ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the content of, and changes in, United States (US) foreign and domestic climate change policy from the 1990s to 2020, while highlighting distinct phases and important developments. US climate change politics has evolved against a backdrop of fluxes in greenhouse gas emissions (GHGE) trends. The dynamics of US politics and policy-making on climate change are shaped by the federal structure of the US political and legal system. The US was an early United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change supporter and among the first countries to ratify it. The departure of the Barack Obama administration and the arrival of the Donald Trump administration resulted in a sharp reversal of official US attitudes toward the Paris Agreement and global climate change cooperation more broadly. The Obama era logic of committed structural and entrepreneurial leadership designed to make identifiable, if incremental, progress toward reducing global GHGE was quickly reversed under Trump’s ‘America First’ banner.
