries should bear the burden of addressing climate change and any efforts by developing countries should not be an obstacle to their economic development.
China emerged at the Copenhagen conference as the new “indispensable nation,” along with the United States, without whom a comprehensive deal would be impossible. On the day following the US announcement of its new offer to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, China stated that it would take voluntary measures to cut its own emissions relative to economic growth by 40–45% by 2020 compared to 2005 levels. Although this meant that its emissions would continue to climb steeply, they would do so at a slower rate. The measures were voluntary, not binding, but were the first indication that China was prepared to take any action to address climate change.
Expectations leading up to the Copenhagen conference were high. The conference had been called to settle the thorny issue of what the international climate change regime would look like after the expiry of the Kyoto Protocol’s first commitment period in 2012. The unofficial slogan of “Hopenhagen,” as many Danes called it, was “seal the deal.” With a record 115 heads of state or government present and more than 40,000 people registered as delegates, the conference was one of the largest environmental meetings in history. Despite the high expectations, the conditions for a global consensus were simply not present. Senator John Kerry observed soon after his arrival in Copenhagen that “The negotiations were even more constipated than I expected.”7 This “constipation” was due to the rigid division of developed and developing countries into opposite blocs. As Commissioner Miguel Arias Cañete, EU’s chief climate change negotiator during 2014–2019, has put it: “the story was about countries against countries, developed versus developing, them and us.”8
The two sides continued to have radically different understandings of their “common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities,” the formula first formalized at the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992. This structural divide was deepened by the effects of the 2009 economic crisis, hardening the unwillingness of countries to undertake economically painful decisions. President Obama’s eagerly anticipated address to a packed room of delegates, restating pledges to reduce US greenhouse gas emissions by 17% by 2020 compared to 2005 levels and to help mobilize $100 billion of climate finance by 2020 for developing nations to cope with the effects of climate change, failed to break the conference’s deadlock.
Disaster was averted on the final formal day of proceedings due to a whirlwind of bilateral and multilateral meetings among the heads of state and government of 25 countries, including all of the world’s major economies. The critical moment occurred when President Obama walked unannounced into a private meeting among the leaders of the BASIC bloc. After less than an hour, they emerged with a three-page document that left many details to be filled in later but offered a way forward. Due to the opposition from a handful of countries, the closing plenary session merely took note of the Copenhagen Accord without endorsing it. As such, it remains a political document only without any recognized legal status (unlike the Kyoto Protocol).
For the EU the failure of the Copenhagen conference to produce a legally binding agreement with specific targets and timetables, coupled with the fact that the US and the BASIC bloc had brokered a deal without its involvement, represented bitter disappointments. Not surprisingly, the US had a different view. Not only had the president’s diplomacy proved pivotal, but the agreement incorporated many of the key ideas that the US had been promoting. Most importantly, the agreement represented the first time in history that all major economies had accepted their responsibility to confront the threat of climate change. Whereas the countries willing to accept the emissions targets under Kyoto represented only a quarter of global emissions in the first commitment period, and 15% in the second commitment period, countries representing more than 85% of global emissions put forward emissions pledges under the Copenhagen Accord.
While the Copenhagen Accord did fall short of expectations, it laid the foundation for a significant re-engineering of the architecture for a future international agreement on climate change.9 It represented a more flexible approach than in the past: one that was voluntary and bottom-up as it relied on nationally determined pledges, rather than top down as a result of internationally mandated targets. It assumed that making such pledges transparent and subject to regular international review would be an effective catalyst for action. It weakened the firewall between developed and developing countries, while maintaining some aspects of differentiation, by calling upon all countries to report on their emissions and mitigation actions. In a major step forward, even developing countries agreed on the principle that their actions, not just those of developed countries, would be subject to international review. China, in particular, had resisted this notion until the last day of the conference.10
Developed countries committed to mobilize significant financial resources to assist developing countries cope with climate change: roughly $30 billion during 2010–2012, with a goal of $100 billion per year by 2020 conditional upon “meaningful mitigation actions and transparency on implementation” by the aid recipients. Emissions reductions and developed countries’ financing pledges would be subject to rigorous measurement, reporting, and verification according to future guidelines.
The Copenhagen Accord was vague and required significant detail to be worked out. But had the EU been pushing for a more aggressive agenda in the room with the US and the BASIC bloc, it is possible that the Copenhagen Conference would have ended with no agreement at all.
In the wake of its frustration at Copenhagen, the EU “only had one option: wipe the tears, get its act together and keep pushing…creatively, strategically.”11 The entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty in December 2009 and the creation of a new directorate-general for “climate action” within the European Commission a few months later facilitated the EU’s ability to represent the EU with a single voice in international climate negotiations and to ensure a coherent policy within the bloc.
