What America Owes the Planet

Listen to this article 00:00 15:46 Listen to more stories on curio Before Kyoto and Paris, there was Chantilly. In early 1991, diplomats, scientists, and policy makers from around the world arrived at a hotel conference center near Virginia’s Dulles International Airport, which is famously far from everything. The delegates had been tasked with creating the first international framework for confronting climate change. An ill omen shrouded the proceedings: Virginia was in the grip of a then-record heat wave, with highs of 70 degrees in early February. The convention unfolded over the course of five sessions and 15 months. For the most part, the attendees weren’t debating whether human industry caused global warming. Rather, their mission was to figure out what to do about it, given the preponderance of the evidence that existed even two generations ago. European delegates wanted to establish binding limits on the emissions that each country could produce, which the American representatives immediately shot down. (At the time, the United States was far and away the largest carbon emitter of any country in the world.) There was almost no international accord at all, until the Japanese delegates promoted a weak proposal with no binding emissions targets,...