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BE A CLIMATE HERO Act up. Act now.


by Bill McKibben


major environmental problems alone we could go on for a long time, citing everything from toxic contaminants in our food to the scarcity of safe drink- ing water. This past summer, we all stared in horror at the slowly blackening Gulf of Mexico as the Deepwater Horizon oil slick spread on and below the water’s surface. Making such a list is such a depressing exercise that the temptation is to just walk away from the task. We might feel like a surgeon at a wartime field hospital, forced to do major triage. Where do we turn first?


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t any given moment, there are a thousand things going wrong in the world. If we were to list just


The half-good news is that our


planet’s mounting environmental troubles aren’t isolated, individual casualties. If we can figure out what the keystone is, then we can collectively start to work to cure a bunch of the most pressing problems at once. By the same token, if we guess wrong, we can labor for years to correct a particular woe, only to have our hard work over- whelmed by the underlying infection. Based on the scientific evidence,


I think it’s pretty clear that the most crucial of all the complex issues we face today revolve around the cause- and-effect relationship of burning fossil fuels and the accelerating changes in Earth’s climate. In short: If we can’t


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deal with global warming, nothing else we do will really matter. To put it more positively: If we can remove the needle from our arm that feeds society’s addic- tion to petroleum products, many of our other troubles would begin to wane.


Signs of the Times Let’s start with the hard stuff: Global warming is the first crisis we’ve ever faced that has the potential to shake our civilization to its core. So far, human beings have burned enough coal, gas and oil to raise the temperature of the planet about one degree Fahrenheit. That’s already been enough to cause all manner of troubles:


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