The climate system of the planet earth, and the energy system built by those who inhabit the earth, are today seen as the integrated elements of a single problem: global warming. In turn, scientific inquiry, public concern, and policy prescription have given rise to an international regime for controlling the behavior of the climate through management of the global energy system. In this chapter we explain why this regime, and in particular its codification through the Kyoto Protocol, is a failure. Our central point is simple: protecting people and the environment from the impacts of climate is a different problem from reducing greenhouse gas emissions to combat global warming. The policies that have resulted from combining these two problems are, as a consequence, failing to meaningfully address either problem. Policies to reduce global warming must be pursued independently of policies to reduce climate impacts.

First we explain why the Kyoto Protocol is not achieving its environmentally modest goals, a failure that has no connection to the refusal of the United States to sign onto the treaty, but rather reflects the complexity of energy systems and their management. We then consider the impacts of climate on society through the lens of Hurricane Katrina. Such impacts are unrelated to global warming, and cannot be addressed by emissions reductions. Instead, they require policies specifically focused on reduction of socioeconomic vulnerability to climate.

But emissions reductions are a key societal goal, and next we discuss the role of technological innovation in pursuing that goal. Current policies, embodied in Kyoto, are inappropriate and insufficient for making the necessary progress. A cornerstone of our argument is that much of the failure to date of climate change policy originates in a misunderstanding of the appropriate roles of science and technology in social and political change. Proponents of action on global warming have treated scientific evidence as the central catalyst for motivating necessary change, while technological advance has been viewed as a second-order consequence of such change. We argue that this reasoning is backwards, and that technological innovation is a much more effective scaffolding upon which to address energy policies than scientific knowledge.

The Kyoto Protocol is not effectively addressing the climate impacts problem or the energy technology problem. Although Kyoto is often portrayed as only a first step toward establishing an effective international climate change regime, we conclude that it is a step in the wrong direction.