Economists and other scholars have offered useful diagnoses of the market failures that underlie major global environmental problems. However, scholars have been far less successful in devising policy approaches that can overcome political barriers. They have identified the market failures without offering solutions to political failures. Three sources of political failure seem especially important (1) special interests, (2) the public goods nature of global environmental problems and associated problem of free-riding, and (3) problems in news reporting stemming from changes in the technology for communicating environmental (and other) information to the public. I recommend that the NSF give considerable support to studies that combine attention to the economics impacts with attention to any of these three underlying sources of “political failure.”