Abstract
For mitigating climate change and adapting to whatever impacts we cannot avoid, there are no politically feasible alternatives to improvements in the U.S. Climate Change Action Plan at this time or for the foreseeable future. Yet improvements in the Action Plan have been obstructed by the diversion of attention and other resources to negotiating a binding international agreement, to developing a predictive understanding of global change, and to documenting the failure of the Action Plan to meet its short-term goal for the reduction of aggregate greenhouse gas emissions. Continuous improvements depend upon reallocating attention and other resources to the Action Plan, and more specifically, to the many small-scale policies that have already succeeded by climate change and ‘no regrets’ criteria under the Action Plan. Sustaining the effort over the long term depends on harvesting experience from these small-scale successes for diffusion and adaptation elsewhere on a voluntary basis.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Bailey, J. (1996). Afterthought: The Computer Challenge to Human Intelligence. New York: Basic Books.
Berke, R. L. (1997a). ‘Environmentalists say Gore has fallen down on the job,’ New York Times (June 22): 1.
Berke, R. L. (1997b). ‘In a reversal, G.O.P. courts the “Greens”,'NewYork Times (July 2): A1.
Bodansky, D.M. (1995). ‘The emerging climate change regime,’ Annual Review of Energy and Environment 20: 425–461.
Brunner, R.D. (1980). ‘Decentralized energy policies,’ Public Policy 28: 71–91.
Brunner, R.D. and R. Sandenburgh, eds. (1982). Community Energy Options: Getting Started in Ann Arbor. Ann Arbor MI: University of Michigan Press.
Brunner, R.D. (1996). ‘A milestone in the policy sciences,'Policy Sciences 29: 45–68.
Brunner, R.D. (1996). ‘Policy and global change research,’ Climatic Change 32: 121–147.
Brunner, R.D. (1998). Science and the Climate Change Regime. Presented at the Seventeenth Policy Sciences Annual Institute,Yale Law School, New Haven, CT, October 2–4, 1998 (revised November 1998).
Clinton, W. J. and A. Gore Jr. (1993).The Climate Change Action Plan. Typescript.
Clinton, W. J. (1997). ‘Remarks at the National Geographic Society’ (October 22),Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents 33 (October 27): 1629–1634.
Clinton, W. J. (1998). Radio Address of the President to the Nation (January 31).Washington, DC: TheWhite House, Office of the Press Secretary.
Collingridge, D. (1992).The Management of Scale: Big Organizations, Big Decisions, Big Mistakes. London: Routledge.
Committee on Earth and Environmental Sciences (1992). Economics and Global Change: The FY 1993 Research Program on the Economics of Global Change. A Supplement to the U.S. President's FY 1993 Budget.
Committee on Earth Sciences (1989). Our Changing Planet: The FY 1990 Research Plan. A Report by the Committee on Earth Sciences.
Committee on Environment and Natural Resources (1997). Our Changing Planet:The FY1998 U.S. Global Change Research Program. A Supplement to the President's Fiscal Year 1998 Budget.
Dewar, H. and K. Sullivan (1997). ‘Senate GOP declares Kyoto Pact dead,’ Washington Post (December 11): A37.
Draper, L. (1994). ‘Taking on the climate challenge,’ Electric Perspectives 18 (March-April): 24.
Gore, A. (1996). ‘The metaphor of distributed intelligence,’ Science 272 (12 April): 177.
Havel, V. (1992). ‘The end of the modern era,'NewYork Times (March 1): E15.
Holland, J.H. (1992). ‘Complex Adaptive Systems,’ Daedalus 121 (Winter): 17–30.
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (1995). 1995 Second Assessment Synthesis of Scientific-Technical Information Relevant to Interpreting Article 2 of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (1996). Climate Change 1995: Economic and Social Dimensions of Climate Change. Contribution of Working Group III to the Second Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kaplan, A. (1964). The Conduct of Inquiry: Methodology for Behavioral Science. San Francisco: Chandler Publishing.
Kauppi, P. E. (1995). ‘The United Nations Climate Change Convention: Unattainable or irrelevant,’ Science 270 (1December): 1454.
