Bill McKibben

That's probably too much violent chaos and flux for our societies to withstand.

One million refugees flooding into Europe from the Syrian civil war was enough to discombobulate the politics of that whole continent.

Multiply that by a thousand and try to imagine the world in which one lives.

So our job is to hold that temperature increase as low as possible.

Everything we do that's of significant importance

size helps with that.

And every tenth of a degree is really important.

But it has to happen fast.

The sense that it opened was a reminder to humans that sometimes they're not actually in charge.

and that they have to figure out how to respond to larger forces.

In this case, a microbe who, again, was not interested in compromising, was going to do what it was going to do, and we had to figure out how to get around it.

And we did, and it was a reminder of the remarkable power of science and engineering to help us do that.

The sad part was also, though, the reminder of how confused, chaotic our process

We've allowed our political and information life to become so that large parts of America were scared of, disdainful, suspicious of that kind of progress.

It's entirely possible to imagine a planet that managed to maintain its physical integrity and also had a well-working economy.

In fact, far easier to imagine that than to imagine a well-working economy on the planet we're currently headed for.

Big new studies out of Oxford in the last year proved, I think, that making a rapid switch to renewable energy would save the world tens of trillions of dollars over the next couple of decades.

Forget the damages from climate change, just the fact that you don't have to go buy more coal and gas and oil all the time.

I mean, if you think about it for a minute,

What's the reason that the fossil fuel industry dislikes renewable energy so much and has worked so hard against it?