Instead, I spent yesterday playing with data from ENTRI (Environmental Treaties and Resource Indicators, an online database of environmental treaties). This was the first thing I came up with, environmental treaties signed by country, per decade:
Think of this as four categories:
Europe (in greens)
Japan
US
Developing countries (in blues)
This had one or two things I didn't expect. For instance, I would have expected that Japan might behave most similarly to the European countries - at least in the last couple of decades. But actually, Japan seems closest to Brazil - sometimes outperforming China and India, but not by as much as, say, the US, much less Europe.
Europe seems to sign a lot more environmental treaties than anybody else. At first glance, that bears out my expectations. But first, a quick look at the actual treaties suggests that that might be at least partly because of a couple of big batches of agreements that were signed just by Europeans (I think they might be intra-EU things). That might make them, in a sense, the EU version of EPA rulings. It's certainly not clear that we would expect the EU to be signing more environmental treaties than the US all the way back to the 1950s, given that my understanding is that the US was actually something of a leader in environmentalism in the 1970s.
Speaking of which: the 1970s appear to be when environmental treaty-making peaked. Although I don't know if that might change if I filter out extraneous stuff like intra-EU agreements.
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