The Absence of Governance: Climate Change in Canada and the United States (2008)

There has been remarkably little formal collaboration between Canada and the United States on the issue of climate change policy, despite a wide range of mechanisms for cross-border engagement on common environmental concerns and a vast body of literature that underscores the threat that climate change poses to both nations. Bodies such as the International Joint Commission (IJC) and the North American Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC), as well as non-governmental organizations, have published studies outlining the risks of climate change in both Canada and the United States (IJC 2003; CEC 2002, 2008; National Wildlife Federation 2007). These reports examine not only the prospect of elevated temperature but also the proliferation of extreme weather events, public health risks due to changing patterns for disease transmission via insects, declining surface water levels, elevated sea levels, and shifts in agricultural productivity. Such reports are consistent with those generated for each nation or various regions therein. They provide a common framing for an environmental challenge that is daunting in its potential impact, with cascading effects that could influence virtually every other area of environmental governance, from fisheries habitat to availability of drinking water. These types of documents also confirm the sizable contributions that Canada and the United States make to the global release of carbon each year. These nations' per capita rates of emissions are very similar and both rank among the very highest in the world. Together, they continue to generate more than one-quarter of global emissions per year, with the United States ranking second among individual nations only to China and Canada ranking seventh in annual emissions in recent years. The United States and Canada obviously cannot solve the problem of climate change through unilateral actions. But they clearly need to play significant roles in any serious effort to reduce global emissions and thereby alleviate potential impacts. Nonetheless, climate change policy development was slow within both nations, much less on a collaborative basis. However, there were signs in early 2009 of possible cultivation of a cross-border partnership on climate and clean energy that might also take full continental form through the inclusion of Mexico. Ironically, climate change is not a new environmental challenge, though its saliency in both Canada and the United States has increased markedly in recent years. In 1988, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney heralded the era of global climate governance with a high-profile opening address at the International Conference on the Changing Atmosphere hosted in Toronto. This produced a recommendation that global greenhouse gas emissions were to be reduced 20 percent by 2005, which was supported by both Canadian and American governments. A few years later, both nations had ratified the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC), calling for national emissions stabilization at 1990 levels by 2000. The 1997 negotiation of a binding international agreement, the Kyoto Protocol, followed. In this instance, Canada and the United States took remarkably similar positions to the bargaining table and left Kyoto with nearly identical emission reduction commitments that were to be realized by the end of the current decade. All of this activity between the late 1980s and late 1990s suggested that climate change would essentially be framed as a challenge of international governance, requiring some formal cooperation among nations through various venues of international diplomacy. During much of this period, both Canada and the United States acknowledged that climate change was indeed a serious threat. They demonstrated considerable consistency in their research on problem severity and general receptivity toward engagement in these negotiations. Both increasingly acknowledged that early experiments in soft environmental law, such as non-binding commitment under the FCCC, produced few if any intended results. …