The 1992 Rio Earth Summit produced an important, common sense consensus in favor of avoiding "dangerous interference" with the global climate. Rio, however, led to the Kyoto Protocol, which abandoned the focus on reliable science and effective policy in favor of arbitrary, unrealistic targets and timetables. Kyoto, for all practical purposes, is now dead: the United States and Russia will not participate in the agreement, the European Union is not meeting its commitments to the protocol, and the developing world was never included. Six years after Kyoto, a new approach is needed.

This AEI conference seeks to restart the climate-change dialogue by returning to the spirit and purpose of the Rio consensus in the weeks leading up to the opening of the 9th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Milan, Italy, on December 1, 2003. Panelists will discuss the science of climate change, which has grown more uncertain and more susceptible to political influence in recent years, and public policy issues such as how to spend research money and spur innovation. A return to Rio will offer the opportunity to reexamine how dangerous warming is likely to be, what steps should be taken to address it, and what can be done to reestablish the common sense consensus that led to the Framework Convention.