Things take longer to happen than you think they will, but then they happen much faster than you thought they could. The destructive impacts of the climate crisis are now following the trajectory of that economics maxim as horrors long predicted by scientists are becoming realities. More destructive Category 5 hurricanes are developing, monster fires ignite and burn on every continent but Antarctica, ice is melting in large amounts there and in Greenland, and accelerating sea-level rise now threatens low-lying cities and island nations. Tropical diseases are spreading to higher latitudes. Cities face drinking-water shortages. The ocean is becoming warmer and more acidic, destroying coral reefs and endangering fish populations that provide vital protein consumed by about a billion people. Worsening droughts and biblical deluges are reducing food production and displacing millions of people. Record-high temperatures threaten to render areas of the Middle East and the Persian Gulf, North Africa and South Asia uninhabitable. Growing migrations of climate refugees are destabilizing nations. A sixth great extinction could extinguish half the species on earth. Finally people are recognizing that the climate is changing, and the consequences are worsening much faster than most thought was possible. A record 72 percent of Americans polled say that the weather is growing more extreme. And yet every day we still emit more than 140 million tons of global warming pollution worldwide into the atmosphere, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I often echo the point made by the climate scientist James Hansen: The accumulation of carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases -- some of which will envelop the planet for hundreds and possibly thousands of years -- is now trapping as much extra energy daily as 500,000 Hiroshima-class atomic bombs would release every 24 hours. This is the crisis we face. Now we need to ask ourselves: Are we really helpless and unwilling to respond to the gravest threat faced by civilization? Is it time, as some have begun to counsel, to despair, surrender and focus on "adapting" to the progressive loss of the conditions that have supported the flourishing of humanity? Are we really moral cowards, easily manipulated into lethargic complacency by the huge continuing effort to deceive us into ignoring what we see with our own eyes? More damage and losses are inevitable, no matter what we do, because carbon dioxide remains for so long in the atmosphere. So we will have to do our best to adapt to unwelcome changes. But we still retain the ability to avoid truly catastrophic, civilization-ending consequences if we act quickly. This is our generation's life-or-death challenge. It is Thermopylae, Agincourt, Trafalgar, Lexington and Concord, Dunkirk, Pearl Harbor, the Battle of the Bulge, Midway and Sept. 11. At moments of such crisis, the United States and the world have to be mobilized, and before we ...

1. Things take longer to happen than you think they will, but then
they happen much faster than you thought they could.
The destructive impacts of the climate crisis are now following
the trajectory of that economics maxim as horrors long
predicted by scientists are becoming realities.
More destructive Category 5 hurricanes are developing, monster
fires ignite and burn on every continent but Antarctica, ice is
melting in large amounts there and in Greenland, and
accelerating sea-level rise now threatens low-lying cities and
island nations.
Tropical diseases are spreading to higher latitudes. Cities face
drinking-water shortages. The ocean is becoming warmer and
more acidic, destroying coral reefs and endangering fish
populations that provide vital protein consumed by about a
billion people.
Worsening droughts and biblical deluges are reducing food
production and displacing millions of people. Record-high
temperatures threaten to render areas of the Middle East and the
Persian Gulf, North Africa and South Asia uninhabitable.
Growing migrations of climate refugees are destabilizing
nations. A sixth great extinction could extinguish half the
species on earth.
Finally people are recognizing that the climate is changing, and
the consequences are worsening much faster than most thought
was possible. A record 72 percent of Americans polled say that
the weather is growing more extreme. And yet every day we
still emit more than 140 million tons of global warming
pollution worldwide into the atmosphere, according to the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I often echo the
point made by the climate scientist James Hansen: The

