United States environmental policy

¶ … reaching climate change legislation in the United States is dependent on a multitude of domestic and international actors, and appears to be a diminishing possibility every day as political and practical barriers continue to be erected and strengthened against such legislation. Republican opposition to such a bill, especially in the Senate, has been quite stringent, and several Democratic members of Congress have also joined in opposition to the passing of cap-and-trade and other emissions-oriented legislation. Certain industries and states that support them also strongly oppose changes to emission standards and levels, and without the financial and legal support of Congress other federal agencies are essentially powerless. Internationally, other countries are failing to ratify international legislation (namely an extension to the Kyoto Protocol) for a variety of reasons, including the current economic climate and -- in the case of emerging economies like China and India -- the fact that they were not major polluters in the past and so did not contribute to the current problem to the same degree. Without international agreement, especially among the world's largest polluters, there can be no real effective change in the emissions rates or pace of climate change occurring on the planet.

From a Liberal perspective, climate change poses a very real and very practical threat to national and world security, and moving to cleaner energy sources and reduced pollution also has economic benefits in the short- and long-term. Other perspectives, such as the realist perspective, find that the threats posed by climate change are still uncertain and largely unsubstantiated, and other factors such as the global geopolitical situation also lead them to believe that now is not the time to pursue major hanges in energy production or industry. As international cooperation becomes more and more difficult, it will also become more difficult for to agree on international climate change regulations and rules, let alone enforce them, making an establishments of these rules now premature and effectively useless, according to this view. The fact that this perspective persist in many minds is a major barrier to the passing of effective climate change legislation.