ABSTRACT
By themselves, President George W. Bush’s rejection of the Kyoto Protocol in 2001 and his administration’s attempts to block any new negotiations on international greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reduction commitments under the Kyoto protocol at the 11th Conference of Parties (COP) in Montreal in 2005, painted a bleak picture of the state of climate change norms in the United States. On second glance, though, things were not as bleak as they seemed. Despite foot dragging in the Presidency, the social diffusion of international climate change policy norms grew steadily in the US in the 2000s, taken up in a range of regional, state, city, corporate and other institutional avenues and dominating national political discourse to an unprecedented degree. Climate change norms had reached such salience by late 2005 that four out of five utility and business leaders predicted that the US would impose mandatory caps on greenhouse gas emissions once President Bush left office (Aston and Helm, 2005). In his 2006 State of the Union Address, President Bush himself declared that “America is addicted to oil,” and set a goal of replacing 75 percent of the nation’s Middle East oil imports by 2025 with ethanol and other energy sources (Bumiller and Nagourney, 2006).1
