How The United States Has Responded to Climate Change Over Time

There are many threats to the human race. One of the most threatening of these crises is global warming. According to Michael Mann, a distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Penn State, a global temperature increase of 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit or more would most likely cause a collapse of society as we know it. Countries have been working together to try and find a cure for our shared home, and many nations have started enforcing their own carbon emission regulations. For Americans, this statement raises the question: How has the United States responded to climate change over time? The aim for this essay is to give a correct answer to this crucial question as it requires a comprehensive examination of the country's policies, initiatives, and actions towards mitigating the effects of global warming.

In February of 1979, the World Climate Conference gathered for the first time. This conference was the first time that man’s role in climate change was globally recognized. Here, the foundation for the United Nations Climate Change Panel was built. During this first panel, a summary of the official report read, “Carbon dioxide plays a fundamental role in determining the temperature of the earth’s atmosphere, and it appears plausible that an increased amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere can contribute to a gradual warming … but the details of the changes are still poorly understood.”

For nine years after, no more action was taken by the U.S. to slow climate change. Global warming was still being researched and studied, but no policy or country-wide action was taken.

In 1988, the United Nations Environment Program and the World Meteorological Organization established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, also known as the IPCC. This panel’s purpose was to consider available scientific data, determine the possible future impacts of climate change, and develop a global response. Since its founding, the IPCC has done multiple such climate assessments and has provided multiple plans to reduce the current rate of carbon emissions.

After the IPCC was formed, research was done for another nine years. Finally, in 1997, actual policy change began. That December, The Kyoto Protocol was adopted by the United Nations. The protocol required 37 industrialized nations, which included the United States, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. During the conference, it was agreed that the treaty would not enter into force until 2005. However, after this conference, global warming skeptics were irate. At this point in history, many people still thought climate change was a hoax. The main doubters were the people in the oil and gas industry. Of them, ExxonMobil led the opposition. This oil and gas giant lobbied against the Kyoto Protocol. Exxon and their allies argued that it would be too expensive and that it put too severe of a burden on the United States. Lee Raymond, the chief executive of ExxonMobil at the time, was convinced that the science was wrong. After learning of the Kyoto Protocol, Lee Raymond said, “Victory will be achieved when average citizens understand uncertainties in climate science; and when recognition of uncertainties becomes part of the conventional wisdom.” Exxon began funding groups to research this theory of a climate change hoax.

A couple of months later, the Oregon Institute of Science issued a petition that scientists signed certifying that they believe that there is no convincing scientific evidence that climate change is man’s fault. The petition got over 31,000 signatures, however, only 39 of said signers were climatologists. It is also rumored that Geri Halliwell’s name was signed onto the petition at one time. However, the petitioners say they remove fraudulent names such as Ginger Spice when they find them.

In 2001, George Bush chose to not send the Kyoto Protocol to Congress, which effectively withdrew the United States from the agreement. President Bush was very open about his lack of support for the Kyoto Treaty during his election, and no one was surprised by the United States withdrawal. Shortly after the U.S. dropped out, so did Canada, Russia, and a couple of other major industrialized countries.

2005 rolls around, and the Kyoto Protocol takes effect. Of course, without major carbon-emission countries such as the United States, the Kyoto Treaty is essentially a symbol of potential progress among the 140 countries that ratified it. No policy change has been enacted within the United States yet, and it has been debated for over 25 years.

One year later, and the tides of opinion began to change. In March of 2006, a new CEO, Rex Tillerson, took control of ExxonMobil. In an interview with New York Times, Tillerson said, “We recognize that climate change is a serious issue. We also recognize that greenhouse gas emissions are one of the factors affecting climate change.” Shortly after this, Al Gore launched a campaign against climate change ignorance and released a documentary on the dangers of global warming. The film was undoubtedly a success, winning two Academy Awards. Not long after this documentary, a new poll in the United States found that 41 percent of Americans believed there was solid evidence that the earth is warming due to human activity.

Fast forward another year to 2007, where Al Gore jointly wins the Nobel Peace Prize with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. During his acceptance speech, Gore said, “Now comes the threat of climate crisis – a threat that is real, rising, imminent, and universal. Once again, it is the 11th hour. The penalties for ignoring this challenge are immense and growing, and at some near point would be unsustainable and unrecoverable.” Later that year, the IPCC released a major report confirming that climate change is occurring now, mostly as a result of human activities. With more than 2,000 expert reviewers and 500 lead authors, the report is known as the most professional and accurate report of climate change to date. The UN’s report claimed, “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice and rising global average sea level… There is very high confidence that the global average net effect of human activities since 1750 has been one of warming.” This report drastically changed not only the United States view of climate change, but also the perspective shifted globally.

