After two grueling weeks of negotiations, late in 2009 the Copenhagen conference on global warming ended with a whimper. On nearly every major agenda item, including the need for a new treaty to replace the aging Kyoto Protocol, the meeting failed to produce a useful agreement. Diplomats did the easy things, such as making bold proclamations that global warming should be stopped at 2 degrees and promising huge new sums of money to help developing countries control their emissions and adapt to the changing climate. They also invited countries to make pledges for how they would contribute to these planetary goals. In the months since Copenhagen, analysts have shown that those national pledges won't come close to stopping global warming at 2 degrees. Many of the pledges are missing serious plans for how they will be fulfilled. And the new financial promises for developing countries are also slipping away. Even worse, while everyone agrees that more formal global talks are needed, there is little consensus on the best strategy.

As global talks have become stuck in gridlock, the picture inside the countries whose policies will matter most in determining the future of global warming isn't any more encouraging. Of the industrialized countries, for many years the members of European Union (EU) and Japan have made the biggest policy efforts.

In the late 1980s the United Nations began the first round of formal talks on global warming. Over the subsequent two decades the scientific understanding of climate change has improved and public awareness of the problem has spread widely. These are encouraging trends. But the diplomacy seems to be headed in the opposite direction. Early diplomatic efforts easily produced new treaties, such as the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. Those treaties were easy to agree upon yet had almost no impact on the emissions that cause global warming. As governments have tried to tighten the screws and get more serious, disagreements have proliferated and diplomacy has stuck in gridlock.

This book aims to explain the gridlock and offer a new strategy. My argument is that the lack of progress on global warming stems not just from the complexity and difficulty of the problem, which are fundamental attributes that are hard to change, but also from the failure to adopt a workable policy strategy, which is something that governments can change. Making that change will require governments, firms, and NGOs that are most keen to make a dent in global warming to rethink almost every chestnut of conventional wisdom. In this opening chapter, I will summarize my argument in six steps.

Step 1: why the science of global warming matters

Any serious effort to slow global warming must start with one geophysical fact. The main human cause of warming is carbon dioxide (CO2).

The first glimmer of dawn lights up the dark water that extends as far as the eye can see. The air is heavy with humidity. The silhouette of a ship anchored in the river stands out clearly. It is an oil tanker from the Urucu oilfield, 650 kilometres upstream, here to supply the refinery in the free-trade zone, where the leading companies of the Brazilian electronics industry are booming. The river is already bustling with local traffic. Small boats are unloading cargoes of bananas and manioc destined for the central marketplace, the metal arches of which extend along the river bank. Street vendors are beginning to spread out their merchandise on the pavement. The opera house is perched half way up the hill, its dome towering above the city. In a few hours' time, visitors will be crowding inside, admiring the stage and the gilt décor, comparable to anything the Paris opera has to offer.

We are in Manaus. Two million people live here, in the heart of the Amazonian rainforest, 1,500 kilometres from the mouth of the Amazon. In 1669, the Portuguese settlers established a trading post to signal their presence to the overly close Dutch explorers in Surinam. The town grew by leaps and bounds in the late nineteenth century. From 1890 to 1910 Manaus was the richest city in Latin America and one of the most prosperous anywhere in the world.

Liliana lives in the new housing development of Burlington Park in the San Gabriel Valley, eighteen miles east of Los Angeles. Her parents were attracted by the size of the houses and the large gardens. But like many of their fellow residents, they have found out what this way of life entails in their electricity bills and expenditure on petrol. The family budget is squeezed even tighter because of their monthly mortgage repayments on the house.

Liliana's family does not include its greenhouse gas emissions in the household budget. Each year it emits 6 tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) per person from its two cars and 8 tonnes from its electricity consumption. In total the family's carbon budget comes to 20 tonnes of CO2 for each member of the family. This is the average per person in the US. If all the planet's inhabitants lived like Liliana, world greenhouse gas emissions would be instantly three times as much.

