Climate Change, Global Governance, United States Climate Change with an American Face

Greetings! My name is Michael Franczak, and I’m a historian of US foreign policy and the world economy. My first book, Global Inequality and American Foreign Policy in the 1970s, shows how US foreign policy elites responded to the “Group of 77” developing countries’ demand for a New International Economic Order (NIEO). It’ll be out with Cornell University Press this June—please go buy it soon!

I’m now writing a new book, on climate change and US foreign policy after the Cold War. And for the next week, I’ll be reporting to you, live, from the 26th meeting of the United Nations Conference of the Parties, or COP-26, where global North-South divisions loom large. Most COP-26 “explainers” you’ll see in establishment US outlets (the NYT, WSJ, CFR) will contain the same useful but limited facts: who, what, where, when, why? My goal in the following pieces (this is the first of three) is to bring to you, the Foreign Exchanges reader, a more unique and focused perspective, through a mix of history and on-the-ground commentary from inside the UN’s Blue Zone.

The US has a lot of catching up to do at Glasgow. It hasn’t attended a COP since 2015 (COP-21) in Paris, where the eponymous Agreement emerged. Finally, it seemed then, all countries—North and South—had committed to establishing rules by which states that failed to meet their emissions targets would literally pay a price through a global tax on carbon.

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