A cap-and-trade system is not the answer, according to a leading alternative-energy advocate. To really tackle climate change, the United States must revolutionize its entire energy strategy.

After years of U.S. inaction, a new president will have to move quickly to address global warming. In an e360 report, New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert surveys the views of various nonpartisan groups and provides a blueprint for what needs to be done.

The coal industry and its allies are spending more than $60 million to promote the notion that coal is clean. But so far, “clean coal” is little more than an advertising slogan.

With the Bush administration and Congress failing to act, many states are devising sweeping climate and energy policies that could be a blueprint for a future national climate policy.

In an interview with Yale Environment 360, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says the next U.S. administration must play a leading role in global climate change policy and cautions that China and the developing world must not follow the same path of industrialization as the United States and western Europe.

New evidence suggests that we have already passed a dangerous threshold for the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and that the time for taking strong action is slipping away.