A CALL TO ACTION.

• Author: McKibben, Bill

So we've come to the crux moment.

I wrote the first book for a general audience on climate change--it came out in 1989, three decades ago. In rough terms, that's how long we've had a public debate about global warming. That debate was pretty much a fake: we know now thanks to great investigative reporting (some of it straight out of the Columbia Journalism School) that the fossil fuel companies knew all there was to know about the greenhouse effect in the 1980s, but instead of fessing up and getting to work they sponsored a multi-decade disinformation project. Still, by now even the oil industry concedes we face a crisis. Poor people have been living with the consequences of climate change for a long time already, but we live in the moment when rich citydwellers suddenly find themselves breathing wildfire smoke; when beachdwellers can't find insurance; when the oblivious affluent find their children suddenly angry and militant.

And we live, too, in a moment of great possibility--over the last decade the engineers have done their job, dropping the price of a solar panel and a wind turbine by an order of magnitude. The sun and the wind are now the cheapest ways to generate power around the planet; that means that if we choose to seize this moment it really could be transformational. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change told us a little more than a year ago that a fundamental reordering would need to be far along a decade hence if we were to have any hope of meeting the targets we set in Paris just a half-decade ago. Specifically, they said we'd need to have cut our carbon emissions in half by 2030. That's on the bleeding...