A climate treaty without the US Congress: Using executive powers to overcome the 'Ratification Straitjacket'
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The issue of US ratification of international environmental treaties is a recurring obstacle for environmental multilateralism, including the climate regime. Despite the perceived importance of the role of the US to the success of any future international climate agreement, there has been little direct coverage in terms of how an effective agreement can specifically address US legal participation. This paper explores potential ways of allowing for US legal participation in an effective climate treaty. Possible routes forward include the use of domestic legislation such as section 115 (S115) of the Clean Air Act (CAA), and the use of sole-executive agreements, instead of Senate ratification. Legal participation from the US through sole-executive agreements is possible if the international architecture is designed to allow for their use. Architectural elements such as varying legality and participation across an agreement (variable geometry) could allow for the use of sole-executive agreements. Two broader models for a 2015 agreement with legal participation through sole-executive agreements are constructed based upon these options: a modified pledge and review system and a form of variable geometry composed of number of opt-out, voting based protocols on specific issues accompanied with bilateral agreements on mitigation commitments with other major emitters through the use of S115 and sole-executive agreements under the Montreal Protocol and Chicago Convention (Critical Mass Governance). While there is no single solution, Critical Mass Governance appears to provide the optimum combination of tools to effectively allow for US legal participation whilst ensuring an effective treaty.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.021 | 0.034 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".