What Makes Greenhouse Sense?

Thomas C. Schelling

From Foreign Affairs, May/June 2002

Summary:  The Kyoto Protocol need not be a partisan issue. Climate change needs to be addressed, but the 1997 pact was never going to pass the Senate. By abandoning it, Bush at least avoided hypocrisy. It might take a century to reach a consensus on solving the greenhouse gas problem, but that is no excuse for wasting time getting started.

Thomas C. Schelling is Distinguished University Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at the University of Maryland.

While European countries are lamenting the U.S. defection from the Kyoto Protocol, a major U.S. unilateral initiative in research and development oriented toward phasing out fossil fuels over the next century would both produce welcome returns and display American seriousness about global warming.

The greenhouse gas issue will persist through the entire century and beyond. Even though the developed nations have not succeeded in finding a collaborative way to approach the issue, it is still early. We have been at it for only a decade.

But time should not be wasted getting started. Global climate change may become what nuclear arms control was for the past half century. It took more than a decade to develop a concept of arms control. It is not surprising that it is taking that long to find a way to come to consensus on an approach to the greenhouse problem.