This chapter examines two issues in U.S. foreign policy—the environment and energy. Concerns about air and water pollution, biodiversity, and climate change pose complex policy problems linked to issues like trade, development, human rights, and energy. Even though Washington has taken an active role in formulating agreements on some environmental challenges, it has been unwilling to assume leadership in confronting many others, like biodiversity and climate change. Because countries disproportionately contribute to these problems, questions about who should pay to solve them pose significant obstacles U.S. participation and even leadership.

            Energy and the environment are inseparable. Energy is a foreign-policy issue because America has long relied on foreign sources of oil and is an environmental issue because fossil fuels are a finite resource and are linked to global warming. Like other environmental issues, energy policy has an impact on economic development. Key terms include: biodiversity, climate change, collective goods, global commons, precautionary principle, sustainable environmental policy, transboundary externalities.