It continued to push for a global binding deal with legal force to supplement or replace the Kyoto Protocol. As a result, a conference of the UNFCCC parties agreed in 2011 to seek to negotiate “a protocol, another legal instrument, or an agreed outcome with legal force”—a deliberately vague formula that bridged the gap between those countries (including the EU) that wanted a new international treaty, and other countries (especially India) that wanted to leave the issue of legal form open. The formula was acceptable to the United States because the outcome of the negotiation was to apply to all UNFCCC parties, without differentiating between developed and developing countries. While the formula did not require a fully binding legal instrument, it clearly intended to create an agreement with more binding force than the Copenhagen Accord.12
The European Union and the United States continued to disagree on some important points regarding the architecture of a future global accord on climate change, but they were both aligned in seeking an ambitious outcome. For the first time in the history of international climate change agreements dating back to the Montreal Accord, they were effectively acting as co-leaders that were united far more than they were divided on points of substance. That made all the difference in ensuring a successful outcome in the Paris climate change conference in 2015.
The Paris Conference
The Obama administration’s pro-environmental domestic agenda made the United States a far more congenial partner of the EU than in the past, even if legislative reform proved difficult. Although a bill envisioning emissions trading barely failed in Congress in 2010 due to mid-term elections that put both the House and the Senate under Republican control, the administration moved quickly, especially in its second term, to act under the president’s executive authority to significantly reduce emissions from power plants, the transportation sector (including cars, heavy-duty trucks, and aircraft engines), the oil and gas industry, agriculture, landfills, and coal mines. Rapid job growth in the clean energy economy reinforced the president’s mandate for taking such actions. By 2015, four times as many Americans were employed by renewable energy companies than by the fossil fuel industry. Thanks to rapid price declines due to technological advances, renewable energy had become the dominant trend in new power installations.
Moreover, the United States made several key contributions in the years leading up to the Paris conference that helped ensure its success. One was its $3 billion pledge to the Green Climate Fund established at the Copenhagen Conference to assist developing countries to address climate change. (By the time President Obama left office in 2017, only $1 billion had actually been transferred). Another key contribution was its role in shifting the position of China. The decision by the US Embassy in Beijing in 2010 to publish air pollution statistics online that contradicted Chinese government numbers helped raise the salience of smog as a major domestic health issue in the subsequent years, especially among urban middle classes in large cities.
Secretary Kerry’s tireless secret shuttle diplomacy with China on climate change paved the way for the announcement by Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli at a UN Climate Change Summit in September 2014 that China would soon announce post-2020 actions on climate change that would include “marked progress in reducing carbon intensity” and “the peaking of total carbon dioxide emissions as early as possible.” Two months later in Beijing, one year before the start of the Paris conference, President Obama and President Xi Jinping declared their bilateral intention to reduce emissions: While the United States pledged to reduce emissions by 26–28% by 2025 compared to 2005 levels, China pledged to “achieve the peaking of CO2 emissions around 2030” or earlier if possible as well as to “increase the share of non-fossil fuels in primary energy consumption to around 20% by 2030.”13
That declaration, in turn, paved the way to a US-China Joint Presidential Statement on Climate Change in late September 2015 that set forth a joint vision for the Paris conference and reiterated each side’s domestic actions to address climate change. In that statement, China provided more detail than it had previously on its efforts to reduce the “intensity” of its emissions measured in terms of carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GDP, as well as on its plans to introduce an emissions trading system, to promote low-carbon buildings and transportation, and to introduce tougher fuel efficiency standards. The United States cooperated closely with France, the host of the conference, in a similar France-China Joint Presidential Statement on Climate Change in November.14
The EU also made important contributions in the period leading up to Paris. Its efforts to address climate change were even more ambitious than those of the United States: In October 2014, it announced a legally binding target to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 40% by 2030 compared to 1990 levels, a legally binding target to increase the share of renewables to at least 27% of EU energy consumption by 2030, and an indicative target of improving energy efficiency by at least 27% by 2030. And in 2014, the EU and its member states pledged €14.5 billion euros to the Green Climate Fund. Equally important was its co-sponsorship of a coalition of small island states, enlarged to countries of Africa, the Caribbean, and the Pacific, that contributed significantly to the 2015 climate change conference in Paris.
The Paris conference was the culmination of 23 years of international efforts under United Nations auspices since the Rio Earth Summit to forge collective action to combat climate change. For about 20 years, since the negotiations around the Kyoto Protocol, those efforts had been locked in stalemate. Although the conference was formally the result of four years of preparatory work, it in fact began with the arrival of the Obama administration (and new US climate change policy) seven years earlier. Had the Paris conference failed, the world would have been left without any effective global plan to prevent an increase in global warming. In that event, global warming was predicted to reach as much as 5 degrees centigrade over current temperatures, a level that would render uninhabitable large areas of the globe. As EU Commissioner Arias Cañete noted: “This was the last chance. And we took it.”
