Despite great concern regarding the likely net negative effects of global warming in the long run, astonishingly little progress has been made to prevent such outcomes.

Though efforts to reduce global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have faltered, there do exist other climate policy options that may offer timely and relatively cheap methods for offsetting some of the harmful effects of climate change.

How can we separate real progress from hot air coming out of the global climate talks in Denmark?

Going into the Copenhagen climate change summit, the delegates appear to be competing over who can offer the most ambitious and least realistic targets.

Democrats pushing hardest for the Waxman-Markey climate change bill are determined to have it signed into law before the Copenhagen climate conference in December.

The enlargement of the European Union -- incorporating 10 new states, applicants largely from post-Communist Europe -- is the most important geostrategic event since the terrorist attacks on the United States on Sept. 11, 2001. Unlike the latter, however, it is mostly a benign process -- yet its impact on global affairs should not be underestimated.

‘A prolonged and solemn farce,” Churchill’s description of 1930s disarmament talks, applies even more accurately to the annual round of UN climate talks, which just wrapped up their 17th year of world-saving negotiations in Durban, South Africa, with another 11th-hour “breakthrough” that amounts only to agreeing to meet again next year and repeat the farce.

How is the far right responding to the failed Copenhagen talks, and what role might moderates now play?