Daniel Sarewitz and Roger Pielke, Jr. have a new chapter in press that will be published in Controversies in Science and Technology, Volume 2, edited by Daniel Lee Kleinman, Karen Cloud-Hansen, Christina Matta, and Jo Handelsman. (prepublication version here in PDF) Their chapter, The Steps Not Yet Taken, has useful insights.

Our central point is simple: protecting people and the environment from the impacts of climate is a different problem from reducing greenhouse gas emissions to combat global warming. The policies that have resulted from combining these two problems are, as a consequence, failing to meaningfully address either problem. Policies to reduce global warming must be pursued independently of policies to reduce climate impacts.

Good point. Confusing these problems with one another, and then prescribing policies that address that confused muddle, has failed and must fail.

First we explain why the Kyoto Protocol is not achieving its environmentally modest goals, a failure that has no connection to the refusal of the United States to sign onto the treaty, but rather reflects the complexity of energy systems and their management. . .

Current policies, embodied in Kyoto, are inappropriate and insufficient for making the necessary progress. A cornerstone of our argument is that much of the failure to date of climate change policy originates in a misunderstanding of the appropriate roles of science and technology in social and political change. Proponents of action on global warming have treated scientific evidence as the central catalyst for motivating necessary change, while technological advance has been viewed as a second-order consequence of such change. We argue that this reasoning is backwards, and that technological innovation is a much more effective scaffolding upon which to address energy policies than scientific knowledge.

The Kyoto Protocol is not effectively addressing the climate impacts problem or the energy technology problem. Although Kyoto is often portrayed as only a first step toward establishing an effective international climate change regime, we conclude that it is a step in the wrong direction.

Right again. Any policy targeted at the confused muddle will fail, but failing to grasp the importance of technological innovation compounds the error.

The above grafs are from the introduction, selecting mostly the parts about the failures of climate change policy. Their idea that this stems at least in part from confusing climate management with impact management has merit, but I don't think it is sufficient to explain the situation. They explain further:

U.S. President George W. Bush saved the Kyoto Protocol. By refusing to even consider bringing the treaty before the U.S. Senate for a debate and vote over ratification, Bush ostentatiously ceded the moral high ground to those other nations—all 163 of them—that signed onto the treaty and brought it into force. In so doing, he shifted the world’s attention onto America’s scurrilous role in refusing to take seriously the problem of global climate change, and away from the inevitable failure of the international governance regime that led to Kyoto. . .

Had Bush and his advisors been a bit more clever, they would at the very least have voiced support for the treaty, and might even have pushed the Senate to ratify it. Besides fellow Kyoto-non-ratifier Australia, many of the Annex I nations that actually have ratified Kyoto—including Canada, Japan, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand, Finland, Norway, Denmark, and Austria—are failing to meet the treaty’s requirements for greenhouse gas emissions reductions, and have little or no prospect of doing so before the treaty expires in 2012. 4 Had the U.S., as the world’s biggest energy user and greenhouse gas emitter, simply joined that group of scofflaws, the fact that Kyoto’s emissions reduction goals were impossibly ambitious (even as they were, at the same time, environmentally inconsequential) would have become obvious to all the world, and the treaty could quickly have been pronounced dead, or at least abandoned to its death throes as the inertia stored up in the tens of thousands of people who depend on the international climate regime for a living and for ideological sustenance inexorably dissipated.

It's not a compelling argument. The world will not miraculously come to its senses when Kyoto fails, and would not have done so under any conditions because Kyoto isn't about climate change, it's about international control. Consider: the UN is an abject failure in everything it does. People do not support it because it works, they want world control even if it is unrelentingly bad. Kyoto is part of that ideological and political objective. Climate change is merely an excuse to establish controls that were desired by these ideologues. That this doesn't help with climate change is irrelevant to them. When they say that Kyoto is a first step they mean it. But the subsequent steps will be no more effective for climate management since that is not the objective. They will, however, tighten control over economies and societies, which is the true goal.

