Climate change is a complex problem that can be approached from many different perspectives: atmospheric science, global change biology, environmental economics, international law, environmental philosophy, and so on. It involves almost every sector of society from land use planning to forest management. One particularly productive way of framing the problem of climate change is as a problem of energy policy. This is the perspective that I will take in this paper. I begin with some brief remarks about the role of different energy sources in human history. I go on to claim that every currently available energy policy entails difficult trade-offs and that technology will not deliver us from the agony of choice, at least on the time-scale on which we must act to avoid “dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.” I then bring these observations to bear explicitly on the problem of climate change and discuss their implications for policies that are now under active consideration. Finally, I draw some conclusions.

ENERGY'S HISTORY

Energy use has been central to the development of human civilization, society, and economy. As a first approximation, we can say that the story of human development has been the story of increased use of energy. Indeed, we can even think of human history as falling into epochs marked by the human ability to exploit various sources of energy.