A Plan B for Climate Agreements

U.N. negotiations are going nowhere, and greenhouse-gas emissions are soaring. Its time to move on.

In 2007, just before he accepted the Nobel Prize on behalf of the U.N.s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Rajendra Pachauri, the organizations leader, declared that the world was running out of time to prevent catastrophic global warming. If theres no action before 2012, thats too late, Pachauri told the New York Times. What we do in the next two or three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment.