Bringing the material back in: United States responses to the global climate change regime

With the increased public attention on the Bush Administration's decision not to regulate carbon dioxide and to drop out of the international climate change negotiations, recent social scientific inquiry has investigated the decisions regarding the possible regulation of greenhouse gases in the United States. Scholars have looked at the importance of conservative think tanks, the lack of a consistent domestic policy, and the Bush Administration's proclivities to explain the country's unique position. Although these factors are very important, they do not get at the root of the problem: the material characteristics of a country and the ways that dependence on certain natural resources affect political outcomes. This article builds off of the literature on resource dependency in local and international contexts to present a model for understanding the relationship between resource dependence and political outcomes within a nation-state. By analyzing this relationship in the United States, I present a more comprehensive explanation of American responses to the potential regulation of greenhouse gases. Incorporating data about natural resource use and national decision-making both before and after the Bush Administration's decision to pull out of negotiations for the Kyoto Protocol, this paper concludes that comprehending fully political decisions about global climate change in the United States requires that we understand the ways that resource dependence gets translated into domestic policy.