This article considers the puzzle of Norway and Canada, two countries that have adopted ambitious Paris Agreement targets yet are also major fossil fuel exporters. To date, both countries have taken full advantage of the international convention that assigns responsibility only for emissions within a country’s borders. However, climate activists, First Nations, and green politicians increasingly have challenged fossil fuel production via campaigns centered on issues salient to voters in nonproducing regions: opposing new exploration licenses in Norway and pipelines in Canada. While supply-side campaigns have sometimes succeeded in ending expansion, neither country has seriously entertained restricting current production. We attribute these outcomes to continued public support for fossil fuel–driven prosperity; institutions that assign responsibility for production and climate to different government agencies; and the success of counternarratives that unilateral supply restrictions are futile, prosperity from petroleum exports will fund domestic clean-energy transitions, and gas exports advance global climate action.

This article investigates the roles of policy diffusion and policy learning in shaping the design of California’s cap-and-trade system. On the surface, it is very similar to other cap-and-trade programs, but in practice many detailed differences reflect active efforts by California policy-makers to avoid flaws that they saw in other systems, such as the EU ETS and the US East Coast’s Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. We assess how California’s cap-and-trade system emerged, the significance of policy diffusion, and the lessons for other trading systems by applying two broad sets of theoretical frames—the role of policy diffusion and the role of organized local political concerns. We find that despite the signature status of the trading system, California mostly relies on much less transparent and more costly direct regulation. We also find that California’s cap-and-trade system has developed mostly in its own, special political context, which hampers the feasibility of cross-border trading.

Strong rhetorical differences between the European Union and the United States on climate matters have been evident for almost two decades. Since the mid-2000s, such differences are becoming visible in their respective climate policies as well. We propose three explanations for differences in climate policy outcomes in the EU and the US. First, the agenda-setting privileges of their policy-makers are significantly different, influencing how agenda setters shape policies and link issues, such as energy and climate policy. Second, while issue linkage has helped overcome distributional obstacles in the EU, it has led to more complexity and greater policy obstacles in the US. Finally, legislative rules, procedures, and norms have constrained the coalition-building efforts of lawmakers in the two systems in different ways, affecting negotiation processes and outcomes. Such differences in agenda-setting privileges, potential for issue linkages, and legislative procedures in the EU and the US have left them wide apart in international climate negotiations.