Strange Climate Event: Warmth Toward U.S.

When it comes to global warming, the United States has long been viewed as one of the world’s worst actors.  American officials have been booed and hissed during international climate talks, bestowed with mock “Fossil of the Day” awards for resisting treaties, and widely condemned for demanding that other nations cut their fossil fuel emissions while refusing, year after year, to take action at home.

Suddenly, all that has changed.

At the global climate change negotiations now wrapping up in Peru, American negotiators are being met with something wildly unfamiliar:  cheers, applause, thanks and praise.

It is an incongruous moment, arriving at a time when so many aspects of American foreign policy are under fire.

But the enthusiastic reception on climate issues comes a month after a historic announcement by the United States and China, the world’s two largest polluters, that they would jointly commit to cut their emissions.  Many international negotiators say the deal is the catalyst that could lead to a new global climate change accord that would, for the first time, commit every nation in the world to cutting its own planet-warming emissions.

The American policy that helped prod China — and change the international perception of the United States — is one of President Obama’s most contentious domestic decisions. His June announcement that he would use his executive authority to push through an aggressive set of regulations on coal-fired power plants in the United States — the nation’s largest source of greenhouse gas pollution — set off a firestorm of legal, political and legislative opposition at home.  Critics have called it a “war on coal” that could devastate the American economy.

But in the arena of international climate change negotiations, it has fundamentally transformed the feeling toward his administration.

“The U.S. is now credible on climate change,” said Laurence Tubiana, the French climate change ambassador to the United Nations, who is leading efforts to broker a new agreement to be signed by world leaders in Paris next year.

Veterans of two decades of climate change negotiations called the turnaround in America’s image profound.

“Countries got weary of negotiations with the U.S.; it got tough in negotiations, but it didn’t deliver,” said Yvo de Boer, the former executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.  “Now the U.S. has policies in place to deliver on its word.”

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