For three years, former Time chief political correspondent Eric Pooley has followed the political fight over limiting the amount of carbon pollution emitted by the United States — and the Climate War is his blow-by-blow report from the front. Urgent and timely, the book is a behind-the-scenes page-turner for the green set, a detailed explanation of this country’s national inaction on carbon limits. It’s a rich story of scientists, schemers, politicos and hacks, but the main characters are three men who have tried — and up till now, failed — to forever change the way America uses energy and hopefully help stem global warming.

Developing nations want the Kyoto Protocol to continue, while developed nations want to invalidate that and consecrate a new treaty. At stake are the mandatory emissions reductions for rich nations and, to a lesser extent, the funding for the developing world to mitigate their financial burden from climate change.

The biggest weakness of the Kyoto protocol for dealing with the human-created emissions that are causing the decades-long rise in global temperature is that the two biggest polluters, the US and China, refused to sign it. China wouldn’t sign it largely because the US under Bush wouldn’t sign it, and the US under Bush wouldn’t sign it because the Bush Administration wasn’t just merely in bed with big industrial polluters, but actively worked for them, being oil execs and all.