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.

Canada held an election last Monday and the result was anything but boring. The headline story is that the Conservative Party of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who has headed minority governments since 2006, won an absolute majority of seats, 167 of 308, in the House of Commons. The Conservatives' triumph offers a couple of lessons that may be relevant to U.S. Republicans.

While it’s sometimes hard to distinguish the crackpot from the consequential, many sober scientists believe that even far-out schemes are worth exploring, considering the alternatives.

With all the smoke from those thousands of burning cars in the rioting suburbs, the French have now completely blown their targets for carbon emissions under the Kyoto Protocol.

With the collapse of cap-and-trade in Congress, it is no longer possible to avoid the inconvenient truth that serious carbon constraints are a non-starter.

Why does talk of human nature inspire such fear and loathing in so many people? It challenges three deeply held beliefs: the blank slate (the mind has no innate structure), the noble savage (people are naturally good), and the ghost in the machine (behavior is not caused by physical events)....

Aftertwelve years of the frozen selfishness of Jean Chretien / Paul Martin Liberal government in Canada, spring at last is in the air.

As moral questions intensify, the answers offered by the case that struck down Canada's abortion laws will look more and more inadequate, shallow, short-sighted and obsolete.