Realism Reigns Supreme in U.S. Environmental Policy

At the United Nations’ summit on climate change this past Tuesday, President Obama called for an international effort to cut greenhouse gas emissions and stop climate change. Coming on the heels of record environmental protests over the weekend, Obama’s speech focused on cooperation and advocated liberalism. But ever since climate change became an issue, the United States’ decisions on the matter have been realist and anything but cooperative.

Take one of the largest cooperative efforts to stop climate change to date— the Kyoto Protocol: a global effort to curb emissions that includes nearly all UN members. One rather significant country is missing from the party: the U.S., which signed but never ratified the treaty. This decision was realist to the core: developing countries, even powerful ones such as China and India, were and are not required to meet any emissions standards. Two of the main reasons cited by the U.S. for not ratifying the treaty were that those states would gain a comparative advantage, and that the protocol would be detrimental to the U.S. economy anyway.  In realism, a state thinks first and foremost of national interest and relative power, which is exactly what the United States did.

After all, who was going to stop them? The United States is the hegemon, the most powerful state on the planet. Who and what army can tell the U.S. how to conduct their affairs? That’s one of the largest issues with cooperation: if someone doesn’t want to play along, and no one can force them to, why should they? The same goes for China: the U.S. wouldn’t go to war with them over emissions standards, and no other country has the power to force them to change. Similar to the failure of the League of Nations, without the U.S.’s involvement, the Kyoto Protocol is now a shell of its original intent: Russia, Japan, and New Zealand no longer have emissions standards they need to meet, and Canada has dropped out altogether. This basically leaves European countries as the only ones making an effort to lower greenhouse gas emissions, which can’t hurt but is nowhere near the global impact the Kyoto Treaty was meant to have. This is the classic “tragedy of the commons” dilemma: with each country looking out for itself, things such as the environment get ignored.

The United States, however, is not often realist in the domain of international relations. In the name of democracy, capitalism, and/or global safety, the U.S. loves playing world police and has not hesitated to step in to other countries’ affairs (which a realist, who cares only of national security, would disagree with). Whether it’s to stop communism by invading Vietnam, promote democracy by fighting in Iraq and Libya, or prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, we have used our position as hegemon to (if you view things positively) set an example for the rest of the world.

But where is that example now? Instead of being at the forefront in the protection of our environment, the United States has backed off. President Obama can call for cooperation, but it seems hypocritical: we continue to rely on oil and natural gas instead of funding alternative energies such as wind and solar. The fact that the U.S. is even considering the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline to extract and transport tar sands (even dirtier and worse for the environment than regular oil drilling) says it all. President Obama is right: what we need is liberalism, for every country to work together to solve this problem, but we must first change our realist mindset and lead the way.

Links to sources:
New York Times article: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/24/world/asia/obama-at-un-climate-summit-calls-for-vast-international-effort.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=HpSum&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=1
Kyoto Treaty information: http://unfccc.int/kyoto_protocol/items/2830.php