Expectations for a successful outcome in Paris were extremely high, especially after the disappointment in Copenhagen. There were more than 50,000 participants, including 19,000 government delegates and 150 heads of state or government from 196 countries, 6000 representatives from non-governmental organizations and business, and 2800 members of the press. As the conference opened in December 2015, just several weeks after terrorist attacks had killed 130 people in Paris, it was unclear whether a compromise could be reached. The successful outcome was due to many factors, including US diplomatic outreach to China and India, EU diplomatic outreach to a broad coalition of largely developing countries, and the careful preparation and skillful diplomacy of the French hosts.
The US and the EU agreed on several key objectives for the Paris conference. Both wanted it to be ambitious, in the sense that it had to present a serious path forward to curbing global warming such that the earth’s climate would avoid catastrophic and irreversible changes. They both wanted it to be durable, in the sense of having an indefinite duration unlike the Copenhagen Accord that involved one-shot pledges covering the period up to 2020. Both wanted it to be inclusive, in the sense that it had to include efforts by all countries and that it had to gain universal acceptance, unlike the Kyoto Protocol that bound countries representing only a minority of global emissions. Both agreed that while the responsibilities of rich and poor countries had to be different, especially regarding emissions reductions and financial contributions, the old static divide between developed and developing countries needed to be more flexible to reflect the latter’s increasing wealth and role in climate change. Both wanted a mechanism for regular reviews of national commitments to reduce emissions to enable increasing levels of ambition to reflect public pressure and technological advances. And they agreed that countries’ emissions reductions commitments must be transparent and that countries must be accountable to deliver and update these commitments, as well as subjecting them to international verification. Such an agreement would send a powerful signal to the markets and to citizens of all countries that the decarbonization of the world economy is irreversible.
But there remained important points of division between the US and the EU even as the conference began. The EU urged, in the face of US resistance, that the agreement be in the form of a legally binding international treaty. Whereas the EU had long resisted the view of the United States (as well as other major emitters like China and India) that only voluntary action would be compatible with national sovereignty, it had come to accept in the years leading up to the Paris Agreement that bottom-up nationally determined emissions reductions could be as effective as a top-down set of rules. Nonetheless, the EU pushed for the strictest binding rules in as many areas as possible. And the EU pushed for the deepest cuts as possible in national emissions while the United States remained concerned about undertaking unrealistic objectives damaging to its economy.
The US and the EU were instrumental in bringing about the final compromise. The EU backed down from its insistence that nationally determined emissions cuts needed to be legally binding. The US agreed to language, especially important to South Africa, regarding “loss and damage” that accepted the principle that developing countries are entitled to special aid to mitigate the impact of climate change and to respond to climate-related disasters, without conceding that developed countries bear the historical liability to compensate developing countries for the former’s role in climate change. Other countries compromised as well. China and India agreed to language that expressed an aspiration to limit the increase in global warming to 1.5 degrees centigrade.
The agreement had to be carefully constructed. As US chief negotiator Todd Stern has observed, the Paris Agreement successfully found the sweet spot between what was possible and what was necessary:
It is easy to demand what seems necessary without regard to whether it’s politically impossible, and also easy to do the politically expedient without much regard for what’s necessary. Finding the sweet spot is hard.15
Building on some of the ideas contained in the Copenhagen Accord, the Paris Agreement represents a paradigm shift compared to prior approaches to addressing climate change: It blended elements of a top-down and a bottom-up approach; rejecting the strict division of countries that had characterized climate change regimes, it found a middle ground on the issue of differentiation by charting a middle course between those obligations that applied universally and those that applied principally to some nations; it blended obligations that were legally binding with those that were not; and, perhaps most importantly, it relied on peer pressure and the evolution of norms to drive more ambitious action when rigid rules wouldn’t work.
Did the Paris Agreement achieve its objectives? It certainly meets the objective of inclusiveness because roughly 190 countries, representing more than 95% of global emissions, are signatories. It may not be as ambitious as many would have liked, but it nonetheless represents a serious and potentially durable way forward. Whereas the Rio Earth Summit had nebulously called for the stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere that would prevent dangerous human interference with the earth’s climate, the Paris Agreement was the first time that the international community agreed that this would mean limiting a temperature increase to no more than 2 degrees centigrade above pre-industrial levels. The agreement also includes an aspirational goal, reflecting the strong lobbying of islands and other vulnerable states, to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 degrees centigrade and to achieve greenhouse gas “neutrality”—net zero emissions resulting from balancing carbon emissions into the atmosphere with the permanent removal of carbon from the atmosphere—by the second half of this century.
