I have a piece up on the Guardian site arguing that George W. Bush isn’t really the major obstacle to the United States confronting climate change – it’s the American character itself:

The great carbon debate is only just beginning in America, and it’s not clear where it will go. The US could forge a broad consensus on carbon and use it to lead the world to action on climate change. But another, more likely outcome is what we’ve seen in many high-stakes political debates here: endless talk and only incremental action.

Let’s start with the fundamentals. The US rarely follows a European model for its major government programmes – just look at healthcare. Climate change is likely to be no exception. America’s geographical isolation and its superpower ways don’t exactly equip it well for the kind of painstaking, sustained political coordination that will be required to confront global warming. Americans are used to knocking heads together, not sending bureaucrats off to calibrate our CO2 emissions with those of other nations.

Current American development patterns, predicated on wide-open spaces, mobility and SUVs, are obviously going to have to change. But it’s going to be hard to sell people on policies designed to raise energy costs even higher, as capping carbon emissions will.

Finally, the American political system is constructed in ways that allow individual interest groups to hold it hostage at the expense of the national or global interest. The combined lobbying clout of oil and coal companies, along with the large industries that emit the most CO2, dwarfs that of environmental groups – or any interest group, for that matter.

The question, then, is whether the U.S. political system can be shaken loose from its deeply-ingrained habits to address a rapidly (in generational terms anyway) deteriorating situation, and how this might be done. A lot depends on how firmly committed Bush’s successor is to doing something serious. McCain appears on a track to pull back from cap-and-trade. Obama, meanwhile, will have a lot on his plate – could he, for example, tackle both major health care reform and cap-and-trade in one term, with a recession underway to boot? My pessimistic take: it will take more pain in the form of natural disasters, droughts, and other dislocations directly traceable to climate change to raise America from its torpor – and by then it will probably too late for political action to make a big difference.

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