This dissertation evaluates the effectiveness of international climate change agreements as a product of international law and diplomacy requiring implementation in the domestic context. The period between 1983 and 2012 appeared to be the warmest 30-year period of the last 1400 years in the Northern Hemisphere (Quin et al., 2014). Over time, a scientific consensus has emerged from research and literature that anthropogenic climate change is occurring (Oreskes, 2004). This consensus has triggered an insurgency of climate policy in the western world and, increasing use of international treaties and agreements to address the climate issue which is global in scope.
International climate treaties have mainly stemmed from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which has emerged as the dominant global climate change institutional arrangement. In 1988 the UN General Assembly called climate change a ‘common concern of mankind’, this depiction is recognised today as the birthing of the UNFCCC concept. This indicates that the UNFCCC, which is increasingly a post-political organisation dealing with consensus concepts, has an overarching ideology to substantively address climate change rather than act as a detached facilitator. In 1992 the Framework Convention on Climate Change opened for signature at the Rio Summit, which came into force in 1994 (Rajamani, 2015). Twenty-one meetings and a defeated climate agreement later, the Paris Climate Agreement was signed in 2015. It was shaped around intended nationally determined contributions submitted by each party outlining their discretionary commitment to climate change mitigation. The Paris Climate Agreement is at the core of the discussion in this dissertation.
The Paris Climate Agreement is the current international legal apparatus inducing domestic action on climate change, meaning that in some domestic contexts, it is the sole legal apparatus for climate change action. It is the framework that most countries are using to frame their global warming policy. The Paris Agreement states in Article 2 that the rise in global temperature is to be held to well below 2°C or even to 1.5°C above industrial levels, and requires that governments set targets with increasing ambition to meet this overall goal (Jacobs, 2016). the 1.5°C target set by the Paris Agreement only gives a 50% chance of avoiding the worst effects of climate change. The targets set by individual nations are more in line with warming of 3°C (Spash, 2016), this does not instil optimism. The European Commission described the agreement as the first truly universal and legally binding climate agreement (Bergkamp and Stone, 2015). It requires contributions from every party, regardless of economic or political status, unlike the previous attempt, the Kyoto Protocol, which has not delivered.
The UNFCCC has an ideology to mitigate climate change, it should be focused on achieving the purpose it exists to serve. The Paris Agreement has achieved broad coverage and has been congratulated on its inclusiveness, but specific countries are indispensable to securing real progress. China and the United States have been described as ‘key countries’ (Young, 2016), whose climate contribution, almost 40% to world emission levels, and global power make their actions the most impactful. They are integral to a substantive outcome. Dealing with climate change under international law means every state has equal rights and standing, but equating the role of Barbados, who contribute 0.01% to global emissions, with the role of Russia, who contribute 7.53%, seems a foolish way to organise a climate change initiative. The domestic equivalent would be equating British Petroleum with your local greengrocer. There are only 20 countries that contribute more than 1% to global emissions, together accounting for just short of 80%. Negotiations should be structured to allow considerable contributors to tackle the issue rather than trying to accommodate 175 parties, 155 of which contribute less than 1% to global emissions, and 28 who contribute nothing. The industrialised big emitters have economic and social commonalities making it easier to reach agreement. It should not be a possibility that major players must make any compromise that might impact their political ability to implement the agreement at home to appease parties that are inconsequential to outcomes. Countries looking to keep emissions down and countries looking to cut emissions are pursuing different objectives which require different tools, reaching consensus for a divided agenda is bound to be difficult. The Paris Agreement may not be perfect, but it has been signed and ratified and the next step is to implement it domestically.
This dissertation aims to bridge the gap between the domestic implementation of international agreements and the international consequences of failure to do so effectively. To do this, it utilises the volatile relationship between the US, the world’s biggest carbon dioxide polluter per capita, and the Paris Climate Agreement. It will assess the method of ratification used to incorporate the Paris Agreement into US domestic law in relation to the US Constitution and political climate. This will be shown to inevitably lead to a non-party US to the Paris Agreement. The dissertation proceeds to observe the implication of this seismic landscape shift on the international stage in terms of international legal factors and reciprocity, which is the diplomatic culmination of the analysis throughout the dissertation. Reciprocity is a co-operation facilitator between nations which constitutes ‘a series of transactions in which interests are traded for advantages’ (Brunee and Toope, 2010). It forms the closest practical equivalent to international legal enforcement institutions. It allows countries to trust one another and rely on exchanges of substantive and intangible entities when they may otherwise be unable to rely on one another and makes inter-country dynamics predictable (Brunee and Toope, 2010). This reciprocity is the foundation of many international relationships including that between the US and China, and on rare occasions can be the infrastructure required for construction of international cultural norms. It will be returned to in this dissertation to demonstrate the inadequacy of the Paris Climate Agreement, its entire international climate agreement species and the overarching international climate regime.
This dissertation contributes two new concepts to the above discussion. Firstly, this dissertation contributes an original and innovative methodology for predicting voting behaviour on international climate agreement issues for the US Senate, this is a response to the absence of any model that could have been usefully applied to the body today. Secondly, the dissertation carries out a novel analysis that directly links diffuse reciprocity with the UNFCCC and explores the consequences of both diffuse and bilateral reciprocity on the Paris Climate Agreement specifically. Reciprocity is both universally accepted and well understood, yet it is seldom applied in reality or put into specific context to prospectively influence decision making. Reciprocity is usually deployed in the process of lamenting something that has failed, or explaining dynamics in the academic abstract. This dissertation identifies a new role for reciprocity as a major player in the formulation of international law. When passing domestic laws, bodies have regard for the constitution. When creating international agreements, bodies should have regard for reciprocity. The implication of this consideration is the unsuitability of international law as a tool for tackling climate change.