On a celebratory night in late 2016, the Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower were lit up in green to remind the world to implement the Paris climate agreement. Yet in recent years, climate legislation in the United States has been stuck at a red light, most recently because Joe Manchin, a conservative-leaning Democratic US Senator from West Virginia, single-handedly made a hostage of America's commitment to the Paris agreement's decarbonisation targets.
But now, after previously striking a lethal blow to US President Joe Biden's $2 trillion Build Back Better Act -- the most ambitious climate legislation in US history -- Mr Manchin has come around in support of a modest substitute bill that will include hundreds of billions in federal funding to support the clean-energy transition. At a time when extreme weather events are ravaging many parts of the world, the compromise package comes as a big relief. But it is also somewhat disappointing for a beleaguered Democratic Party that is still reeling from the Supreme Court's reversal of Roe v Wade, and for an American electorate that is increasingly anxious about climate change.
Efforts to establish a global climate-policy governance regime have taken a long, zigzagging path, passing through 26 annual "conferences of parties" (COPs). The process got off to a promising start, in 1988, with the creation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world's premier climate-science entity. And that was soon followed by the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, where 178 countries adopted the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
