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Europe and Global Climate Change: Politics, Foreign Policy, and Regional Cooperation
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(forthcoming)
Book Abstract
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Europe is a crucial actor in the climate change debate and related policy responses. Like the United States, as a group the countries of Western Europe are a major source of GHGs, meaning that the extent to which they limit those emissions will be important for future climate change. They also possess the technological and financial resources that are necessary to reduce GHG emissions globally and to assist those countries that are vulnerable to climate change to adapt to its undesirable effects. While the European reaction, like that of the United States, has not truly met the challenge of global climate change, nowhere has the response to this problem been greater than among the countries of Western Europe and the European Union (EU). As a group they have taken greater steps at the national, regional and international levels to reduce their own and other countries' emissions of "greenhouse" gases (GHGs) causing global warming, and they have done the most to at least begin assisting developing countries that will suffer inordinately from the effects of climate change.
What explains Europe's response to what is arguably the world's most pressing environmental problem, and possibly the most important long-term threat to the world yet foreseen? Why have the European states been more proactive than other countries, notably the United States? Why have they not done much more, especially given their tremendous contribution to the problem and what is arguably a moral obligation to stop polluting the global atmosphere and to do much more to help those most affected by past and present pollution of it? This book seeks to answer these and related questions. It brings together chapters that describe the responses of individual European countries and the European Union to climate change; discuss major issues of domestic and international politics and policymaking underlying those responses; frame the problem of global warming in terms of foreign policy, defined in this context as the crossover between domestic and international politics; and place climate change in the context of increasing European regional cooperation, integration and development of a common European foreign policy.