The world’s attention now is riveted upon Kyoto, Japan, and the global warming conference. The world has this bad habit of frittering away its attention on such fruitless enterprises.

Not that the world needn’t reduce, in a big way, its output of greenhouse gasses. That the scientific community is far from unanimous on the extent to which humans are altering climate is irrelevant. Fact is, mankind went on a fuel-burning binge at the dawn of the industrial revolution 150 years ago and hasn’t let up since. People may not be melting the polar icecaps, but they are making it awfully hard to breathe.

Something must be done, but Kyoto clearly isn’t the way to do it. The entire setup — the United States vs. Europe vs. Japan vs. the developing nations — is wired to be short on progress and long on posturing.

The United States comes into the conference tagged as the unrepentant bad boy of soot: it is the source of one-quarter of the world’s greenhouse emissions; its smoggy output last year grew at the highest rate since it pledged to cut back at the Rio conference in 1992; whatever advances it has made in reducing industrial emissions have been more than negated by its escalating love affair with bigger, faster cars.

And Congress, mindful of who usually ends up paying for bold global initiatives, has tucked into the baggage U.S. delegates lug to Kyoto this resolution: no treaty unless restrictions apply with equal strength to developing nations. Irrigating parched farmland and lighting up remote villages will not come at the expense of sport utility vehicles.

So America’s modest proposal is to roll back emissions by 2010 to the level of 1990, which looks like nothing until one realizes that emissions are projected to increase by some 25 percent in the next 13 years if left unchecked.

With the U.S. hemmed in by economic reality and Congress, Japan and Europe are free to claim the high ground, saying they’ll turn that ugly 25 percent increase into negative numbers. Japan wants to cut emissions by 2010 to 5 percent below 1990 levels, Europe to 15 percent. Thus Japanese and European politicians get to cozy up to their environmental constituencies, knowing they’ll never have to deliver. Getting to blame America for the lack of action is a bonus.

The fundamental flaw in the entire Kyoto process is that it sets an arbitrary number as a goal and leaves the true essentials — the cost and means of reaching that goal — as mere details. Cutting energy use as a first step, without considering the global consequences, will impoverish the world, thus making the development of new technology for cleaner, cheaper power more difficult than it already is. Other than really clean air, the Stone Age didn’t have much to recommend it.

Super-efficient engines and appliances, solar, wind and tidal power, advanced scrubber devices, nuclear energy — all these technologies and others await. But the private sector cannot be expected to foot the bill for bringing the energy revolution to market; the costs are staggering and the uncertainities prohibitive. Rather than beat each other up and pose for the folks back home, the world’s economic powers would do better to establish a joint research and development fund, to create public/private international consortiums, to work cooperatively to solve a problem that probably does threaten the planet. Maybe, after Kyoto, they’ll get around to it.