Professor James S. Hoyte, Assistant to the President, and Lecturer on Environmental Science and Public Policy, moderates this panel discussion on the politics and economics of mitigating climate change.

Introduced by Professor Hoyte are Robert Stavins, the Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, and Richard N. Cooper, the Maurits C. Boas Professor of International Economics at Harvard University.

Providing context for the panel, Hoyte states that although both professors have staked out ground as critics of the Kyoto Protocol, both have different approaches and strategies on how to address the problem of climate change. As previously indicated by Professor McElroy, the start of the political context for addressing climate change was the Framework Convention, in which the United States was an important participant in establishing nonbinding goals, which led through a series of meetings to the Kyoto Protocol.

States Professor Hoyte, on one hand, one of McElroy's most salient points was the major role that the U.S. plays in constructing a solution to the global climate change problem. On the other hand, McElroy made a point to state that the Convention and Protocol did not lay any responsibilities with developing countries such as China, India, and others. Notes Hoyte, if neither the U.S. nor the developing countries are an integral part of the solution, it's pretty daunting to conceive of how we might get to developing any solution.