The Climate Change Transparency Project focuses on uncovering previously closed and classified documents that illuminate the policy debates and decisions that have guided the United States through more than 40 years of climate change negotiations and global environmental issues. Project staff have filed hundreds of Freedom of Information Act requests and forced the State Department, Environmental Protection Agency, Treasury Department, Department of Energy and other federal agencies to release thousands of documents tracking decades of U.S. debates around climate change and environmental diplomacy, from the time of the Nixon administration, when the EPA was created and cross-border issues like acid rain dominated the discourse, to the 2015 Paris Agreement, to the present day, as the Biden administration confronts economic and security issues that are increasingly linked to climate change.
There is a substantial body of political science scholarship and policy analysis about climate change and environmental diplomacy, most if not all of which is based primarily on public documents or interviews with officials. These studies and analyses need to be augmented by greater access to records which document the process of policy making within the U.S. government as the White House, State Department, and other agencies—including Defense, the EPA, the CIA, Commerce, and Treasury Department—have sought to understand the technical issues involved and their implications for U.S. interests and policy objectives.
This project identifies and documents the major, high-level environmental concerns that have been the focus of many U.S. diplomatic efforts and agreements dating back to the 1970s—including the landmark Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act legislation—to the 1987 Montreal Protocol to Protect the Ozone Layer (agreed upon during the Reagan administration), the most successful environmental agreement reached to date. The cornerstone of the project focuses on efforts to reach agreement on a treaty to curb the greenhouse gas emissions that are driving global climate warming. These negotiations, carried out under the aegis of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, adopted in 1992, center on the Kyoto Protocol, adopted in 1997, and the efforts to reach agreement on a post-Kyoto agreement, which produced the Paris Agreement on Climate Change in December 2015.