2. accumulation of carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse
gases -- some of which will envelop the planet for hundreds and
possibly thousands of years -- is now trapping as much extra
energy daily as 500,000 Hiroshima-class atomic bombs would
release every 24 hours.
This is the crisis we face.
Now we need to ask ourselves: Are we really helpless and
unwilling to respond to the gravest threat faced by civilization?
Is it time, as some have begun to counsel, to despair, surrender
and focus on "adapting" to the progressive loss of the
conditions that have supported the flourishing of humanity? Are
we really moral cowards, easily manipulated into lethargic
complacency by the huge continuing effort to deceive us into
ignoring what we see with our own eyes?
More damage and losses are inevitable, no matter what we do,
because carbon dioxide remains for so long in the atmosphere.
So we will have to do our best to adapt to unwelcome changes.
But we still retain the ability to avoid truly catastrophic,
civilization-ending consequences if we act quickly.
This is our generation's life-or-death challenge. It is
Thermopylae, Agincourt, Trafalgar, Lexington and Concord,
Dunkirk, Pearl Harbor, the Battle of the Bulge, Midway and
Sept. 11. At moments of such crisis, the United States and the
world have to be mobilized, and before we can be mobilized, we
have to be inspired to believe the battle can be won. Is it really
too much to ask now that politicians summon the courage to do
what most all of them already know is necessary?
We have the technology we need. That economic maxim about
slow-fast phenomena, first articulated by the M.I.T. economist
Rudiger Dornbusch and known as Dornbusch's Law, also
explains the tsunami of technological and economic change that

3. has given us tools to sharply reduce global warming pollution
much faster than we thought was possible only a short time ago.
For example, according to the research group Bloomberg New
Energy Finance, as recently as 2014 -- a year before the Paris
climate agreement was reached -- electricity from solar and
wind was cheaper than new coal and gas plants in probably 1
percent of the world. Today, only five years later, solar and
wind provide the cheapest sources of new electricity in two-
thirds of the world. Within five more years, these sources are
expected to provide the cheapest new electricity in the entire
world. And in 10 years, solar and wind electricity will be
cheaper nearly everywhere than the electricity that existing
fossil fuel plants will be able to provide.
This transition is already unfolding in the largest economies.
Consider the progress made by the world's top four emitters of
greenhouse gases. Last year, solar and wind represented 88
percent of the new electricity capacity installed in the 28
nations of the European Union, 65 percent in India, 53 percent
in China and 49 percent in the United States.
This year, several American utilities have announced plans to
close existing natural gas and coal generating plants -- some
with decades of useful life remaining -- to replace their output
with cheaper electricity from wind and solar farms connected to
ever-cheaper battery storage. As the chief executive of the
Northern Indiana Public Service Company said recently, "The
surprise was how dramatically the renewables and storage
proposals beat natural gas." He added, "I couldn't have
predicted this five years ago."
Today, the fastest-growing occupation in the United States is
solar installer, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and
it has exceeded average job growth sixfold in the last five years.
The second-fastest growing job: wind turbine service
technician.

4. In Australia, a high-tech entrepreneur, Mike Cannon-Brookes, is
reportedly planning to sell renewable electricity generated in
the Northern Territories to South Asian cities over a long-
distance undersea cable. Globally, close to 200 of the world's
largest companies have announced commitments to use 100
percent renewable energy, and several have already reached that
goal. A growing number of cities, states and provinces have
pledged to do the same.
The number of electric vehicles on the road has increased by
450 percent in the past four years, and several automobile
manufacturers are shifting research and development spending
away from internal combustion vehicles, because the cost-
reduction curve for E.V.s is expected to soon drop the cost of
the vehicle well below comparable gasoline and diesel models'.
Over half of all buses in the world will be electric within the
next five years, a majority in China, according to some market
experts. At least 16 nations have set targets to phase out
internal combustion engine vehicles.
More broadly, the evidence now indicates that we are in the
early stages of a sustainability revolution that will achieve the
magnitude of the Industrial Revolution and the speed of the
digital revolution, made possible by new digital tools. To pick
one example, Google has reduced the amount of electricity
required to cool its enormous server farms by 40 percent using
state-of-the-art artificial intelligence. No new hardware was
required. Sustainable alternatives to existing methods of
industrial production are being pursued by more and more
companies.
A farmer-led regenerative agriculture revolution that is also
underway avoids plowing and focuses on building soil health by
sequestering carbon dioxide in the ground, making the land
more fertile. The farmers are using rotational grazing and

