Almost every facet of modern life - from driving to the grocery store to turning on a light - relies on inexpensive and abundant fossil fuels. When burned for power, these fuels yield emissions of carbon dioxide that accumulate in the atmosphere. They are the leading cause of global warming.

Assuring ample energy services for a growing world economy while protecting the climate will not be simple. The most critical task will be curtailing emissions from coal; it is the most abundant fossil fuel and stands above the others in its carbon effluent. Strong lobbies protect coal in every country where it is used in abundance, and they will block any strategy for protecting the climate that threatens the industry. The only practical approach is to pursue technologies that burn coal much more cleanly.

Such new technologies exist on the drawing board, but governments and regulators are failing to bring designs into practice with deliberate speed. Instead, most of the policy effort to tackle global warming has focused on creating global institutions, such as the Kyoto Protocol, to entice change. Although noble, these global efforts usually fall hostage to the interests of critical countries. After negotiating the Kyoto treaty, for example, the United States refused to sign when it found that it could not easily comply with the provisions. Australia did the same, and Canada is also poised to withdraw. Nor have treaties like Kyoto crafted a viable framework for engaging developing countries; these countries' share of world emissions is rising quickly, yet they are wary of policies that might crimp economic growth.

Breaking the deadlocks that have appeared in the Kyoto process requires, first and foremost, a serious plan by the United States to control its emissions. The United States has a strong historical responsibility for the greenhouse-gas pollution that has accumulated in the atmosphere, but little has been done at the federal level. (A few states are implementing some policies, and they, along with rising political pressure, might help to catalyze a more aggressive federal approach.) It will be difficult, however, for the United States (and other industrial countries) to sustain much effort in cutting emissions unless its economic competitors in China and the other developing countries make some effort as well. Without a strong policy framework to contain emissions throughout the world, levels of greenhouse-gas pollution will reflect only the vagaries in world energy markets. We need a proper strategy for moving away from harmful emissions.

A few years ago, many analysts thought that market forces were already shifting away from coal. They predicted the growth of natural gas, a fuel prized for its cleanliness and flexibility. That vision was good news for the climate because electricity made from natural gas leads to half of the carbon-dioxide emissions of electricity from coal. But natural-gas prices, which tend to track oil prices, have skyrocketed over the past few years, and, unsurprisingly, the vision for the growth of natural has dimmed. Natural-gas plants, which accounted for more than 90 percent of new plants built in the 1990s, are harder to justify in the boardroom. Most analysts now see a surge in the use of coal. One hundred new coal-fired plants are in the planning stages in the United States. Absent an unlikely plunge in gas prices, coal is here to stay.

Despite the challenges of handling coal responsibly, the potential of research and deployment of advanced technologies to help the United States and the major developing countries find common interest on the climate problem is great. In advanced industrialized countries, the vast majority of coal is burned for electricity in large plants managed by professionals - exactly the setting where such technology is usually best applied. In the United States, for example, coal accounts for more than four fifths of all greenhouse-gas emissions from the electricity sector.

Most of the innovative effort in coal is focused on making plants more efficient. Raising the temperature and pressure of steam to a "supercritical" point can yield improvements in efficiency that, all told, can reduce emissions about 20 to 25 percent. Boosting temperature and pressure still again, to "ultra-supercritical" levels, can deliver another slug of efficiency and lower emissions still further. Encouraging investments in this technology is not difficult: most countries and firms are already searching for gains in efficiency that can cut the cost of fuel; a sizeable fraction of new Chinese plants are supercritical; India is a few steps behind, in part because coal is generally cheaper in that country, but even there the first supercritical unit is expected soon. Across the advanced industrialized world, supercritical is the norm, at least for new plants. A few companies are taking further steps, investing in ultra-supercritical units. Two such plants are going up outside Shanghai, using mainly German technology, evidence that the concept of "technology transfer" is becoming meaningless in the parts of the world economy that are tightly integrated. Markets are spreading the best technologies worldwide where their application makes economic sense. In other countries, technologies to gasify coal - which also promise high efficiency - are also being tested.

