Bill McKibben

And so I've spent the

Remaining 35 years of my life or so, hard at work trying to do what I can to slow down that fate.

I mean, we knew it was going to be hard.

The cheerful title of that first book way back in 1989 was The End of Nature.

So I was under no illusions that we were going to easily deal with this.

And the reason that it's not easy, of course, is that the thing that causes it, burning coal and gas and oil...

is also the same thing that's at the heart of modern economies.

So it would have been a difficult challenge to move past coal and gas and oil, even with the best faith in the world.

We'd still be on that process, even if we'd gotten started right away.

But of course, we didn't have the best faith in the world from some of the players.

And this problem has been grievously compounded by the fact that, as we now know from great investigative reporting,

the fossil fuel industry not only didn't tell the rest of us what they knew about it in a timely fashion, they also came together to spend billions of dollars building this architecture of deceit and denial and disinformation that kept us locked for 30 years in a sterile debate about whether or not global warming was real.

A debate, remember, that both sides knew the answer to at the start.

It's just one of them was willing to lie.

And it turned into the most

probably the most consequential lie in human history because it's cost us so much time.

The scientists now tell us that if we want to meet those targets, we said in Paris, we need to cut emissions in half by 2030.

And that means we have six years to do it instead of 36 years to do it.

And that's a big problem.

So we all know the things that we can do in our personal lives, and I'm sure many people are doing a lot of them.