The US and the EU were among the first countries to submit their “independent nationally determined contributions” to reduce emissions in March 2015. While the former pledged to reduce its emissions by 26–28% by 2025 compared to 2005 levels, the latter pledged to reduce them by 40% by 2030 compared to 1990 levels. By the time the Paris conference had started, more than 180 had submitted contributions and today nearly every country on the globe has done so. The total of the contributions still falls short of what is required to deal with global warming as they are unlikely to impede a rise in global temperatures of 2.7–3 degrees above pre-industrial levels. But they represent a massive improvement over the 4–5 degree centigrade of global warming that would have resulted from business as usual. As one observer noted: “The deal alone won’t dig us out of the hole that we’re in, but it makes the sides less steep.”16
The negotiators were aware that the voluntary contributions filed at the start of the negotiations and even by the time of the agreement’s ratification would be insufficient, but they believed that the contributions would be a useful foundation. The voluntary contributions can take many forms, general or specific, conditional or unconditional. But the accompanying system requiring nations to be transparent about their contributions and to report on their progress in implementing them, as well as to submit to international monitoring and review, incentivizes countries to put their best foot forward. Most countries are prepared to go to great lengths to avoid being “named and shamed.”
Every five years, starting in 2023, the parties to the agreement would meet to conduct a “global stock take” based on the best available science to assess their individual and collective progress in meeting the agreement’s long-term goals. Based on these assessments, the parties must file subsequent voluntary contributions every five years that are increasingly ambitious. Rather than being punitive, the compliance system seeks to assist laggards in meeting their goals. The Paris Agreement provides support to developing countries, including money to invest in green infrastructure and technology, as well as to adapt to the consequences of climate change that they are already facing. Moreover, the agreement provides an important signal to public and private actors that they should prepare for the end of the fossil fuel era.
Critical to the achievement in Paris was the negotiation by the United States and the European Union of a hybrid agreement that combined binding and voluntary elements in a legal instrument that could satisfy the formal requirements of a treaty while at the same time enabling the Obama administration to sign it under its executive powers that did not require legislative approval. The issue of the legal form of climate change agreements had bedeviled every prior negotiation: While the United States had been willing to accept a legal instrument applicable to all parties, China, India, and other large developing states had only been willing to accept a legal agreement if it contained emission reduction obligations that bound only developed states. The fact that the Kyoto Protocol contained such asymmetrical and binding obligations was the key reason why the United States stayed out. The Copenhagen Accord applied to all countries but was a non-binding agreement.
The EU had for many years pushed energetically for the Paris Agreement to be an international treaty with binding nationally determined contributions. Such an instrument would require formal ratification, normally with legislative approval. The EU reasoned that such an instrument would express at the highest levels of government an intent by signatories to be bound by its terms. It would provide a higher assurance of implementation and compliance. Unlike a political agreement signed by the executive branch of government acting alone, a treaty would be more likely to survive changes in administration and would entail more reputational costs if breached. It would mobilize participation by civil society, business, and the media. It would engage legislatures and strengthen domestic laws that could be relied on before national courts.17
The US had persistently objected to the EU’s focus on the binding legal form of the nationally determined contributions for several reasons. It pointed out many examples of non-compliance with legally binding commitments, as well as of compliance with non-legally binding ones. Moreover, the US had argued that insisting on legally binding commitments might lead to a lower level of ambition, especially with regard to emissions reductions. Focusing on making national commitments transparent and subject to public reporting and review might lead to greater ambition and better practical results.
The US objection was also grounded in a fundamental legal problem. The US Constitution requires “treaties” to be approved by two-thirds of the US Senate, an outcome that was highly unlikely in the case of the Paris Agreement. Many international agreements of the United States, however, are adopted as “executive agreements,” in most cases with the approval of Congress, but in some cases by the President acting alone. The US negotiating team wanted to ensure that the Paris Agreement, while formally meeting the requirements of a treaty, could fall within this latter category. In order to do so, the provisions of the agreement had to fall within authorities already delegated by Congress to the president under existing legislation and his general foreign policy powers. Moreover, the agreement could not commit the United States to international obligations, such as binding emissions reductions targets or financial commitments, beyond those necessary to implement the UNFCCC that the Senate had already ratified.
The US and the EU struggled to find a solution that would satisfy each other’s basic requirements. The solution was a hybrid between “obligations of result,” such as the Kyoto-style targets that the US couldn’t accept, and “obligations of conduct,” which the EU found to be too soft. Some obligations in the agreement would be of the former variety, some of the latter. Some “obligations of conduct” were expressed in precise terms and tied to specific objectives (including to reduce emissions), so that they amounted to meaningful obligations. The result of this hybrid approach was an agreement that was more binding than the UNFCCC but less binding than the Kyoto Protocol.
Even though the Paris Agreement does not carry the title of a treaty in the United States, there is little dispute that the agreement’s legal form makes it a treaty under international law. Many international treaties contain provisions that do not create legal obligations. With regard to the key issue of emissions reductions, the operative text of the agreement amounts to an obligation of conduct, not result. Each party is legally bound to prepare, communicate, and maintain successive “nationally determined” voluntary “contributions” to reduce emissions. Moreover, each party is legally bound to pursue domestic mitigation measures with the aim of achieving the objectives of these contributions. But while each party must take these identifiable steps, their contributions do not amount to Kyoto-style obligations of result. Moreover, while the parties reaffirmed a collective target (already expressed in the Copenhagen Accord) of mobilizing $100 billion per year by 2020 to assist poor countries to address climate change, the agreement does not contain quantified financial obligations for individual countries.
