All Costs and No Benefits: Economic Expertise and Media Coverage of US Climate Change Policy Debates, 1997-2001

Prior research demonstrates how the American climate countermovement prevented significant climate policy by framing mitigation as expensive and unnecessary. We expand on this research by examining the economic arguments deployed by both opponents and proponents of climate mitigation in the debates over the Kyoto Protocol from 1997-2001. Through an analysis of 790 articles in three national newspapers alongside key documents, we find that the dominant economic framing contrasted competing claims about the cost of mitigation (whether it would have a large or small impact on the American economy). In contrast, virtually no actors - including proponents - argued that Kyoto would provide substantial benefits to the US in terms of reduced climate impacts, in part because prominent economic models ignored those impacts or assumed them to be small. This analysis suggests that mainstream economic expertise may have contributed to the failure of the United States to implement substantial climate policy.