International Environmental Policy: Interests and the Failure of the Kyoto Process, Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen and Aynsley Kellow, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2002, pp. xi, 214

This valuable critique of climate change politics is written by two of its leading observers. The authors—who variously describe themselves as skeptical, dissident or agnostic about the scientific issues—acknowledge that their views on the process are controversial and unpopular. Why, they ask (1), was Kyoto so widely embraced? Unlike other complex international agreements, the Protocol has been iconized. To criticize it, they write, is to attack not only the “moral crusade” (104) of environmentalism but also the global development agenda (110). Behind the complaint is a well-crafted argument about the inadequacies of science as a guide to policy, and a detailed account of what they see as the politicization of climate science. The science, in sum, has been “inescapably tied up with the play of interests from the outset,” and “reflects, rather than simply drives, politics” (6–7).