Defeating Kyoto: The Conservative Movement's Impact on U.S. Climate Change Policy

In this article, we argue that a major reason the United States failed to ratify the Kyoto Protocol to ameliorate global warming is the opposition of the American conservative movement, a key segment of the antienvironmental countermovement. We examine how the conservative movement mobilized between 1990 and 1997 to construct the “non-problematicity ” of global warming. After we describe how conservative think tanks mobilized to challenge the global warming claims of mainstream climate science, we examine how these countermovement organizations aligned themselves with prominent American climate change skeptics known for their staunch criticism of mainstream climate research and their af�liations with the…