“Branding Kyoto”: The Rhetorical Uses of the Kyoto Protocol by American and Canadian Legislators, 1998-2008.

In the wake of the adoption of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, the American and Canadian governments have taken different environmental policy pathsâ€"Canada has ratified the agreement while the United States has not. But while officially approving the emissions plan, the Canadian government has not acted on its aims and objectives. Meanwhile, the United States has supported other environmental agreements, such as the APEC Sydney Declaration for Climate Change, also signed by Canada. These redirections and evasions serve to rhetorically undermine and defocus the Kyoto initiatives. In both countries, approaches to climate change have been politically and rhetorically opportunistic. In light of the ambiguous defeat of Kyoto in Canada and the United States a political discourse has emerged that has adopted the term “Kyoto” as a rhetorical tool to describe poor environmental policy. Using the debate transcripts from the American House of Representatives and the Canadian House of Commons this interdisciplinary and international panel will investigate the rhetoric of Kyoto from three unique perspectives: that of a rhetorician, that of a political scientist, and that of a biologist. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]