For twenty years the international diplomatic community has held continuous diplomatic talks on global warming but those efforts have produced very little. This chapter explains why.

My starting point is the fact that global warming is a hard problem to solve. As I showed in Chapter 2, one of the central reasons for the difficulty is that the chief pollutant, CO2, is an intrinsic by-product of the modern fossil fuel-powered economy. Deep cuts in CO2 are needed, but making those cuts will influence the economic competitiveness of nations. National policies must be interdependent. That is, what one country will be willing to adopt depends on the efforts its trading partners are making. The benefits from successful cooperation – less global warming – are abstract and arise mainly in the distant future. In the best of worlds it was never going to be easy to manage this problem.

My argument in this chapter is that when the global warming problem appeared on their radar screen the world's top diplomats opened a toolbox that had all the wrong tools for the job. They thought global warming was just another environmental problem, but the standard tools of environmental diplomacy don't work well on problems, such as global warming, that require truly interdependent cooperation. The diplomats took a hard problem and made it even harder to manage by choosing the wrong strategy. Here I will focus on the four tools that were the centerpiece of that toolbox.