Global Science, Local Practice

Environmental concerns during the 1990s were dominated by the question of global warming, which may indeed become the central theme in development politics in the coming millennium. As we are going to press, more than 100 developed and developing countries are involved in rounds of talks surrounding the Kyoto Protocol, an international agreement reached in 1997 under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change seeking to avert or reduce global warming by limiting carbon dioxide emissions. The upcoming United States presidential elections will bear heavily on this process. Vice-President Al Gore played a key role in bringing the issue to the attention of the American public and in the negotiations that led to the agreement (but in election times his environmental enthusiasm is being tempered by other pressures, such as from mineworkers and autoworkers unions). Texas' Governor G.W. Bush and the oil, highway, and car manufacturing lobbies oppose the agreement, as has also done the Republican Congress which partly explains why three years have gone by without it being ratified, let alone implemented

Climate change · Convention · Enthusiasm · Global warming · Governor · Kyoto Protocol · Negotiation · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Presidential system · Sociology · United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change · Climate variability and models · Law

• Climate change and energy use

  Open Access•Annette Henning•Anthropology Today•2005

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• Still Fiddling while the Globe Warms

  Patricia K Townsend•Reviews in Anthropology•2004

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