Forty years ago, the Club of Rome produced a best-selling report warning humanity that its escalating wants were on a collision course with the world's finite resources and that the only way to avoid a crash was to stop chasing economic growth. The predictions proved spectacularly wrong. But the environmental alarmism they engendered persists, making it harder for policymakers to respond rationally to real problems today.

The Copenhagen conference won't solve the problem of climate change once and for all. Rather than aiming for a broad international treaty, negotiators should strengthen existing national policies and seek targeted emissions cuts in both rich nations and the developing world.

As climate change accelerates, policymakers may have to consider "geoengineering" as an emergency strategy to cool the planet. Engineering the climate strikes most as a bad idea, but it is time to start taking it seriously.

Record energy and food prices, plus a limping economy, have created new hurdles to fast action on climate change.

Michael A. Levi and Trevor Houser take a closer look at the numbers presented in the American Power Act.

Michael Levi proposes the creation of a new multilateral mechanism for climate policy review, so as to better evaluate the success understand the viability of the climate policies of both developing and developed nations.

Listen to experts breakdown the development of an international framework for geoengineering and the implications of these technologies for U.S. foreign policy.

Listen to experts and policymakers place the climate change negotiations at Copenhagen within a global context.

This session was part of a CFR symposium, Countdown to Copenhagen: What's Next for Climate Change?, which was made possible through generous support from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, the Alcoa Foundation, and the Robina Foundation.

Listen to Rick Boucher, U.S. representative from Virginia (D), and Ernest J. Moniz, professor of physics at MIT, discuss the current state of clean coal technology and specific climate change legislation under consdideration in Congress.

Greenhouse gas trading is now a multibillion-dollar international business and is expected to continue to grow, despite uncertainty about a post-2012 international climate regime.

A possible transfer of political power in the congressional midterm elections could doom short-term chances for a comprehensive climate bill. But experts say climate issues could still be addressed through bills focused on clean energy.

The UN conference on climate change that begins December 7 in Copenhagen is supposed to produce new targets for emissions reductions, but experts say major countries are at odds on the ultimate goal of a new framework. This backgrounder looks at some of their positions.

Although this year's Rio+20 conference produced only vague goals and few concrete commitments, it provided a major opportunity to shift the global environmental focus to the national and local levels, says this Expert Roundup.

In his piece for Foreign Policy, Charles Kenny explains how the world is building a low-carbon global economy -- with or without the United States.

As background to the ongoing negotiations, this document provides a U.S.-centric chronology of the international policy deliberations to address climate change from 1979-2011.

This book authored by Lester Brown looks at the environmental threats to international stability and analyses the international cooperation needed to stem environmental deterioration.

This in-depth study of twelve producer, processing and consumer countries demonstrates that actions taken by governments, civil society and the private sector over the last ten years in response to illegal logging and related trade have been extensive and had a considerable impact.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has analyzed the research on the effects that policies to reduce greenhouse gases would have on employment.

Reuters tracks the negotiating positions of the top five greenhouse gas emitters ahead of the December UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen.

Popular Mechanics looks at the presidential candidates' positions on the Law of the Sea treaty and other issues affecting the environment.