From this date on, climate change became a much bigger concern within the United States. A few months later in 2008, former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich and current Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi filmed an advertisement together to increase U.S. awareness of global warming. While they sat right next to each other on a loveseat, the two political enemies came together to address a bigger than usual, global issue. “We do agree,” republican politician Gingrich says. “Our country must take action to address climate change.”

Even though a majority of the country had come to accept man-made climate change, there was still a large amount of opposition. A month after the dual-party global warming advertisement, the enemy struck back. The group “Americans for Prosperity” launched a hot air balloon campaign. This flying vessel was designed with the slogan, “Global Warming Alarmism: Lost Jobs, Higher Taxes, Less Freedom.” However, groups like this slowly started to disband, because support dwindled nonstop.

In May of 2008, Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain expressed support for cap-and-trade legislation, which would require all manufacturers, power plants, and others responsible for major carbon emissions to reduce pollutants. At this point and time, Senator McCain was the only Republican to support mandatory emission limits. A couple of months later in August, the Democratic platform spoke out about climate change. The party as a group called climate change, “an epochal, man-made threat to the planet.” Both party leaders, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, called for mandatory emission cuts.

The year 2008 ends with Democratic candidate Barack Obama securing the United States Presidency. With this new, relatively young President, the U.S. was in store for lots of new policies. In fact, in President Obama’s state of address, he insisted that a market-based emission cap must be enforced. This plan also rewarded companies that do not meet the cap, by allowing them to lease additional credits to companies that produce more than the allotted amount, creating a financial incentive to reduce emissions. Fast forward to June and the first climate change policy in U.S. history passes the House. This was the Waxman-Markey carbon regulation bill, known as the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009. This bill had lots of aspects, but it mainly provided funding to train workers for jobs in the renewable energy industry. However, in July, the bill collapsed. There were just not enough votes for the Waxman-Markey bill to pass the Senate.

The collapse of this new policy severely hurt the fight against climate change. New polls came out saying only 36% of Americans believed in man-made climate change, and only 57% of Americans believed the Earth was warming at all. Shortly after the bill failed, the time to strike was ripe for climate change policy opposers. Suddenly, 1,000 hacked emails spanning 13 years surfaced from climate scientists involved with the IPCC. Global warming critics argued that the emails proved that climatologists tampered with key evidence that debunked climate change and that the groundbreaking IPCC report from 2007 was now disproven. However, multiple later individual investigations showed that no evidence was tampered with and none of the emails affected the scientific consensus on climate change. The IPCC also defended their report by saying, “There is no possibility of exclusion of any contrarian views if they have been published in established journals or other publications which are peer-reviewed.”

After the Climategate email scandal settled down, climate change was still pretty widely disagreed on within the U.S. However, in January of 2010, NASA reported that the 2000-2009 decade was the warmest ever recorded. Not long after, the National Academy of Sciences released a report saying, “Climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for — and in many cases is already affecting — a broad range of human and natural systems.” Even with all of this evidence, Republicans gained control of the house in the 2010 midterm elections. Among these new members, were the first Tea Party candidates. These new members of the House were very opposed to the addition of any new climate change policy within the U.S.

Due to this power shift, the Republicans had free rein to control all new policies. In other words, 2011 was not a great year for climate change policy. That April, Republican House Leader John Boehner said that to eliminate waste within the government, climate change would now only be handled by the science committee. With this declaration, the Republican Majority eliminated the House Committee on Global Warming. In March, Democratic representative Henry Waxman proposed two amendments regarding climate change, and both were rejected by all 31 Republican House members. Later that year, future Presidential candidate Mitt Romney stated, “My view is that we don’t know what’s causing climate change on this planet. And the idea of spending trillions and trillions of dollars to try to reduce CO2 emissions is not the right course for us.” A month after that, Republican Newt Gingrich, now running for the 2012 Presidency, recanted his words in his climate change project with Speaker Pelosi. On Fox News, he spoke about his role in the ad saying, “It’s probably the dumbest single thing I’ve done in recent years.” After all of this climate change opposition, polls suggested a slightly increased percentage of belief in man-caused climate change. This Pew Research Center Poll suggested that now 38% of Americans believed global warming was caused by man’s carbon emissions. The partisan divide was extremely stark: 51 percent of Democrats believed in man-caused climate change and only 19 percent of Republicans considered it to be because of human activity.

