Search

In 2001, President George W. Bush confirmed that the US would not ratify the Kyoto Protocol. Despite the US' withdrawal, its neighbor Canada chose to ratify the Kyoto Protocol the following year. The divergence of these two highly integrated countries is surprising, since Canada and the US accepted comparable commitments in the 1997 Kyoto negotiations, and both could expect the costs of compliance to be significant given the greenhouse-gas intensive nature of their economies. The divergence cannot be explained by politicians' electoral incentives since Canadian and US politicians alike faced strong business opposition and a relatively inattentive public. A strong normative commitment to international cooperation to protect the global commons was necessary to overcome political opposition to ratification, but still not sufficient. In particular, while both Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien and US President Bill Clinton supported ratification, only Chrétien had the institutional capacity to deliver on his values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports that Canadian-U.S. environmental relations manifest a growing importance of transborder state and provincial cooperation and policy-making. Under the joint Climate Change Action Plan, adopted by the New England Governors and the Eastern Canadian Premiers in August 2001, participating provinces and states commit to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to 1990 levels by 2010 and 10 percent below 1990 levels by 2020. The provinces and states moreover pledge to ultimately decrease GHG emissions to levels that do not pose a threat to the climate, which according to an official estimate would require a 75-85 percent reduction from 2001 emission levels.