Global warming may not be the apocalyptic problem that climate Cassandras like Al Gore claim, but it is real and we need to do something about it. The question is what.

For 20 years now, Gore and his acolytes have been campaigning single-mindedly for what has become known as the Kyoto approach to global warming - the idea that the only real way to solve the problem is for governments to either force or bribe their citizens to drastically reduce their use of carbon-emitting fuels.

This effort, which has dominated mainstream thinking about climate policy for most of the last decade, has led to … well, actually very little. Despite grandiose pledges such as the 2008 promise by the Group of Eight industrialized nations to work to cut global carbon emissions in half by 2050, no meaningful international climate agreement has ever been reached and greenhouse-gas levels in the atmosphere are higher than they’ve ever been.

Why so little progress? It’s simple. The Kyoto approach proposes a ‘solution’ that is more expensive than the problem it’s meant to solve - which is to say that it’s no solution at all.

In a 2009 paper for the Copenhagen Consensus Center, climate economist Richard Tol determined […]