Climate and Energy Policy Changes in Germany, Japan and the United States: Actors' Beliefs and Paradigm Shift
Posted: 4 May 2020
Date Written: September 1, 2019
Abstract
Climate change is no longer an uncertain disaster that scientists have predicted will occur in the distant future, but a threat to personal, societal, and international security that is close at hand, an impending apocalypse (cf. Catton 1980, Methmann and Rothe 2012). In 2015, the Paris Agreement was adopted, under which all Parties – not only industrialized countries, but also developing countries – committed to making their best efforts to mitigate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions through nationally determined contributions (NDCs) in order to restrict the global mean temperature rise to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels, and to ultimately prevent a dangerous level of climatic change. However, very few nations actually undertake sufficient efforts to achieve this common goal. The Climate Action Tracker, which covers 32 countries, including all of the biggest emitters, has similar findings; there is not one role model country, and if present policies continue unchanged, the global mean temperature will rise by about 3.4 °C above pre-industrial levels (Climate Analytics et al. 2018). Why do states fail to take sufficient measures to address this global threat in a cooperative manner? This article addresses the above question with the focus on actors' perceptions. After explaining climate and energy policy changes in each country for three decades, the article compares actors' beliefs by undertaking structured interviews to stakeholders. Also comparing beliefs with those identified in the past two rounds of interviews undertaken in Germany and Japan, this article also analyses the secular change of actors' beliefs. The article concludes that actors' beliefs are not largely different in three countries and that a gradual change of beliefs are observed in Germany and Japan in this round of interviews.
Keywords: Climate and Energy Policy, Beliefs, Stakeholders, Paradigm Shift, Non-incremental Policy Change
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