ABSTRACT
American climate policy is a rather maddening thing. There is likely no other country on earth that has such a diverse range of prohibitive factors influencing its climate politics. The American government began to undertake a massive expansion of federal innovation policy beginning in the 1970s in response to growing competitive pressures from East Asia and Western Europe. While the early post-war period had seen US industry in possession of overwhelming leads in most manufacturing and technology sectors, by the mid-1960s these regions (owing in no small measure to their own aggressive industrial policies) had begun to catch-up and eclipse many of these previously sacrosanct US leads. By the early 1980s, neoliberalism's anti-regulatory ideology had become increasingly ascendant in Congress, and was rapidly becoming the political and economic backbone of the Republican Party's governing philosophy. The practical objective of neoliberal governance in this context was not purely ideological, but also quite pragmatic.
