These days, there is little question that climate change has arrived and poses one of the most serious threats to humanity’s and the planet’s futures. Here are the basic questions about climate change: What must we do? What should we do? What can we do? What could we do? What will we do? And why have we done so little?
Thirty years ago, at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, representatives from 150 countries signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, hoping to answer some of these questions. Today, after twenty-seven meetings of the Conference of the Parties, the “pathologies of climate governance,” as Paul G. Harris (2021) recently called the problem, have resulted in virtually no action on these questions, much less agreement on which of them is most relevant. That we could do something is evident; that we will do something is not....