But power-plant efficiency alone won't account for the necessary deep cuts in emissions. Already the growth in demand for electricity is outstripping the improvements in power plants such that the need for more plants and fuel is rising ever higher, as are emissions. This is spectacularly true in fast-growing China.

A radical redesign of coal plants will be needed if governments want to limit emissions of carbon dioxide. Here, the future is wide open. One track envisions gasifying the coal and collecting the concentrated wastes. Another would use more familiar technologies and separate carbon dioxide from other gases. All approaches require injecting the pollution underground where it is safe from the atmosphere. This is already done at scale in oil and gas production, where injection is used to pressurize fields and boost output. The consequences of injecting the massive quantities of pollution from power plants, however, are another matter. Regulatory systems are not in place or tested, and public acceptance is unknown.

While these technologies can work, they won't be used widely before they progress on two fronts. First, they must become commercially viable. Despite the huge potential of adopting them, it is striking how little money is being spent on advanced coal technologies. The U.S. government has created some financial incentives to build advanced coal plants, but much of that investment is slated for plants that are not actually designed to sequester CO2. In fact, the uncertainty of American policy gives investors in power plants an incentive to build conventional high-carbon technology, because it is more familiar to regulators and bankers. Worse yet, increased emissions today might actually improve a negotiating position in the future when targets for controlling emissions are ratcheted down from whatever is business as usual. Some private firms, such as BP and Xcel, are putting their own money into carbon-free power - but the totality of the private effort is small compared with the size of the problem. There are good mechanisms in place for encouraging public research and private investment in such technologies; the real shortcoming is in the paucity of the effort.

The second problem is that countries such as China, India, and other key developing nations won't spend the extra money to install carbon-free coal. Yet these countries' share of global coal consumption has soared almost 35 percent over the past ten years.

The inescapable conclusion is that the advanced industrialized countries must create a much larger program to test and apply advanced coal technologies. Electricity from plants with sequestration might eventually cost half more than from plants without the technology. That's not free, but it is affordable and is less than the changes in electric rates that many Americans already experience and accept.

State and federal regulators need to create direct incentives - such as a pool of subsidies - to pay the extra cost until the technology is proven and competitive with conventional alternatives. That subsidy, along with strict limits on emissions, will set a path for cutting the carbon from U.S. electricity without eliminating a future for coal. They must also extend the same incentives to the major developing countries, which have no interest in paying higher rates for electricity because their priorities do not rest on controlling CO2. Yet these countries' involvement now is essential. Averting emissions has a global benefit regardless of where the emissions are controlled. And developing countries are especially unlikely to shoulder more of the burden themselves, in the more distant future, unless they are first familiar with the technologies.

Solving the climate problem will be one of the hardest problems for societies to address - it entails complicated and uncertain choices with real costs today, and benefits in the distant future. Yet the stakes are high and the consequences of indecision severe. Serious action must contend with existing political constituencies and aim at existing resources that are most abundant. The technologies needed to make coal viable will not appear automatically. An active policy effort - pursued worldwide and initially financed by the industrialized world - is essential.

Originally published in the January/February 2007 issue of Boston Review.

The alliance between the Republic of Korea and the United States has been facing new pressures in recent months. Leaders in Washington and Seoul are visibly out of synch in their response to the escalatory actions of North Korea, beginning with the July 4 missile tests and leading to the October 9 nuclear explosion. South Korean leaders seem more concerned with the danger that Washington may instigate conflict than they are with North Korea's profoundly provocative acts. American officials increasingly see Seoul as irrelevant to any possible solution to the problem. Officials on both sides valiantly try to find areas of agreement and to paper over differences. If attempts to restart the six-party talks on North Korea falter again, it is likely this divide will resurface.

There is a tendency on both sides of the Pacific to overdraw a portrait of an alliance on the verge of collapse. Crises in the U.S.-ROK alliance are hardly new. As I have written elsewhere, there never was a "golden age" in our alliance that was free from tension. Korean discomfort with an alliance founded on dependency and American unease with Korean nationalism has been a constant since the early days of this relationship. Clashes over how to respond to North Korea have been a staple of the alliance since its earliest days.

