This is a book about the strategies that society can take to solve climate change. Some strategies, or policies, are better than others. The insight I hope you will agree with and remember is that those strategies that have dominated discussions of climate change both in the media and in academic circles – carbon taxes and fees, global emissions targets, and steps to reduce our energy use – actually belong to the list of less effective ones. I describe the reasons that they haven't worked and why climate change continues to grow worse. At the same time, there is a new set of strategies that has started to work and can continue to work. All of these focus the power of the people on innovating and implementing a new set of technologies that will give us the energy we want without the carbon dioxide emissions and with no major effects on the economy. The difference is one of sticks and carrots. In Part 2, I explain why the sticks don't work, and, in Part 3, I explain why the carrots do.

Before jumping into theories of strategy and policy, however, I need to briefly set the stage, clarifying the problem for which we need a good discussion of strategy – of carrots and sticks – in the first place. That is what these first three chapters are about. Chapter 1 describes the state of hopelessness that many people feel toward solving climate, leading a good number of them to deny that it is a problem at all, and how this contradicts what others might see as an easy problem to fix. Chapter 2 digs into the science of climate change. What is important here is to distinguish what we know pretty well from what we can only make educated guesses at. The fact that the latter category is so large, and unlikely to become much smaller anytime soon, does in fact define some of the goals we ought to set. Chapter 3 blazes through two approaches toward coping with the symptoms of climate change once they are upon us without really solving the underlying problem. These need to be gotten out of the way so that they don't distract us later on.