Marjohan is fourteen, the same age as Liliana. He lives in the south-east of the island of Borneo. Like his two brothers, he helps his father grow rice. The family owns 2 hectares situated right below the village. Water is abundant here. They flood their fields in the time-honoured way. The use of fertilizer has revolutionized rice farming and they can now get two crops a year. The needs of the family are largely met, and the village grocer, a relative, sells the surplus.

The light is fast fading. The north wind is bitingly cold. But the chill does not discourage the many cyclists pedalling along the city streets. At the opera house by the town's docks they're getting ready for the evening performance. Behind its imposing roof, the last glimmer of daylight is reflected from the blades of the wind turbines offshore. We are in Copenhagen, a city where the environment is taken seriously.

A ship is inching its way under Oresund Bridge, which links Copenhagen to the Swedish city of Malmö. It is a bulk carrier, transporting coal loaded in Szczecin, Poland. It glides along the stretch of the Baltic Sea bordering the city, avoiding the wind turbines lined up like marker buoys in the water and berths behind the opera house. Its cargo is destined for Amagervaerket power station, situated midway between the opera and the wind farm.

The whole city is brightly lit. Light shining through the huge glass wall of the opera house casts multi-coloured glints across the water. Plumes of water vapour emerge from the three chimneys of the power station, now running at full capacity to meet peak demand for electricity.

From the Bella Center, the conference centre where the Copenhagen summit was held in December 2009, one can clearly make out the juxtaposed wind farm and thermal power station, symbols of tomorrow's and yesterday's worlds. What the negotiators discussed above all else were the options countries have in making the transition from yesterday's world to tomorrow's.

So far, I have left four loose ends in this book. Here I tie them up.

In Chapter 3 I concluded that the countries most enthusiastic about slowing global warming are likely to adopt quite varying national strategies for regulating emissions. It is unlikely that any of them will adopt simple economy-wide cap and trade programs that would let them make credible international promises to regulate their emissions at particular levels. That conclusion points to the need for flexibility when these countries negotiate their international commitments and also suggests that those commitments could become quite complex as these governments tighten the screws and implement highly diverse policies whose exact impact on emissions are hard to measure. But I have not shown how international negotiations can manage that complexity.

In Chapter 4 I argued that the success of efforts to slow global warming will hinge on engagement of countries that are, today, reluctant to spend their own resources on controlling emissions. I showed that these countries could make a much bigger dent in emissions with very little extra effort but that the current system of incentives – the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), notably – is not well matched to the real barriers that slow action. But I have not shown how a different system of incentives could work.

In Chapter 5, I showed that efforts to control emissions must be married to an active technology policy. I also showed that only a handful of countries need be engaged.

The town of Saumur on the river Loire is best known for its internationally reputed horse-training school, the Cadre Noir. Opulent residences rise up in tiers between the gently flowing river and the château perched on the hilltop. Time here seems to stand still. One can easily imagine bumping into characters from Balzac on the street corner. In fact the town is the setting for one of his most famous novels, Eugénie Grandet. Old father Grandet, the town's former cooper and a central figure in the novel, is the prototypal rentier or person of private means.

During his youth Grandet contributed to local prosperity through his barrel-making business. With the passage of time, he becomes a rentier. His properties are among the best located in the area and are particularly well served by public highways: a source of economic rent. Grandet's wine storage capacity enables him to sell his stocks when the vats of other producers are empty: a source of scarcity rent. His meadows bordering the Loire are more fertile than other land thanks to the alluvial deposits carried down by the river. Grandet therefore cut down the poplars that were covering the pasture in order to obtain this additional income: differential rent. When he is not contemplating his gold at nightfall, Grandet counts and re-counts his debt securities, which bring him fixed returns. Indeed the character has become ill from his rents.

