U.s. Climate Change Foreign Policy Making, From The Bali Road Map

As the largest economy in the world, the United States takes up most of the greenhouse emissions of the globe, as a result the States matters a lot in global efforts of preventing global warming and the climate change.Over the past 20 years, the United States has been kept changing with regard to its policies toward the global climate change. At the very beginning of the 1990s, it acted as quite an active role in such international cooperation and made great contribution to the climate-change regime building. In 1997, the United States said yes to The Kyoto Protocol. In 2001, however, the Bush Administration announced that The Kyoto Protocol would be counter-productive to the US economy and national interest, thus the US would not accept the obligations imposed through this Protocol. In 2007, the United States, although reluctantly, signed The Bali Roadmap and was planning to reclaim its leading role in climate change preventing efforts.This paper would be divided into four main parts, of which the first part provides a brief introduction to The Bali Roadmap and the negotiation process; the second part makes summary to the United States stance toward The Bali Roadmap as well as that of other chief powers; the third part, being the core of this paper, would focus on the motivation which leads to the change of American stance toward the global climate change, and the fourth part draws a conclusion for this paper and makes prediction on the future direction of the United States climate change policies.