Susan Biniaz, lead US climate lawyer from 1989 to 2017, provides an analysis of the role and perspective of the United States. According to Biniaz, US policy toward an international agreement on climate change was guided by four primary objectives: it should apply to developing countries, incorporate self-determined mitigation commitments, reflect a balance between binding and non-binding provisions, and include strong mechanisms for reporting and review. The chapter traces how the United States sought to promote these objectives in the years leading up to Paris, identifying the Major Economies Forum as a key process to build trust and identify potential “landing zones”. Stronger US-China bilateral engagement played a crucial role. Biniaz shows how the shape of the negotiation table can matter and how informal “huddles” have played an important role. The chapter ends with a commentary by Jonathan Pershing, former US negotiator and Program Director at the World Resources Institute, which highlights the diplomacy and discussions, often behind the scenes, required to assess the credibility of proposed nationally determined contributions.

The first step toward meaningful progress on climate change is to be realistic about institutions – both about how existing institutions, such as national governments, can be brought to bear on the problem, and also about the prospects for creating powerful new international institutions. It is, in essence, a decision about whether it is more productive to bring existing tools, however imperfect, to bear on the problem or to design new and better tools at the international level. The latter course has attractions, but the risk is that the design process may go on indefinitely – with greenhouse gas emissions rising unchecked – without producing a viable new institution. Such has been the case over the last decade as attention has focused on designing the Kyoto Protocol, an elaborate new international institution without any real precedent that may do nothing to slow emissions.

In this chapter we argue that a better alternative would be to tackle climate change with simpler policies that can be carried out by national governments immediately. As David Victor noted in chapter 4, that process is happening by default already. We discuss key characteristics needed in an effective approach to climate change and argue that prospects for creating a powerful international institution to control greenhouse gas emissions are dim at best. We then outline one policy, an internationally coordinated system of national policies based on a hybrid tradable permit mechanism, that can be implemented with minimal development of new international institutions.