Global warming is almost universally seen as a dire threat. It has prompted repeated efforts to forge a global agreement on the means to reduce the threat. Global efforts seem repeatedly to have failed almost surely because of the problems inherent in collective action. Developing countries want the world to look backward and allocate the lion’s share of corrective action and costs to the developed countries. The developed countries argue that we must be forward looking, allocating significant costs to the future large emitters, namely the developing countries. Each argument is just the right rhetorical device to advance the interests of one set of governments at the expense of another.

Global agreements like the Kyoto Protocol attracted worldwide attention and enthusiasm. Almost every national government signed on to the terms of the Kyoto Protocol. That made for terrific headlines, but once we probe beneath the surface we discover, just as we should expect, that so many signed on because the agreement was shallow. It provided few mechanisms to enforce violations, flexibility to get credit for meeting reduced greenhouse gas targets even when no reductions occurred and for the vast majority of signatories it asked for nothing in terms of climate change abatement. The Copenhagen summit was an even bigger failure. When offered financial assistance to help defray the cost of abatement for developing economies, China balked. It objected to the string that was attached. Those using the fund were required to observe real transparency so that their compliance could be monitored and, if they failed to comply, they could be punished. It is much easier to subscribe to the rhetoric of climate abatement than to the costly political action it requires.

A bilateral approach between key emitters may improve the prospects of politically tenable solutions. This is especially true if there is a focus on large-coalition emitters and a properly designed system for balancing costs, benefits, and cash transfers. We saw a hypothetical example of this involving the United States and Brazil. Perhaps in the future we will see this bilateral arrangement tried out and discover how it works or what impediments it faces. Ultimately, effective greenhouse gas emissions seem either to require bold unilateral action by wealthy societies like the United States or small international agreements rather than quixotic pursuit of global solutions to this global problem.