Reading the climate news in recent weeks, one might start to wonder who won the last election.

‘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.

The international diplomacy of climate change is the most implausible and unpromising initiative since the disarmament talks of the 1930s, and for many of the same reasons; that the Kyoto Protocol and its progeny are the climate diplomacy equivalent of the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 that promised to end war (a treaty that is still on the books, by the way), and finally, that future historians are going to look back on this whole period as the climate policy equivalent of wage and price controls to fight inflation in the 1970s.

This book considers the driving elements behind the benefits and costs of climate protection via Kyoto or similar international agreements that follow.

This volume investigates the potential performance of the Kyoto Protocol's international trading mechanisms in the presence of diverse types of domestic greenhouse policy instruments.

What do the endlessly repeating cycle of futile Eurozone rescue talks and the endlessly repeating cycle of futile annual UN climate summits have in common? Put more plainly, what accounts for the unreality of both efforts, such that "breakthrough" agreements are soon recognized to be ineffective, if not fraudulent?

In a move that stunned the world, the Bush administration withdrew U.S. support for the Kyoto Protocol that addresses climate change. The protocol, which was never submitted for Senate approval, would have limited greenhouse gas emissions from developed countries. The question is what to put in its place. As...

Can international regimes be effective means to restrain carbon emissions?