Korean-American relations today are much deeper than at the inception of this alliance. Our interests are intertwined on many fronts, not least as major players in the global economic and trading system. We share fundamental values as democratic societies, built on the rule of law and the free flow of ideas. There is a large, and growing, contact between our two peoples, from trade and tourism to immigration.

The current situation is worrisome however because it threatens the security system that lies at the foundation of the alliance. Though our interests are now far broader, the U.S.-ROK alliance remains military in nature. The founding document of this alliance was the

Mutual Defense Treaty signed on October 1, 1953, following the conclusion of the armistice pact to halt the Korean War. That treaty has been significantly modified only once - 28 years ago in response to American plans to withdraw its ground forces from Korea - to create the Korea-U.S. Combined Forces Command (CFC).

The two militaries have a vital legacy of decades of combined command, training and war planning. American military forces in significant numbers have remained in place to help defend South Korea from potential aggression from the North. South Korean troops have deployed abroad numerous times in support of American foreign policy goals, including currently in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This foundation of security is not only essential to this alliance but is the very definition of the nature of alliances in general, as distinct from other forms of cooperation and partnership in international relations.

"Alliances are binding, durable security commitments between two or more nations," Dr. Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, a Stanford scholar and former Clinton administration senior defense official, wrote recently. "The critical ingredients of a meaningful alliance are the shared recognition of common threats and a pledge to take action to counter them. To forge agreement, an alliance requires ongoing policy consultations that continually set expectations for allied behavior."

Alliances can survive a redefinition of the common threat that faces them but not the absence of a threat. Nor can alliances endure if there is not a clear sense of the mutual obligations the partners have to each other, from mutual defense to joint actions against a perceived danger. "At a minimum," Sherwood-Randall says, "allies are expected to take into consideration the perspectives and interests of their partners as they make foreign and defense policy choices."

By this definition, the U.S.-ROK alliance is in need of a profound re-examination.

The 'shared recognition' of a common threat from North Korea that was at the core of the alliance is badly tattered. As a consequence, there is no real agreement on what actions are needed to counter that threat.

There is a troubling lack of will on both sides to engage in policy consultations that involve an understanding of the interests and views of both sides, much less setting clear expectations for allied behavior. Major decisions such as the phasing out of the CFC have been made without adequate discussion.

Americans and Koreans need, in effect, to re-imagine our alliance. We should do so with the understanding that there is still substantial popular support for this alliance, despite conventional wisdom to the contrary. The problems of alliance support may lie more in policy-making elites in both countries than in the general public. That suggests that a concerted effort to reinvigorate the alliance will find public backing.

The results of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs 2006 multinational survey of public opinion show ongoing strong support for the American military presence in South Korea. Some 62 percent of Koreans believe U.S. troop levels are either about right or too few; some 52 percent of Americans share that view. A slightly larger percentage of Americans - 42 percent compared to 36 percent of Koreans - think there are too many U.S. troops. Along the same vein, 65 percent of Americans and 84 percent of Koreans favor the U.S. providing military forces, together with other countries, in a United Nations-sponsored effort to turn back a North Korean attack.

The crack in the alliance comes over the perception of threat from North Korea.

While some 79 percent of Koreans feel at least "a bit" threatened by the possibility of North Korea becoming a nuclear power, only 30 percent say they are "very" threatened. Fewer Koreans feel the peninsula will be a source of conflict than the number of Americans. More significantly, nuclear proliferation is viewed as a critical threat by 69 percent of Americans, compared to only half of Koreans (interestingly, Chinese are even less concerned about this danger).

The opinion poll was conducted before the nuclear test so it is difficult to judge the impact of that event. These survey results do clearly indicate however that while the security alliance still has support, there is an urgent need for deep discussion, at all levels, about the nature of the threat.

The crisis that faced the NATO alliance in the wake of the end of the Cold War has some instructive value for Koreans and Americans today. At the beginning of 1990, I was sent by my newspaper, the Christian Science Monitor, from Tokyo, where I had been covering Japan and Korea since the mid-1980s, to Moscow. The Berlin Wall had fallen a few months earlier and the prospect of the end of a half-century of Cold War in Europe was in the air. However, I dont believe anyone, certainly not myself, anticipated the astounding pace or scale of change that took place within just two years.