There's nothing new here, it's steam age leftism limping into the 21st century on ragged stumps. There's almost nothing remaining to the creed that can legitimately considered to be "left", but the elites that front that group press on regardless since the lust for power is undiminished. As ever, they are opposed by a different group of elites that are even less identifiable in classic political terms. They are all but indistinguishable from their opposite numbers when examined closely, but they seek power by brandishing other hobgoblins.

That similar tactics should be adopted simultaneously by different elites is an interesting enough phenomenon to warrant further exploration.

To begin with, it is apparent that the underlying perturbations are indeed serious. Terrorism and the complexity of increasingly conflict among different cultural and religious traditions are certainly problematic, as are the implications of global climate change and other environmental perturbations. Indeed, it is precisely because such issues are so foundational and complex that transparent, multicultural, open and sophisticated dialogs about options, costs, benefits, distributional effects of alternatives, and related policy issues are important.

Ironically, it is perhaps the increasing diversity of the world that has increased the utility of responsive catastrophic visions, an ironic antithesis to a thesis of technology mediated radical democratization of discourse. For transparency and multiculturalism are clearly not what catastrophic visions promulgated by these elites are all about. . .

Similarly, climate change is being repositioned from a difficult and complex challenge to a looming planetary disaster, with all other values now paling in comparison. So, for example, Vice President Gore recently stated that global warming was "infinitely" worse than Iraq, while UK environment secretary David Miliband suggests issuing all British adults with annual carbon allowances. . .

Why such visions? For one thing, elites generally benefit from stability; moreover, in this case the relevant elites are heavily invested in particular worldviews. Their challenge is thus to impose stability and their teleology on an increasingly fractious, complex, information-rich, networked, and multicultural world. Mere communication, even propaganda, is increasingly inadequate in such an environment; indeed, even the Big Lie technique loses efficacy (although it is still tried by aficionados; consider the Administration's efforts to link Al-Qaeda and Saddam’s regime).

Under such circumstances, when the global information structure itself creates a radical heterogeneity, those who do not ideologically agree must be coerced, and only catastrophic visions are adequate to force homogeneity. Modern technology has created radical ontological diversity, and those who wish ideological hegemony over political discourse, be they neoCons or global warming activists, must generate eschatological, indeed apocalyptic, constructs if they hope to overcome it. The more diverse the dialog, the more catastrophic the necessary vision must be. Terrorism and environmental perturbations are real; the catastrophic constructions based on them are weapons of hegemonic cultural imperialism.

Read that a couple of times if necessary. To be clear, it isn't concern about terrorism or climate change that marks you as a supporter of these villainous elites. It's the vision thing that is the mark of the beast. Both sides oppose "a thesis of technology mediated radical democratization of discourse", since this is a universal acid that melts elites of all flavors. Open and honest discussion of threats, and various prescriptions for blunting those threats, is useful discourse. It is when you go over to the dark side and seek power, and so cease to be open and honest, that the horns grow.

Update:

I forget sometimes that this particular big lie is still being told.

Check out this bogus Associated Press story. Key bit:

The United States is no longer bound by Kyoto, which the Bush administration rejected after taking office in 2001.

Er, no. The truth is as close as this entry from the not especially Bush-friendly Wikipedia:

On July 25, 1997, before the Kyoto Protocol was finalized (although it had been fully negotiated, and a penultimate draft was finished), the U.S. Senate unanimously passed by a 95–0 vote the Byrd-Hagel Resolution (S. Res. 98),[40] which stated the sense of the Senate was that the United States should not be a signatory to any protocol that did not include binding targets and timetables for developing as well as industrialized nations or "would result in serious harm to the economy of the United States". On November 12, 1998, Vice President Al Gore symbolically signed the protocol. Both Gore and Senator Joseph Lieberman indicated that the protocol would not be acted upon in the Senate until there was participation by the developing nations.[41] The Clinton Administration never submitted the protocol to the Senate for ratification.

It's not about Bush. BDS is an epidemic. Minds have been wasted all over the planet. The curious bit is that we will give them a pass and carry on as if they were still whole humans with sound minds.