Bill McKibben

fast to do this.

And that's where the political divisions get in the way.

The truth is, most debates are best solved by compromise because they're debates between different groups of people with different ideas and interests.

And you need to meet in the middle somehow and come back five years later and argue it out again.

And five years after that, and you slowly move the needle in the right direction.

This debate at its heart is between

human beings on the one hand and physics on the other.

And that's a very hard debate because physics is immature.

It doesn't compromise.

It won't meet you in the middle.

It's just going to do what it's going to do to meet the bar that it sets.

Well, it's not worthless.

The outcome is not binary.

We're not going to stop global warming at this point.

We've waited too long for that.

We've already warmed the planet a lot and there's momentum behind it.

We'll warm it some more.

The question now is, can we stop it short of the point where it cuts civilizations off at the knees?

And that's not at all clear.

And I think the consensus among people who think about that at this point is that if we let that happen,