Within less than a year, in October of 1990, West and East Germany were reunited.

The once-mighty Soviet empire in Eastern Europe disintegrated almost overnight. By July of 1991, the Warsaw Pact had come to an end. Perhaps most astounding of all - not least to officials of the administration of George H.W. Bush - the Soviet Union fell abruptly apart in December 1991.

These tectonic events triggered a debate about the future of the NATO alliance that had provided security to Europe since it was founded in April of 1949. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev somewhat famously - and perhaps apocryphally - anticipated this debate. "We are going to do something terrible to you," he is said to have told Ronald Reagan. "We are going to deprive you of an enemy."

In those early days, the very continued existence of NATO was under active discussion. The Soviet leadership called for the creation of entirely new "pan-European" security structures that would replace both NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Some in Europe favored the European Union as a new vehicle for both economic integration of the former

Soviet empire into Europe, along with creating new European security forces that would supplant NATO's integrated command.

A more cautionary view argued for retaining NATO without change as a hedge against the revival of Russia as a military threat or the failure of democratic and market transformation in the former Soviet Union. American policymakers opted instead for the ambitious aim of expanding NATO membership to absorb, step by step, the former Soviet empire, including the newly freed western republics of the Soviet Union.

Along with expansion, the United States pushed NATO to redefine the "enemy." Americans argued that new threats to stability and security from ethnic conflict - and international terrorism - compelled NATO to "go out of area or out of business." NATO did so first in the Balkans, in Bosnia and Kosovo, though reluctantly. The alliance has moved even farther beyond Europe to Afghanistan, where NATO commands the international security forces. This draws upon the invaluable investment made in joint military command and operations that are the foundation of the alliance.

Certainly NATO's transformation is far from complete. As was evident at the most recent NATO summit in Riga, considerable differences of opinion remain between many European states and the United States over the mission of NATO. Europeans tend to still see NATO as an essentially defensive alliance, protecting the "euro-Atlantic" region against outside aggression, with an unspoken role as a hedge against uncertainties in Russia. They are resistant to continued American pressure for expansion - including a new U.S. proposal to move toward global partnership with countries such as Japan, South Korea and Australia.

But the reinvention of NATO after the Cold War provides some evidence that even when the nature of the threat has changed, security alliances can preserve a sense of common purpose.

A re-imagined U.S.-ROK alliance could draw from the NATO experience by including the following elements:

HEDGE - The alliance remains crucial as a 'hedge' against North Korean aggression, even if the dangers of an attack are considered significantly reduced. If North Korea retains its nuclear capability, that hedge will need to expand to include a shared doctrine of containment and deterrence, including making clear that the U.S. will retaliate against use of nuclear weapons, no matter where it takes place. Strategically the alliance is also a 'hedge' against Chinese ambitions to dominate East Asia and a guarantor of the existing balance of power;

EXPANSION - The alliance can reassert its vitality as the basis, along with the

U.S.-Japan security alliance, of an expanded multilateral security structure for

Northeast Asia;

NEW MISSIONS - The alliance should take on new missions, most importantly to participate in military and non-military counter-proliferation operations;

OUT OF AREA - A re-imagined alliance might formalize an "out of area" role, elevating the deployments of peacekeeping and other forces to Iraq and Afghanistan into more systematic joint global operations between the two militaries. In this regard, the participation of South Korea in a program of global partnership with NATO, most importantly in the area of joint training, merits serious discussion.

There is another alternative: South Korea and the United States can chose to bring their alliance to a close. If we cannot agree on the common threats that face us, this alliance cannot endure. What we should not do is to allow the alliance to drift from inattention into a deeper crisis that would only benefit our adversaries.

(This article is based on a presentation by the author to the 1st ROK-U.S. West Coast

Strategic Forum held in Seoul on Dec. 11-12, 2006).

This article appeared on the website of the Maureen and Mike Mansfield Foundation.

Reprinted with permission from the Maureen and Mike Mansfield Foundation.