Before Sept. 11, one of the hottest issues in international relations was the UN Convention on Climate Change and its Kyoto Protocol. Negotiated for more than 8 years, most of the world's countries finally signed the treaty this past Summer while the US watched from the sidelines. Europeans accused the US of endangering the planet, while the US accused Europeans of being unrealistic and signing an "unimplementable" treaty. In fact, discussions on climate change had become so heated that people were talking about a growing "US-European rift." The emergence of a common enemy has overcome these divisions, but the problems surrounding climate change remain. Sooner or later, these will need to be addressed. Like terrorism, global warming is a threat to all countries.

One way of resolving this dispute may be to create a series of markets in greenhouse gases. Believe it or not, the use of markets to control pollution is already widespread. And the Kyoto protocol itself calls on countries to use market mechanisms to reduce their emissions of the gases responsible for climate change. In fact, gray markets in carbon are already in operation in the US (trading tens of millions of dollars) and various European countries are in the process of establishing government-sanctioned markets in greenhouse gases at the national level. In fact, the only developed country that hasn't begun exploring the creation of such markets is the US. Join us for a discussion on climate change, the US position towards Kyoto, and how markets might help the world address some of its trickiest environmental problems, including the current impasse on global warming.