It is clear that any effort to devise comprehensive national-level climate policies reaches by necessity into a hornets’ nest of established economic practices, social relationships and deeply held paradigmatic beliefs (or disbeliefs). Reducing CO2 emissions generated by energy production and use cuts deeply into existing economic structure, transportation, and consumption practices, and few areas of national economic, social and cultural fabric are not fundamentally disturbed by a new climate politics. This paper analyzes the drivers and obstacles involved in developing US climate policy. Working from a neo-institutional perspective that emphasizes the rule-based nature of social interaction, it makes use of two lines of sociological theorizing that take environment–society interactions as their central concern. Known respectively as the Treadmill of Production (Schnaiberg 1980) and Ecological Modernization Theory (Spaargaren and Mol 1992). These theories emphasize the various forces that sustain continuity and or facilitate change. Processes of production and consumption are central to both these theories, and both analyze how social dynamics, actors, institutional arrangements & processes structure specific kinds of additions & withdrawals (resource use and pollution) in production. In relation to societal change processes that take account of ecological constraints, these two lines of theorizing represent opposite sides of a single coin. Among other things, the paper analyzes the key forces that helped bring US climate policy to a tipping point during the first two years of the Obama administration, and identifies the underlying dynamics that appear poised to carry it into the future.
