4 - Climate change: the hardest problem in the world

Summary

In mid-November 2000, the US elections remained in suspended animation while the world awaited the outcome of the Bush–Gore contest. Continents away, delegates gathered for the climate change negotiations in The Hague, Netherlands. Climate campaigners from the Dutch branch of the environmental group Friends of the Earth built a dike of sandbags, nearly two and a half meters high and stretching for 500 meters around the conference center, a symbolic reminder of the potential disruption posed by climate change. With signs that read “You've sunk the world” and “Industry Lobbyists (and the government officials who do their bidding): How Will Your Grandchildren Forgive You?” activists pushed delegates to maintain strong environmental standards as they negotiated the implementation rules for the Kyoto Protocol.

For officials of the departing Clinton administration, this was their final hurrah, their last chance to influence climate policy. While the Kyoto Protocol had dim prospects for ratification in the United States, a successful set of negotiations might have made it more politically palatable for the US Senate to eventually provide their advice and consent. Moreover, a breakthrough in The Hague could have made it harder for President Clinton's successor to back away from the international negotiations. It was not to be.

European and American diplomats had a falling-out in the final days of the negotiations, in part as a consequence of the kinds of normative and electoral pressures they were facing from advocates.