Andrew Revkin

It's plant food.

It's beer bubbles.

And the idea we can swiftly transition to a world where that gas is a pollutant, regulated, tamped down from the top is fantastical.

Having looked at this for 35 years, I brought along one of my tokens.

This is my 1988 cover story on global warming.

Jim Hansen, the famous American climate scientist, really, he stimulated this article by doing this dramatic testimony in a Senate committee that summer.

Actually, spring, late spring.

It was a hot day, and it got headlines, and this was the result.

But it's complicated.

Look what we were selling on the back cover.

Yeah.

You know, looking back at my own career on the climate question, it's no longer a belief fight over is global warming real or not.

You say, well, what kind of energy future do you want?

That's a very different question than stop global warming.

And when you look at climate, actually, I had this learning journey on my reporting where I started out with this as the definition of the problem.

you know, the 70s and 80s, pollution was changing things that were making things bad.

But what I missed, the big thing that I missed of the first 15 years of my reporting from 1988 through about 2007.

when I was, that period I was at the New York Times in the middle there, was that we're building vulnerability to climate hazards at the same time.

So climate is changing, but we're changing too.

And where we are here in Austin, Texas is a great example.