Global Warming: A Global Social Dilemma

Global Warming: A Global Social Dilemma Student’s Name Institutional Affiliation Global Warming: A Global Social Dilemma Climate change is a global commons issue that has the potential to fundamentally alter human existence on earth. Climate change, or global warming, refers to the increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and the resultant increase in the Earth’s average temperature. Scientists predict that, at present trends of rising temperatures, the earth’s average temperature will increase between one and three and a half degrees centigrade between 1990 and 2100. The rising temperatures create a number of potential problems for all countries on earth. The warming of the atmosphere will cause thermal expansion of the oceans as they warm, leading to an increase in the average sea level of between 15 and 95 centimeters by 2100. Such increases would submerge large tracts of coastline in all countries. Hence, a very important social dilemma to tackle and consider seriously. There is a substantial and growing social science literature related to the study of climate change. Much of this literature is devoted to evaluating and formulating policies to address climate change. International relations theorists have addressed the issue. Their focus has been primarily on the negotiation and implementation of international agreements. International relations scholars have largely neglected the development of domestic climate policy in their theories. In particular, they have failed to analyze the interrelated development of domestic and international climate policies. Specifying the links between international and domestic forces has proven to be an extremely difficult theoretical task (Legro, 1996). The dominant international relations theories, Neorealism and Neoliberal Institutionalism, both implicitly accept that international forces have domestic policy effects, but both have difficulty accounting for feedback between domestic and international variables. The reason is that both emphasize systemic forces at the expense of domestic forces. For Neorealists and Neoliberal Institutionalists, the characteristics of the international setting are most essential for understanding cooperation. How many states are involved? What are the interests at stake? What is the payoff structure? What is the international institutional structure? The interests pursued by states are for the most part exogenous to the theories (Sterling-Folker, 1997). Both theories emphasize the impact of systemic forces on outcomes to international interactions, but they differ in the forces they consider to be determinative. According to Neorealists, it is the anarchic environment of the international system that produces insecurity among states. The state of insecurity presses upon states and forces them to focus on relative power positions and the potential for gains and losses through international cooperative agreements. Most Neorealist studies attempt to provide a logical-deductive specification of national interests (Paterson, 1996). This approach assumes that states will pursue a certain set of goals related to ensuring the survival of the state, and national strategies will follow from these goals. While this approach is very useful in the case of national security and to some extent in economic relations, its appropriateness for environmental affairs is questionable. Environmental policies necessarily involve tradeoffs among public health, environmental quality, economic growth, and economic competitiveness. The hierarchy of goals the state seeks to pursue is not obvious. The logical- deductive approach is unable to specify the origins of most environmental interests or the variation in interests pursued by states facing similar environmental threats; nor can it adequately explain the selection of issues included on the domestic or international agendas. Neorealism posits the fundamental interests of the state within which the state must pursue its specific interests. The focus on relative power position and security limits the range of acceptable international strategies and leads to emulation of successful strategies. The effect, according to Neorealists, is that the core strategies...