The United States and International Environmental Law: Living with an Elephant
Bibliographic record
Abstract
For many observers, the U.S. decision in 2001 to abandon the Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, encapsulates an alarming trend in American attitudes towards international environmental law. This article explores recent trends in U.S. approaches. It begins by canvassing the trajectory of U.S. practice since around the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio. This review suggests that some shifts in legal avenues for shaping relevant policy agendas have indeed occurred, but that it would be a mistake to treat one event - the U.S. withdrawal from Kyoto - as representative of the nature of these shifts. It then examines a range of possible explanations for the changing U.S. approach to international environmental law. These include factors related to the growth of treaty regimes and institutional structures, factors related to American power, domestic politics and attitudes towards international law, and factors specifically related to the administration of George W. Bush. Both the review of U.S. practice and the assessment of factors that might account for American policy suggest that the international environmental law community must carefully distinguish short-term developments from longer-term trends.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".