5. planting trees and diverse cover crops to enrich soil and protect
against erosion.
And so far, the best available technology for pulling carbon
dioxide from the air is something called a tree. That's why many
nations are starting ambitious tree planting efforts. Ethiopia
recently reported planting 353 million trees in 12 hours, nearly
double the goal of 200 million. Scientists calculate that we have
enough available land worldwide to plant between one trillion
and one and a half trillion trees. To protect our vast but
dwindling forests, new satellites and digital tools can now
monitor deforestation virtually tree by tree, so corporations will
know if the products they buy were grown on razed or burned
forestland.
Yet for all this promise, here is another hard truth: All of these
efforts together will not be enough to reduce greenhouse gas
emissions sufficiently without significant policy changes. And
right now, we don't have the right policies because the wrong
policymakers are in charge. We need to end the mammoth
taxpayer-funded subsidies that encourage the continued burning
of fossil fuels. We need to place a direct or indirect price on
carbon pollution to encourage the use of cheaper, sustainable
alternatives that are already out there. New laws and regulations
may be needed as well to encourage innovation and force more
rapid reductions in emissions.
The political reconfiguration we have desperately needed has
been excruciatingly slow in coming, but we now seem to be at
an inflection point, when political change begins to unroll more
rapidly than we thought was possible. It's Dornbusch's Law,
brought to politics.
The people, in their true function as the sovereign power, are
quickly understanding the truth of this crisis, and they are the
ones who must act, especially because the president is not on

6. speaking terms with the truth and seems well beyond the reach
of reason.
This will require a ferocious attack on the complacency,
complicity, duplicity and mendacity of those in Congress who
have paid for their careers by surrendering their votes and
judgment to powerful special interests that are sacrificing the
planet for their greed. To address the climate crisis, we must
address the democracy crisis so that the people themselves can
reclaim control of their destiny.
As has often been the case in successful political revolutions,
young people have taken up the gauntlet with inspiring passion.
Greta Thunberg has stirred millions as the school strike
movement she began in Sweden spreads to many countries. The
Sunrise Movement, the Extinction Rebellion, Zero Hour and
other youth-led movements are gathering momentum daily. On
Friday, hundreds of thousands of people around the world were
marching and gathering to call for action on climate change.
Employees of many corporations are aggressively demanding
that their employers take action to help save the climate
balance.
The "blue wave" that gave Democrats control of the House in
last year's midterm elections was fueled in part by concern
about climate. The Green New Deal, introduced by
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and
Senator Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts, ties solutions to
the climate crisis to environmental justice and a "just transition"
that will create millions of well-paying jobs. This effort has
won support from many Americans, just as the nuclear freeze
movement of the early 1980s attracted wide approval and helped
pave the way for an arms control agreement between President
Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, the leader of the Soviet
Union.

7. Virtually all of this year's Democratic presidential candidates
are making the climate a top priority. Many have released
impressive and detailed plans that would have been unthinkable
only a few years ago. A CNN poll in April found that the
climate crisis was the No. 1 concern of Democrats who are
registered to vote. Another recent poll showed that a record 79
percent of American adults and 86 percent of teenagers believe,
finally, that the climate crisis is caused by human activity, and,
even more significantly, so do 60 percent of Republicans.
Americans' disapproval of President Trump's approach to the
climate was higher, at 67 percent, than on any other issue.
College Republicans at dozens of schools have called on the
Republican National Committee to support a carbon tax and
have loudly warned the party that it will forfeit support from
younger voters if it does not. Another recent poll shows that 67
percent of millennial Republican voters say their party needs to
do more on climate.
Next year's election is the crucial test of the nation's
commitment to addressing this crisis, and it is worth
remembering that on the day after the 2020 election, the terms
of the Paris climate accord will permit the United States to
withdraw from it. We cannot allow that to happen. Political will
is a renewable resource and must be summoned in this fight.
The American people are sovereign, and I am hopeful that they
are preparing to issue a command on the climate to those who
purport to represent them: "Lead, follow, or get out of the way."
Al Gore shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for his work to
slow global warming. He is the author of, among other books,
"An Inconvenient Truth: The Crisis of Global Warming."
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Photograph
The teenage Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, near
right, at a protest in Lausanne, Switzerland, in August.
(PHOTOGRAPH BY JEAN-CHRISTOPHE BOTT/KEYSTONE,
VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS) (SR4); Many young people
attended a climate march in New York on Friday in advance of a
United Nations meeting about global warming. (PHOTOGRAPH
BY DAMON WINTER/THE NEW YORK TIMES) (SR4-SR5)
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