Climate Change: The Kyoto Accords, and Hope, Are Expiring - TIME

There's one absolutely foolproof way to cut carbon emissions: economic collapse...

That's why — for environmentalists at least — the great economic crash of 2008 contained a flicker of good news, with reduced carbon output providing a brief breather that could give the international community a chance to come up with a meaningful path to a lower-carbon economy. Even better, this was happening just in time for the big U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen at the end of 2009. (See who's bankrolling the climate-change deniers.)

Of course, things didn't exactly work out. Just about all the Copenhagen attendees got was frostbite from standing out in the cold, waiting to get into the overcrowded conference center — and we're now paying the price for that lack of results.

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Why, at a moment when nearly every government accepts that climate change is a threat, are we actually going backward? There's no shortage of groups to blame: the fossil-fuel lobby, the global-warming-is-a-hoax wing nuts, the compliant media, the Exxon tiger...

There's been a lot of talk recently that the world is finally facing an economic reckoning — a final past-due bill for those years of living so far beyond our means. The truth is we're facing a climate reckoning as well. The two are fatally intertwined — and they're going to be impossible to solve separately, if they can be solved at all.