While this struggle over legal form may sound rather technical and perhaps even unimportant, it could be argued that the fate of the planet depended on its outcome. The final text of the Paris Agreement, circulated by the French hosts shortly before the closing plenary, replaced the word “should” with “shall” in a key provision, converting the form of “nationally determined contributions” into a binding legal requirement that would have required Senate approval and therefore the withdrawal of the US from the deal. The substitution was quickly corrected as a clerical error and the plenary voted on the amended version. That was fortunate as there would have been no deal without the United States.
In addition to finding the “sweet spot” on the issue of the legally binding nature of the agreement, the US and the EU were instrumental in negotiating a new and more flexible interpretation of the long-standing principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities” that better reflected contemporary realities. The issue cut across all the elements of the agreement: mitigation, adaptation, finance, and transparency.
The agreement upholds two basic ideas: First, that countries’ responsibilities for addressing global climate change should be differentiated according to past contributions to the problem and their present capacity to respond; and second, that developing countries shall not be obliged to take actions that exceed their capacities or that are inconsistent with their priorities for growth and development. However, the Paris Agreement eliminates the firewall establishing separate rules for developing and developed countries. All countries must deliver nationally determined contributions to mitigate climate change, but all countries can self-differentiate by deciding what they want to do. Furthermore, developed countries must adopt strict, absolute emission reduction targets while developing countries are “encouraged to move over time towards economy-wide emission reduction or limitation targets in light of different national circumstances.” While the agreement reaffirms the financial commitments of developed countries, it enlarges the donor pool by encouraging other countries to provide financial support. Although all countries must be transparent in the way they report on their contributions, the rules provide flexibility in implementation to those countries that “need it in light of their capacities.”
In summary, the Paris Agreement stands as a monument to what the US and EU can do to advance important global priorities when they work together. Not only did they manage to overcome substantial differences in approach between them, but they also were critical actors in getting global participation. Especially important in this regard were the EU’s steady efforts prior to Paris to build a coalition of developing countries seeking an ambitious deal. The coalition included progressive Latin American and Caribbean countries, small island states, and least developed countries. The decisive moment in the Paris negotiations came when the United States unexpectedly joined this coalition. That decision, in turn, led Brazil (one of the core members of the BASIC coalition) to join and further isolated China and India in the homestretch of the talks. As EU Commissioner Arias Cañete put it: “all of a sudden the debate was not about developed versus developing. It was about the willing versus the unwilling. And no one wanted to be seen as the unwilling.”18
Thanks to their efforts, the agreement entered into force in November 2016, far faster than anyone would have dared to predict. Despite its flaws, it establishes for the first time an ambitious, durable climate regime that applies to all countries, provides strong accountability and transparency measures to ensure that countries do what they say, and focuses not only on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but also on delivering financial and technical assistance to countries that need it to adapt to climate change. The agreement is a finely tuned balance that is the result of multilateral innovation in the face of gridlock. It is also a bet that nations will drive each other into a spiral of upward ambition to combat global warming. As Todd Stern, the US negotiator, has observed:
A bet on the rising norms and expectations is at the heart of the Paris Agreement. If [it] is to succeed, this bet, above all, has to pay off.19
It may be too early to tell whether countries will fulfill the expectations of the agreement in this regard. But already the agreement has mobilized numerous sub-federal and non-state actors, including regions, cities, companies, and non-governmental organizations to take action. The emissions reduction pledges of these actors may well have as big an impact, or perhaps even a greater impact, than the national pledges.
Most importantly, the agreement is a departure from business as usual. It sends a clear signal to the market that the world is progressing inexorably toward a low-carbon future. John Kerry argues that the real success of the Paris Agreement is that it mobilized the private sector:
It was an invitation to the marketplace to get the job done and make money doing it….Paris was inviting the private sector to save us from ourselves.20
The Paris Agreement may help to accelerate investments in the new climate economy, driving faster technological advances and rapidly reducing costs of producing renewable energy. Even in China, the world’s largest emitter, renewable energy has become the dominant technology for new power installations. A virtuous cycle of technology and investment resulting in more efficient green power should strengthen social norms about climate change and the political will to make increasingly more ambitious voluntary emissions contributions. That virtuous cycle will be necessary to enable the US and the EU to meet their mid-century strategies of cutting greenhouse emissions by 80% below 2005 and 1990 levels, respectively.
