It was at the so-called Earth Summit, the major environmental summit of the United Nations in spring 1992 in Rio de Janeiro. A young, internationally largely unknown American Senator named Al Gore led a small squad of US parliamentarians and made a passionate appeal to the world public. It is time for a global climate pact, a “Marshall Plan for the Earth”. America must lead there.
These were completely new sounds from the United States. Because the then US government under President George Bush, a former oil manager, did everything possible to undermine or even hinder the international efforts for more climate and environmental protection, which were tentatively starting at the time. A few months later, Bill Clinton replaced Republican Bush, and Al Gore himself was Vice President of the United States.
But even then, the United States found it difficult to lead the world by example in international climate and environmental policy – as Al Gore had demanded. This weekend he stated: “We have finally crossed a decisive threshold.” What was meant was the “Inflation Reduction Act 2022”, which the US Senate passed on Sunday, the most far-reaching package of climate protection laws in America to date. If implemented, it would mean that the US could reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent by the end of the decade from 2005 levels.
Biden’s vote victory is historic
Almost three decades earlier, in 1993, at Gore’s urging, Clinton had drafted some kind of climate protection law for the first time. But the proposal to tax CO₂ emissions from fossil fuels was not even discussed in the Senate. “Dead on arrival,” that’s what Washington political jargon means, “already different on arrival.” The Democratic senators, who then as now held the majority in the upper house of Congress, signaled to the White House that such a move would not find enough support even among them – let alone the resistance of the Republican opposition.
Clinton and his deputy did not try again after that with a climate protection law. The Kyoto Protocol, the major international agreement on climate protection that they helped negotiate, was also not even discussed by the Senate. Nothing had changed in the basic constellation until this Sunday – which further underlines the historical importance of the vote victory for Biden.
After all, Al Gore rose to become the international star of climate policy. His documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” on the global climate catastrophe became a global hit in 2006, and a year later he received the Nobel Peace Prize. This did little to change the political situation in the USA. A new push to introduce emissions trading under President Barack Obama also didn’t even get a chance in the US Senate in 2010.
Of course, floods, heat waves, droughts and forest fires may have contributed to the change of heart: the consequences of global warming, long denied in America, can no longer be overlooked. According to statistics from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a federal agency, the United States has been hit by 89 weather and climate-related disasters in the past five years, killing 4,500 people and causing $788 billion in property damage.
However, another circumstance may have made the Climate Protection Act politically acceptable. Unlike Gore and Clinton’s push 30 years ago, Biden’s new legislative package dispenses with any form of energy tax. It relies entirely on subsidies and grants for climate-friendly investments. Al Gore should be okay with that: “I just couldn’t have dreamed for a moment,” she quotes him as saying New York Times“that it takes so long.”