Surprisingly, Jeffrey Sachs’s “Common Wealth” (Penguin Press, 400 pages, $27.95), which promises a “new economic paradigm,” contains little economics. The great problems of the world economy — global warming, water scarcity, species loss, the human population explosion, terrible poverty — are, in Mr. Sachs’s estimation, mainly engineering in nature, solvable on a global scale at minor cost by prudent international housekeeping.

The book thus contains no elaborate economic arguments or reasoning. Instead, after each problem is marched onstage, there is a prosaic “to-do” list to fix it. In an age of minimal expectations of the power of government action, Mr. Sachs is an irrepressible big government booster.

These to-do lists are a surprising mix of the grandiose, the mundane, and the bizarre. Thus, in the chapter “Rethinking Foreign Policy,” Mr. Sachs tasks America to “understand the Middle East and respond appropriately.” On world population control, he includes among the edicts: “Family planning service-delivery points should be densely located.” There is even an extensive to-do list specifically aimed to resolve the savage conflict in Darfur, with a typical item being “Introducing an early warning system for western Sudan that comprises low-cost meteorological stations, access to satellite data on regional oceanic and atmospheric conditions, and climate forecasting software.”

This structure makes the book a bit of a slog. Even minimally aware readers will know the problems. But the proposed solutions have little drama. Water problems? Just get UNCCD to coordinate with GEF, UNDP, and UNEP. Habitat loss? The GEF should set up ocean and land preserves. Global warming? Give UNFCCC a stronger protocol to cut CO2 emissions. More important, by treating these problems as challenges demanding simple human ingenuity, Mr. Sachs blithely overlooks the political and economic difficulties that have bedeviled all earlier solutions.

Consider the problem of global warming. We know the solution: Increase the energy efficiency of cars and planes, develop non-fossil fuel alternatives, and capture CO2 and pump it into underground storage. But the cost of the remedy is another matter. Mr. Sachs optimistically assumes the annual cost of this to be less than 1% of world GNP. Having established that, he quickly pronounces the solution: a new international climate treaty, Kyoto Plus. Problem solved, he suggests. As an example of how simple this all is, Mr. Sachs points to the successful global control of ozone-depleting chemicals through the 1987 Montreal Protocol.

But ozone-depleting chemicals were eliminated so easily by international treaty because it truly was a minor cost, and the producers, concentrated in high-income countries, did not lose from a general switch to non-depleting chemicals. Controlling global warming will impose a much more general cost.

And of course there are local obstacles. America and Canada are releasing 25% of the CO2 entering the planet’s atmosphere, much more per person than in most of Europe. Drastic reductions in American emissions will be a crucial element of any solution. Will that happen? Any attempt to sharply increase auto efficiency would deal a death blow to substantial chunks of the domestic auto industry, which has specialized in fuel-hungry vehicles. Carbon taxes on airlines to force them to scrap older, fuel-inefficient planes would result in more layoffs. Retrofitting coal power plants with carbon capture and sequestration technologies would increase domestic electricity prices between 20 and 100%. Will that play politically when the air-conditioning season arrives across huge swathes of America, and seniors drop from heat exhaustion because they cannot pay their electricity bills?

The evidence is that even the enlightened European one-worlders whom Mr. Sachs admires are struggling and failing to meet the modest Kyoto protocol emission goals: Only three of 36 signatories required to limit emissions are on track to meet their target. Spain, Portugal, Greece, Ireland, Canada, and New Zealand all have substantially higher emissions now than in 1990. Spain’s emissions have increased by 50%, Canada’s by 62%. Other than occasionally chiding politicians for their cowardice on these issues, Mr. Sachs seems oblivious to these domestic complications. One of the barriers to expanding non-warming nuclear power, for example, is the problem of safely disposing of the waste. That has an engineering solution also. It is the Yucca Mountain repository, originally scheduled to open in 1998, but now delayed to at least 2021. Most likely it will never open, since Harry Reid of Nevada, majority leader of the Senate, has vowed to kill it. The internal paralysis of the American political system when faced with such simple issues does not bode well for its ability to act on global concerns. Listing the engineering solutions is of little help with problems of this scale. Rather, we need a strategy to mobilize anxious domestic constituencies to action in a fractious and divided world.

Mr. Clark is a professor of economics at the University of California-Davis, and the author of “A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World.”