Kris, M. (1996). ‘Not-so-silent spring,'National Journal (March 9): 522–526.
Landau, M. (1969). ‘Redundancy, rationality, and the problems of duplication and overlap,’ Public Administration Review 29 (July/August): 346–358.
Lashof, D. (1996). ‘The environmental perspective,’ in James C. White, ed., Evaluating Climate Change Action Plans: National Actions for International Commitment. New York: Plenum Press, pp. 49–54.
Lasswell, H.D. and A. Kaplan (1950). Power and Society: A Framework for Political and Social Inquiry. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Lasswell, H.D. (1956).The Decision Process: Seven Categories of Functional Analysis. College Park, MD: Bureau of Governmental Research, University of Maryland.
Lasswell, H.D. (1963). ‘Experimentation, prototyping, and intervention,’ in The Future of Political Science. NewYork: Atherton Press, pp. 95–123.
Lasswell, H.D. (1971). A Pre-View of Policy Sciences. NewYork: Elsevier.
Lasswell, H.D. and M. S. McDougal (1992). Jurisprudence for a Free Society: Studies in Law, Science and Policy. New Haven, CT: New Haven Press, and Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers.
Lemonick, M. (1993). ‘Stop polluting, please,’ Time (November 1): 71.
Lewin, T. (1997). ‘More public school pupils now don uniforms,'NewYork Times (September 25): A1.
Mitchell, A. (1996). ‘President acts on school attire,'NewYork Times (February 25): 1.
Montgomery, D. (1996). ‘Critique of Session II,’ in James C. White, ed., Evaluating Climate Change Action Plans: National Actions for International Commitment. NewYork: Plenum Press, pp. 75–88.
Muller, F. (1996). ‘Mitigating climate change: The case for energy taxes,’ Environment 38 (March): 13–20, 36–43.
Office of Global Change (1992). National Action Plan for Global Change. Department of State Publication 10026 (December).
Olson, S. (1997). ‘White House enlists science for public education effort,’ Science 277 (1 August): 630–631.
Paarlberg, R. L. (1996). ‘A domestic dispute: Clinton, Congress, and international environmental policy,’ Environment (October): 16–20, 28–33.
Pielke, R.A. Jr. (1995). ‘Usable information for policy: An appraisal of the U.S. Global Change Research Program,'Policy Sciences 28: 39–77.
Pielke, R.A. Jr. (1998). ‘Rethinking the role of adaptation in climate policy,’ Global Environmental Change 8: 159–170.
Pielke, R.A. Jr. and M. H. Glantz (1995). ‘Serving science and society: Lessons from large-scale atmospheric science programs,’ Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 76 (December): 2445–2458.
Schick, A. (1995). The Federal Budget: Politics, Policy, Process. Washington DC: The Brookings Institution.
Simon, H.A. (1957).Models ofMan. NewYork: JohnWiley and Sons.
Simon, H.A. (1981).The Sciences of the Artificial. 2nd ed. Cambridge: M.I.T. Press.
Simon, H.A. (1983). Reason in Human Affairs. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Stevens, W. K. (1997). ‘Experts doubt a greenhouse gas can be curbed,'NewYork Times (November 3): A1.
Tennekes, H. (1990). ‘A sideways look at climate research,'Weather 45: 67–68.
U.S. Climate Action Report (1997). Draft.
U.S. Department of Energy (n.d.).The Climate Challenge and Your Utility. Fact sheet.
U.S. General Accounting Office (1996). Global Warming: Difficulties Assessing Countries' Progress Stabilizing Emissions of Greenhouse Gases. GAO/RCED-96–188 (September).Washington, DC: U.S. General Accounting Office.
U.S. General Accounting Office (1997). GlobalWarming: Information on the Results of Four of EPA's Voluntary Climate Change Programs. GAO/RCED-97–163 (June).Washington, DC: U.S. General Accounting Office.
Ungar, S. (1995). ‘Social scares and global warming: Beyond the Rio Convention,’ Society and Natural Resources 8: 443–456.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Brunner, R.D., Klein, R. Harvesting experience: A reappraisal of the U.S. Climate Change Action Plan. Policy Sciences 32, 133–161 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1004523203325
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1004523203325