Achieving “net zero” emissions—balancing the introduction of new greenhouse gases in the atmosphere with the extraction of an equivalent amount from the atmosphere—in the second half of this century will require a massive shift in our energy mix. In a detailed report issued in 2016, Shell Oil estimates that it would entail changing the mix from the current 80% reliance on hydrocarbons to 40% reliance on wind and solar, 20% on nuclear and hydro, 15% on biofuels, with the remaining 25% on fossil fuels (mostly natural gas) balanced by carbon sequestration.21 It is also clear that emissions from international aviation and shipping, major contributors of greenhouse gases, will have to be included more comprehensively than they are today. The international aviation and shipping sectors would be one of the top dozen greenhouse gas emitters in the world if they were treated as a country.
Achieving these goals will require continued US-EU co-leadership. Alas, the Trump administration announced within several days of assuming power that it would withdraw from the Paris Agreement (Fig. 11.2). While the administration has respected the legal provision in the agreement establishing a four-year withdrawal period, the US has rejected its voluntary emissions reduction contribution and has refused to participate in any of the important follow-up action items after Paris to define the technical rules, guidelines, and procedures necessary to implement the agreement. The US withdrawal from its leadership role risks undermining the delicate balance underpinning the deal. As Todd Stern, US lead negotiator at Paris under President Obama, has pointed out:
many countries swallowed hard in Paris to accept paradigm-shifting provisions that they saw as necessary to get the United States on board. Having taken those sometimes difficult steps, urged on by the United States, they then turned around to discover that, less than 18 months later, the United States had jumped ship.22
The EU and even China have stepped up to fill the vacuum left by the United States. A broad coalition of sub-federal actors in the United States, including states, cities, civil society, and business, have also taken important measures to ensure that the United States respects its commitments. California has been a trendsetter for many years on climate change, including on fuel standards (although President Trump is seeking to revoke its authority to set its own standards). The EU has been active in exploring ways of collaborating with key actors like California and nine Eastern states that operate CO2 cap-and-trade emissions systems. It has worked with the largest US cities that are members of the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate & Energy to support voluntary action to combat climate change and with leading business leaders, such as with Michael Bloomberg, in an effort to manage the global transition away from coal.
Fig. 11.2
Cover of Der Spiegel, Issue 23 (2017) after President Trump’s Decision to Withdraw the US From the Paris Agreement
(© Edel Rodriguez. Reprinted with Permission from Der Spiegel)
It is highly unlikely that the Paris Agreement can succeed unless the United States re-engages soon. At a conference in Katowice, Poland, in mid-December 2018, the signatories to the accord agreed on a 250-page rule book that details, for example, how countries should monitor and report their greenhouse gas emissions and the efforts they’re taking to reduce them. But the United States partnered with Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait to water down approval of a landmark report on the need to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees centigrade. The Trump administration has ensured that meetings of the G-20 no longer refer to “global warming” or “decarbonization.” It has sought to roll back US environmental regulations in many areas, including relating to coal-fired power plants and methane emissions by the oil and gas industry.
Perhaps worst of all, the Trump administration has given legitimacy to Americans who are in denial about climate change. A poll conducted in September 2019 showed that 15% of Americans believe that climate change is not occurring or that it is not due to human causes. That figure is the highest in the world, nearly three times the global average.23
Even if the United States re-engages under a new administration, it will be a challenge to regain the leverage and credibility the United States enjoyed in climate negotiations under the Obama administration. US re-engagement will be crucial to ensure that current pressures on the Paris Agreement are resisted. Developing country signatories, some motivated by ideological reasons and others by concerns about meeting rigorous obligations accounting and reporting, have been using the negotiations on implementation to reinstate the old firewall between developing and developed countries. These signatories are also concerned that pledges by developed countries to provide financial assistance to developing countries will fail to meet the targets under the Paris Agreement, especially since the Trump administration has refused to disburse the remaining $2 billion owing out of its total $3 billion commitment to the Green Climate Fund.
One of the European Commission’s legislative priorities for its 2019–2024 mandate may complicate transatlantic cooperation on climate change. It has promised a (WTO-compliant) tax to be imposed at EU borders on the carbon content of goods imported from countries that do not put an equivalent price on carbon (as would be the case of the United States). The idea behind this tax is that EU economic growth and the effectiveness of EU climate policy are undermined by the relocation of carbon-intensive production by EU firms to non-EU countries that are shirking their responsibilities to save the planet.
It would be a tragedy if the US and the EU remain at loggerheads on the environment. There is literally no time to waste. Together they can make an enormous difference, as proven by the efforts at Montreal, Kigali, and Paris. Among the hugely promising areas for collaboration is promoting the improvement in the energy efficiency of air conditioners, refrigerators and other products that will need to switch out of HFCs because of the Kigali amendment to the Montreal Protocol. According to two experts, just a 30% increase in the efficiency of India’s air conditioning units would save enough electricity to avoid having to build 140 medium-size power plants to meet peak demand by 2030.24 Emissions reductions will have to be accompanied by significant carbon sequestration (amounting to hundreds of billions of tons of CO2) if the goals of the Paris Agreement are to be reached. The US and the EU are leaders and natural partners in this goal.
