According to Professor Cooper, there are three structural problems in addressing global climate change. First, climate change is a global problem, and because all countries contribute to this problem, all countries must get involved in its solution. Second, actions to mitigate global climate change involve risks of incurring costs in the present and offer highly uncertain benefits in the distant future, making this an unattractive investment to politicians facing reelection every two to five years. Third, in order to be effective, actions to mitigate climate change have to be taken by hundreds of millions of firms and households.

This need for mass participation makes the requirements for international agreements about climate unique. Most other international agreements bind the behavior of governments as they relate to other governments. In the case of climate change, however, governments need to agree with other governments about what their residents need to do. This poses a much greater challenge than is true with the typical treaty. For all of these reasons, collective actions on policy change won't be effective. Societies typically take dramatic action only in response to dramatic events, and Cooper says that it will take at least three really hot summers in a row even to attract the attention of the body politic to this issue, and even then the prospect for action is less probable because of the need for wide international involvement.

Cooper presents two observations about how we should not deal with climate change. First he describes the work of Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish statistician, environmentalist, and former member of Greenpeace, who asserted that many environmentalist claims are based on flimsy evidence or mere conjectures. Lomborg’s book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, was hotly challenged by Danish environmentalists; the outcry, says Cooper, took on "the smell of a historical witch hunt." Claims and counterclaims should be assessed coolly, on the basis of evidence and cogent reasoning, he advises, not on the basis of sentiment. Second, Cooper warns against dealing with this complex problem by rallying around some kind of overly simple solution and ramming it through the political process. That has been the approach of some European governments with respect to the Kyoto Protocol.

Although Cooper considers the Kyoto Protocol a flawed document, and says the Bush administration was wise not to sign it, he adds that it was wrong of the administration not to offer a viable alternative. States Cooper, The administration's program of voluntary reductions of 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions between 2000 and 2010, he states, can only be described as laughable. With American businesses competing against foreign firms, and companies trying desperately trying to cut costs, they cannot voluntarily incur expensive new commitments.

The substance of the Bush climate policy is to rely on technical fixes: fuel cells that replace oil as automotive fuel, large-scale sequestration of carbon dioxide, and nuclear energy as a replacement for coal-fired generation of electricity and hydrogen. The strategy of relying on such technical solutions is not absurd, Cooper explains, but their time frame exceeds the next decade. We have time, Cooper says; the question is whether we have the perseverance.