Lodz Province, Poland. The town of Kleszczow has a little over 3,000 inhabitants, most of them farmers and retired people. It is part of the district of Belchatow, in the historical industry centre of Poland. Kleszczow is home to the largest coal-fired power station in Europe, its two main chimneys each as high as the Eiffel Tower creating a landmark that can be seen from a great distance on clear days. Every year Belchatow power station generates a fifth of Poland's electricity from its twelve generating units. It is owned by Polska Grupa Energetyczna (PGE), a company which also owns two lignite mines – lignite being the most carbon-emitting coal. This vertical integration ensures the plant's supplies. Belchatow also emits more carbon dioxide (CO2) than any other installation in Europe, around 30 million tonnes a year, or a third of the total emission of countries such as Portugal or Colombia.

Yorkshire, UK. Drax lies six miles south of Selby, famed for its Benedictine Abbey dating from 1069. The village had only 382 inhabitants at the last census. Since the closing of the village shop in 2007, which also served as the local sub-post office, the Huntsmans Arms pub is the only remaining business. Yet Drax is the site of the largest coal-fired power station in the UK. Its six generating units, with a total capacity of 4,000 megawatts (MW), supply 7 per cent of the country's electricity. The power station can process 36,000 tonnes of coal a day.

CO2 is a tough pollutant to manage. It is long-lived and most of its emissions are intrinsic to burning fossil fuels, which industrialized economies depend on. Any serious plan for taming CO2 will require intense international cooperation, but no country acting alone has much incentive to control its pollution. Worse, no country will adopt costly emission controls without confidence that its economic competitors are doing the same. These simple factors make the problem of global climate change a really hard one to solve.

This book has advanced six arguments. First, gridlock on global warming exists, in large part, because governments have adopted the wrong models to guide their diplomatic efforts. They have relied too much on the history of international environmental accords. But those models mostly don't work well for problems such as regulating CO2 that require complicated coordination of policies that are costly and thus affect national economic competitiveness. The hallmark of the CO2 problem is the need for interdependent commitments. What one country is willing to adopt depends on what its economic competitors are implementing. None of the history of international environmental cooperation offers robust models for that kind of cooperation. And in the few instances where international environmental diplomacy offers relevant precedents the community of global warming diplomats have largely drawn the wrong lessons. Following the wrong models has made a hard problem even harder to solve.

The atmosphere and greenhouse gases

1. The atmosphere is a thin layer of gas that becomes denser nearer to the ground. When we travel by air (at an altitude of 10 kilometres), around 70 per cent of the molecules comprising it, including greenhouse gases, are below us. At an altitude of 50 kilometres, one has passed through the ozone layer. Beyond that, the atmosphere gives way to empty space.

2. The Earth's atmosphere consists largely of nitrogen (78 per cent) and oxygen (21 per cent). Greenhouse gases (excluding water vapour) account for less than 0.04 per cent of the total. These percentages of the total volume exclude water vapour, the concentration of which (0–4 per cent) depends to a great extent on weather conditions.

3. The various greenhouse gases do not remain indefinitely in the atmosphere. But how long each gas stays there varies. A molecule of methane remains in the atmosphere for twelve years on average, a molecule of nitrous oxide 114 years, and industrial gases from hundreds up to thousands of years. Due to its very complex cycle, carbon dioxide (CO2) can remain there between two years and several thousand years.

4. […]

Most books on global warming policy start with a chapter on the science. Because that's been done so many times before, I will do something different. I start with a brief history of the science.

Scientifically, much of what was needed to start worrying about global warming was known in the late 1950s. Yet no society really became concerned until much later in the 1980s. The shift reflects a change in mindset about whether human activities could have adverse global consequences.

Although this book is about global warming, serious efforts to solve that problem really began with a different atmospheric problem: the ozone layer. From the early 1970s industrial societies worried – at first about supersonic airplanes and then spray cans – that they were thinning the life-protecting ozone layer. Ozone concerns changed the mindset and made it easier to spot and manage other global problems, including global warming. Unfortunately, the ozone experience also created a model for how to regulate global problems that worked well for ozone but is a terrible way to handle more complex and expensive problems like global warming. The wrongheadedness of that model is a topic for later in Chapter 7.

In reviewing the basic science of climate warming I boil it down to three central facts that matter for policy. At the top of that list is the fact that carbon dioxide (CO2), the chief human cause of warming, has a very long atmospheric lifetime.