US-EU Cooperation on Environmental Protection
There are many other areas of environmental protection on which the US and the EU work closely together in addition to climate change. Fortunately, the cooperation has remained robust in many areas throughout the Trump administration regardless of the US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement and wider US-EU tensions. These areas include the combat against illegal logging, the protection of endangered fish and wildlife, and the protection of the Arctic and the world’s oceans, especially the Atlantic. The main actors in this cooperation have been the European Commission, on the side of the EU, and the US Fish and Wildlife Service (part of the Department of the Interior), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (part of the Department of Commerce), and the State Department’s Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs.
The US and the EU have long cooperated in the work of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) established in the mid-1970s as a response to growing concerns that over-exploitation of wildlife through international trade is contributing to the rapid decline and potential extinction of many species of plants and animals around the world. An intergovernmental agreement among 183 parties, CITES operates a system of permits and certificates that are required before listed specimens may be imported or exported. Global efforts such as CITES reflect a consensus that wildlife trafficking is not only destructive of the world’s ecosystem, but also feeds a significant international criminal network, the fourth largest after those trafficking in drugs, people, and arms.
One of CITES’ signature achievements has been to crack down on illegal logging, one of the most destructive acts against wildlife as it threatens entire habitats rather than single species of animal. Much of the illegal logging targets rare tropical species prized by the luxury hardwood furniture industry, especially in China. Since 2013, the US and the EU have spearheaded measures in CITES to prevent the international sale of rosewood logs illegally cut in Madagascar’s northeastern rainforests until Madagascar makes further progress in its plan to identify and take control of undeclared, hidden stocks of rosewood.
As a result of combined US and EU pressure, CITES threatened in 2014 to impose trade sanctions on Thailand, including a ban on the highly remunerative export of reptile skins and orchids, if Thailand failed to act against ivory trafficking. In response, Thailand took comprehensive new legislative and enforcement measures to halt the import, export, trade, and sale of ivory from African elephants. Today it is no longer considered a main hotspot for ivory trafficking.
Since 2013, the US and the EU have also spearheaded measures in CITES to protect five species of shark from overfishing due to the demand for shark-fin soup, considered a delicacy in Asia. These measures were historic because many previous efforts had failed, largely because of opposition from China and Japan. Before they were put in place, humans were killing sharks at a clearly unsustainable rate—100 million per year, equivalent to 6–8% of the global population. As sharks are slow to mature and have few offspring, overfishing has led to dramatic reductions in shark populations (as high as 90% for some species in some regions) with knock-on effects throughout the downstream food chain. The elimination of the sharks as top marine predators, for example, has led to increased populations of rays that have decimated the scallop industry in some areas.
The US and the EU have also been active partners on a wide range of issues relating to the world’s oceans. The link between oceans and the climate is strong: For many years, the oceans have prevented even faster global warming from occurring by absorbing 25% of carbon dioxide emissions and 90% of the world’s heat. Marine and coastal ecosystems serve as a life support system by preserving biodiversity and trapping carbon. But the oceans are coming under increasing strain. Even if global warming is limited to 2 degrees, many ocean species risk extinction and virtually all coral reefs will disappear. On a trip to the Great Barrier Reef in December 2017, I was shocked to see large stretches of dead coral.
Secretary Kerry had a particular interest in the topic and played a critical role, with active EU support, in launching a series of conferences on Our Oceans. The conferences attracted global representation to address such issues as sustainable fisheries, marine pollution, and climate-related impacts on the ocean. The ones hosted by the United States in 2014 and 2016 resulted in the protection of millions of square kilometers of ocean and multi-billion-dollar pledges to protect the ocean from dangerous activities such as pollution and overfishing. The yearly conferences continue to this day and make an important contribution to raising international attention to the world’s oceans.
The US and the EU naturally pay particularly close attention to the Atlantic Ocean. Together with Canada, they have launched an Atlantic Ocean research alliance to deepen cooperation in areas including sustainable management of ocean resources, seabed mapping, the sharing of data, and the mobility of oceanic researchers.25 But the US and the EU are also active partners on a broad set of global issues relating to the oceans.
The US and the EU, two of the world’s largest harvesters and importers of seafood in the world, for example, have been leaders in combating illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing, one of the most serious threats to sustainable fishing and to marine biodiversity in the world’s oceans. IUU fishing has devastating environmental and socioeconomic consequences, especially for coastal communities in developing countries who rely on fisheries for their livelihood and protein. In an agreement signed just before I arrived in Brussels, the US and the EU agreed to take a range of measures, cooperating closely in regional and international organizations designed to combat IUU fishing.26 In 2018, the EU and the eight Arctic states (Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden, and the US) signed an agreement not to engage in unregulated commercial fishing in the central Arctic Ocean for an initial period of 16 years. Although commercial fishing is not occurring now and is unlikely to occur soon in this area because of ice cover, that could change in the medium to long term because the Arctic region is warming at three times the global average rate. The parties to the agreement wished to act as a precaution to ensure the conservation and sustainable management of fish stocks in this delicate ecosystem.27
Without continued close collaboration of the US and the EU on climate change and a wide range of environmental issues, the future of the planet is, simply put, in doubt. They are essential partners in ensuring the continued habitability of that small sphere, suspended in space, that I used to look at in Vice President Al Gore’s office so many years ago.
