Political rhetoric has shifted away from the need to respond to the "generational challenge" of climate change.
On the eastern edge of Kolkata, Dulu Bibi, a 25-year-old mother of four, worries about the cost of treating her two sick boys.
Several thousand officials from 194 countries just gathered in Cancun, Mexico, for yet another global climate summit.
Common sense was an early loser in the scorching battle over the reality of man-made global warming.
Advocates of drastic cuts in carbon-dioxide emissions now speak a lot less than they once did about climate change.
Politicians and commentators are understandably pessimistic about the chances of an international deal on carbon cuts emerging from the United Nations summit in Mexico this December.
Fear may be a great motivator in the short term, but it is a terrible basis for making smart decisions about a complicated problem that demands our full intelligence for a long period, like global warming.
This idea is hard for a lot of people to accept. If we have a solution to a serious problem like global warming, they argue, how can we possibly say that it is too expensive to implement?
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