US environmentalism in comparative perspective

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank John Peterson for his helpful comments and Louise Maythorne for her excellent editorial assistance.

Notes

1. For a discussion of the institutional, ideological and practical barriers to a US green party, see Bomberg (2002, p. 310ff).

2. But note an environmental justice dimension can be found in some British anti-road protests (see Doherty 1999, Wall 1999).

3. And in any case, across several indicators the partisan divide on many issues remains extremely wide. See, for instance, the Economist's YouGov poll on partisan differences on issues of climate change, petrol taxes and other environmental degradation (Economist 2007a).

4. It also echoes closely the complaints levelled at both US and European groups by those in developing world (see Torgerson 2006).

5. For instance, the north eastern states' Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), which developed ‘out of despair at federal government's failure to tackle emissions growth’ (Economist 2007a) promises to cut emissions from power plants by 10% between 2009 and 2018. Because it requires an auctioning (rather than simply allocating or giving away) of all permits, it is a much more ambitious plan than EU's emissions trading scheme, which has included notoriously generous allocation of permits to national polluters.

6. The Evangelical Environmental Network (EEN) is perhaps best known for their campaign to limit auto emissions through their ‘What Would Jesus Drive?’ campaign, but their more general creation care aim is ‘to educate, inspire, and mobilize Christians in their effort to care for God's creation’ (Evangelical Environmental Network 2007).

7. According to Pew Research Center opinion poll in late 2007 over a third of Republican voters identified themselves as evangelicals. See http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=375