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Professor David Victor wrote an opinion piece in Newsweek about the impact of leadership on environmental problems:
Leadership matters when it comes to greenery because solving most environmental issues requires a change in direction. Leaders can send signals and forge new paths. But in the area where the world thinks a single leader towers above all—namely the choice of the next American president—leadership actually matters a lot less. America's president is powerful, to be sure, but American politics has been fragmenting over the last few decades. Alone, the president often has a weak impact on real American policies that affect the environment.
The U.S. record on international environmental issues is highly uneven for reasons that have little to do with George W. Bush's leadership. His administration has been tarred across the planet for reckless leadership on international environmental issues. (Its actual record, while dreadful, is not a uniform failure. It has done useful things in a few areas, such as a thoughtful initiative to help conserve forests in the Congo Basin.) But the signature of Bush's reckless foreign policy in this area, his decision to withdraw from the Kyoto treaty barely three months after taking office, actually has its roots in the Clinton administration. Clinton was highly committed to environmental issues and his vice president, Al Gore, was an even more passionate leader. Their zealous diplomats negotiated a treaty that was larded with commitments that the United States never could have honored. The promise to cut U.S. emissions 7 percent below 1990 levels is a good example. Because actual emissions were rising steadily, it would have been impractical to turn them around in time to meet the 2012 Kyoto deadline. The U.S. Congress never could have passed the requisite legislation, and no leader in the White House could have changed that voting arithmetic. The U.S. withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol was inevitable...
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Author
- David Victor
- Stanford Law School
- David.Victor@stanford.edu
- 650 724.1712