Footnotes
1
Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus (London: Penguin, 2017), p. 250.
2
Brian Kennedy and Meg Hefferon, Pew Research Center, August 28, 2019. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/08/28/u-s-concern-about-climate-change-is-rising-but-mainly-among-democrats/.
3
Judy Garber, Assistant Secretary of State for Oceans, Diplomatic Note: Saving the Ozone Layer. https://medium.com/statedept/saving-the-ozone-layer-e4764f686cef.
4
Daniel Bodansky, “Bonn Voyage: Kyoto’s Uncertain Revival,” The National Interest, September 1, 2001. https://nationalinterest.org/article/bonn-voyage-kyotos-uncertain-revival-372.
5
Daniel Bodansky, “U.S. Climate Policy After Kyoto: Elements for Success,” Carnegie Endowment Policy Brief, April 2002. https://carnegieendowment.org/2002/03/25/u.s.-climate-policy-after-kyoto-elements-for-success-pub-937.
6
Address at Georgetown University, June 25, 2013. http://ens-newswire.com/2013/06/25/president-obamas-climate-change-speech-full-text/.
7
John F. Kerry, Every Day Is Extra (New York: Simon & Schuster), p. 560.
8
Speech by Commissioner Miguel Arias Cañete, December 14, 2015. http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_SPEECH-15-6320_en.htm.
9
https://unfccc.int/resource/docs/2009/cop15/eng/l07.pdf.
10
Todd Stern, “The Future of the Paris Climate Regime,” Yale Law School, April 10, 2018. https://www.brookings.edu/on-the-record/the-future-of-the-paris-climate-regime/.
11
Speech by Commissioner Miguel Arias Cañete, December 14, 2015. http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_SPEECH-15-6320_en.htm.
12
Sue Biniaz, “Climate Change Negotiations: Legal and Other Issues on the Road to Paris,” Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law (2016). https://scholarlycommons.law.case.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2238&context=jil.
13
https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2014/11/11/us-china-joint-announcement-climate-change.
14
https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2015/09/25/us-china-joint-presidential-statement-climate-change; https://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/en/french-foreign-policy/climate/events/article/china-and-france-joint-presidential-statement-on-climate-change-beijing-02-11.
15
Todd Stern, “The Future of the Paris Climate Regime,” Yale Law School, April 10, 2018; Daniel Bodansky, “The Paris Climate Change Agreement: A New Hope?” The American Journal of International Law 11 (2016): 269.
16
Fiona Harvey, “Paris Climate Change Agreement: The World’s Greatest Diplomatic Success,” The Guardian, December 14, 2015.
17
Jacob Werksman, “The International Legal Character of the Paris Agreement,” Brodies Lecture, February 9, 2016. http://www.law.ed.ac.uk/other_areas_of_interest/events/event_documents/BrodiesLectureontheLegalCharacteroftheParisAgreementFinalBICCLEdinburgh.pdf.
18
http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_SPEECH-15-6320_en.htm.
19
Todd Stern, The Paris Agreement and Its Future (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, October 2018).
20
Kerry, Every Day Is Extra, p. 572.
21
https://www.shell.com/energy-and-innovation/the-energy-future/scenarios/a-better-life-with-a-healthy-planet/_jcr_content/par/textimage_494361683.stream/1475857583070/d58a157055bd08857b92a9fcf7abde59277f6484730ad073ec37524e6f9d092f/scenarios-nze-brochure-local-print-awv9.pdf.
22
Todd Stern, “The Paris Agreement and Its Future,” Brookings, Paper 5, October 2018. https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/The-Paris-Agreement-and-Its-Future-Todd-Stern-October-2018.pdf.
23
John Burn-Murdoch and Leslie Hook, “Survey Underscores High Levels of US Scepticism on Climate Change,” Financial Times, September 15, 2019. https://www.ft.com/content/e5374b6c-d628-11e9-8367-807ebd53ab77.
24
Mario Molina and Durwood Zaelke. https://www.unenvironment.org/es/news-and-stories/reportajes/el-protocolo-de-montreal-el-triunfo-de-un-tratado.
25
Galway Statement on Atlantic Ocean Cooperation, May 23–24, 2013. https://ec.europa.eu/research/iscp/pdf/galway_statement_atlantic_ocean_cooperation.pdf.
26
http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-11-1007_en.htm?locale=en.
27
The text of the agreement may be found at: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/resource.html?uri=cellar:2554f475-6e25-11e8-9483-01aa75ed71a1.0001.02/DOC_2&format=PDF.