20 Agencies Coordinated to Pressure Developing Nations Into Greenhouse Gas Limits
By June Hargrove ·
Specific incentives used to bind the Global South stay hidden, though the Pentagon's involvement in 1997 climate strategy treated greenhouse gas emissions as a theater of operations.
A memorandum dated July 15, 1997, captures the United States government in a state of wide-scale coordination, attempting to carve out a position for the upcoming Kyoto Protocol negotiations. Written by Rafe Pomerance, then the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Environment and Development in the State Department's Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs, the document was addressed to Eileen B. Claussen and others.
According to the file's catalogue entry, Pomerance forwarded a draft paper to twenty different agencies. This was not a narrow diplomatic exercise but a broad interagency effort to synchronize the U.S. approach to the Global South. The archive's description records that the paper explained the U.S. position on "controlling greenhouse gas emissions in developing countries" and outlined the specific "incentives to encourage developing countries to support the U.S. proposal for the Kyoto Protocol."
Twenty Agencies
To understand the scale of this effort is to understand how Washington viewed the climate crisis not as a shared ecological emergency, but as a diplomatic chess match. The involvement of twenty agencies suggests a level of scrutiny and strategy usually reserved for high-stakes security transitions or major trade wars. The public record establishes that the Kyoto Protocol, adopted in December 1997, sought to extend the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) by committing state parties to reduce greenhouse gas emissions based on scientific consensus.
However, the catalogue entry for Pomerance's memorandum highlights a more transactional undercurrent. The U.S. was not merely seeking a treaty; it was seeking a way to bind developing nations to emissions controls. The mention of "incentives" suggests a framework of leverage, where environmental compliance was likely traded for other diplomatic or economic concessions. The record does not specify what those incentives were, leaving a gap where the actual price of cooperation should be.
Document imagery from nsarchive.gwu.edu From the files: nsarchive.gwu.edu
Developing Country Paper
The draft in question, titled the "Developing Country Paper," served as a roadmap for managing the varying "views of other negotiating blocs." In the lead-up to Kyoto, the divide between the industrialized North and the developing South was the primary fault line of the negotiations. The public record shows that the Protocol eventually entered into force in 2005 with 192 parties, though the U.S. relationship with the treaty remained fraught for decades.
By analyzing the catalogue entry, it becomes clear that the State Department was preoccupied with "negotiating strategies" to bridge this gap—or perhaps to manage it in a way that favored U.S. interests. The document's existence points to a period where the U.S. was actively calculating how to move the Global South toward a specific version of the Protocol, one that aligned with Washington's domestic and international priorities. While related files exist in other archives—such as the National Security Archive's records on the UNFCCC glossary or the Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) volumes on Japan—the specific tactical nuances of the Pomerance memo remain locked behind the summary provided by the catalogue.
Sherri Goodman
Perhaps the most telling detail in the archive's description appears on page two of the memorandum. There, the record mentions Sherri Goodman, the Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Environmental Security. The inclusion of a high-ranking Department of Defense official in a draft paper about greenhouse gas emissions and developing countries is a stark indicator of how the U.S. viewed climate change.
Environmental security is a term of art that often translates to the securitization of nature. When the Pentagon is involved in climate negotiations, the conversation shifts from atmospheric CO2 levels to geopolitical stability, resource scarcity, and the potential for conflict in the Global South. The catalogue entry explicitly notes that Goodman's mention indicates the "DOD’s continuing involvement in climate change policy and negotiations."
This presence suggests that the "strategies" Pomerance was coordinating across twenty agencies were not solely environmental. They were likely tied to the broader U.S. security apparatus, ensuring that any agreement on emissions would not undermine the strategic interests of the Defense Department. The climate was being treated as a theater of operations.
Beyond the interagency coordination and the Pentagon's shadow, the catalogue entry notes that the memorandum addressed "domestic opposition." It does not list the names of the critics or the specific industries that were lobbying against the U.S. proposal at the time. The record leaves the nature of this internal resistance unstated, focusing instead on the outward-facing strategy to manage the developing world.