In 2012, climate change skeptics took their beliefs to the public schools. Skeptics within Republican state governments such as Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana, etcetera, started campaigning for both sides of the opinion on global warming to be taught in schools. Due to this new policy, students in these states were taught that some people believe climate change is due to man-made carbon emissions, and other people argue that the earth is warming naturally.

Not long after this curriculum change, NASA released another warming report. This report stated that 9 of the 10 warmest years since 1880 have occurred since the year 2000. Surprisingly, this data did little to sway public opinion on climate change. Due to this lack of change, a study is done by a group of Harvard political scientists. While describing the results of this study, Dr. Frederick Mayer said, “information-based science advocacy has had only a minor effect on public concern, while political mobilization by elites and advocacy groups is critical in influencing climate change concern.” This sentence is quite concerning because it means the public is either blissfully ignorant or trusts the words of politicians over scientists.

In the election of 2012, climate change was hardly mentioned. This may seem surprising because of the scale of the issue, but politicians purposely avoid discussing issues that hurt the public’s opinion of them. Because of this, the issue of climate change was effectively tabled until the end of the election. However, fast forward a few months and President Obama has been reelected. A year into his second term, Obama met with Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping. During this meeting, the two world leaders formed an agreement to reduce both production and consumption of hydrofluorocarbons. This plan was expected to decrease about 90 gigatons of CO2 by the year 2050. A scratch on the surface really, but it was still progress. While President Obama was battling to make new climate change policies, state governments began making some of their laws to either combat climate change or combat the belief of global warming.

On March 31, 2015, President Obama and his administration turned in the US Intended Nationally Determined Contribution for greenhouse gas emissions to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The INDC submitted by the United States committed the nation to reduce emissions 26-28% below 2005 levels by 2025. This plan showed the country the President’s vision of a nation with low carbon reliance. This year, President Obama also joined forces with 194 other nations in the Paris Climate accords. In this international panel, the countries involved agreed to set a path to decrease the potential temperature rise to only two degrees celsius.

For the next year, the U.S. did not make any real strides against climate change. Lots of research was being done, and the public opinion on the planet’s warming was beginning to change. However, not many new policies were being introduced to reduce carbon emissions. One report released in 2016 pointed out that the United States would need to spend around 55 billion dollars to effectively tackle climate change. Regardless, the next year’s federal budget was only 21 billion dollars for climate change relief. Due to this lack of funds, the Obama administration began to have to think outside of the box. Not long after, the President released his Clean Transportation Plan intending to reduce carbon pollution by converting the nation's century-old infrastructure into one based on clean energy. The plan was projected to combat global warming by reducing emissions by switching to more sustainable forms of transportation, this encouraged a potential increase of innovation in both public transit and electric vehicle production in the United States.

In 2016, Donald Trump was elected President. Not surprisingly, the United States’ climate change policies were severely altered during this term. During Trump’s Presidency; The United States dropped from the Paris Climate Accords, Obama’s Clean Power Plan was repealed, The Environmental Protection Agency loosened emission standards for vehicles, permitting requirements for infrastructure projects, including oil and natural gas pipelines, were reduced, standards for methane emissions were overwritten, and the President publicly challenged the theory of global warming, which caused huge amounts of citizens to start to doubt the severity of climate change. These four years added no new policies to help combat climate change, but the next election would bring in another Democratic President.

Since 2020, the United States government has taken significant steps to address climate change and global warming. In January 2021, President Joe Biden signed executive orders that re-entered the U.S. into the Paris Climate Agreement and called for the development of a plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net-zero by 2050. The administration has also announced plans to invest $2 trillion in clean energy and infrastructure over the next decade, which is expected to create millions of jobs and reduce emissions. In addition to these actions, the U.S. government has also taken steps to address the impacts of climate change. In August 2021, President Biden declared a major disaster in the state of Louisiana due to the impacts of Hurricane Ida, which was exacerbated by climate change. The administration has also allocated billions of dollars in funding for disaster relief and resilience programs to help communities prepare for and respond to the impacts of climate change.

In conclusion, the United States has had a complex and varied response to climate change over time. While there have been significant advancements and initiatives, such as the Paris Climate Agreement and the Clean Power Plan, there have also been setbacks and rollbacks of environmental regulations. However, the recent actions of the U.S. government, including rejoining the Paris Agreement and making ambitious pledges to reduce emissions and invest in clean energy, suggest a more proactive approach to addressing climate change. Moving forward, continued efforts and collaboration will be necessary to mitigate the impacts of global warming and create a more sustainable future for all.