I am a journalist, not an environmentalist. I got into this issue because I found out that some scientists were being paid under the table by the coal industry to say nothing's happening to the climate. And I said to myself, if there's this cover up going on, what are they covering up? And they're with the next 10 years of my life. So let me start by offering three sort of large gauge observations about what we are really facing in terms of climate change. The first is its speed. Global warming has blindsided all of us. It didn't even surface as an issue in the public arena until 1988. That was the year the UN began to form the IPCC. It's the same year Jim Hanson went before Congress to testify the global warming is at hand. Today, mere 19 years later, scientists are telling us that we are either approaching or already at a point of no return in terms of staving off climate chaos. That is an incredibly short period of time. The blink of an eye historically speaking for such enormous changes in these massive planetary systems. The second point that presents one of the most difficult aspects of this challenge has to do with feedbacks and lag times. Carbon dioxide stays up there for 100 years. So many of the impacts that we are seeing today are probably the result of emissions we put up in the 70s and 80s before India and China really ramped up their coal fired surge of industrialization. And that makes it virtually inevitable that we will see more events of the magnitude of Katrina and the European heat wave of 2003. The final point involves the extreme sensitivity of Earth's systems to just a tiny bit of warning. As all of you know, the glaciers are melting, the depotions are heating, violent, weather is increasing, the timing of the seasons is changing, and all over the world. Once insects, birds, fish, animals, and whole ecosystems are migrating toward the poles and searchers' stable temperatures. And all that has resulted from one degree of warming. On the military front, it was interesting that 11 admirals and generals recently declared climate change to be a major threat to our national security as climate disruptions trigger more conflicts in countries whose crops are destroyed by weather extreme. What we need is a rapid worldwide switch to non-carbon energy to wind and sun we need it yesterday. We can no longer keep burning coal and oil. For example, we see lots of renewed attention given to various forms of carbon trade. In addition to a lot of the floods that have been pointed out already, the bottom line is we cannot finesse nature with accounting tricks. Other experts are pushing for mechanical carbon sequestration. To me this is basically a full employment act for companies like Bechtel and Halliburton. Secondly, we should know by now there are profoundly unknowable and potentially very high risk consequences in trying to geoengineer ourselves around nature's roadblocks. Invariably these kinds of efforts come back to harness with their unintended consequences. My third objection is really simple minded. How many windmills could we build for the cost of one carbon-sweak restoration plan or one nuclear plan? And the answer is very, very many indeed. Norking this problem be solved by lifestyle changes. It's not enough for us to just turn down our thermostats, carapool and change our lightbulbs. The real impact is Steve noted comes from telling lots of other people loudly and clearly why you're doing that and that way you create the political base for the kind of big changes that are really necessary down the road. From a personal standpoint, I find this issue as enraging as it is depressing. We have brought to this point of no return and the prospect of oil-based warfare on a big way by these massive coal and oil companies who put their annual earnings reports above our collective future. Peabody Coal, ExxonMobile and their allies have relentlessly attacked the science and inso doing, they have marginalized the findings of more than 2,000 scientists from 100 countries reporting to the UN in what is the largest and most rigorously peer-reviewed scientific collaboration in history. These same companies have also misrepresented the economics of an energy transition and now with their champion in the White House, they are effectively sabotaging the world's efforts to move forward with a meaningful climate treaty. In short, big coal and big oil have essentially privatized truth. They have demonized the U.S. and the rest of the world and they have given the impacts of climate change in poor countries. They are making a mockery of our basic instincts of human solidarity. The implications of continuing inaction are frightening. A growing body of evidence indicates that we are already entered in the era of runaway climate change. Given the recklessness of the fossil fuel lobby, it seems only a matter of time before we go over a cliff and to a collective state of free fall and crash land at Global Ground Zero. An increasingly inflamed climate could also put our tradition of democracy corrupted as it is at even further risk. When governments are confronted by breakdowns, they have resorted traditionally to totalitarian measures to keep order in the face of chaos. While the emergency may be short lived, there are too many precedents in which a temporary state of emergency has led to a longer state of siege. So I think one frequently overlooked potential casualty of accelerating climate change may be the democratic process itself. The question is whether we will be able to emerge from the coming turbulence as a more cooperative, humane, and nurturing species or whether we will regress into a more defensive and fortress kind of tribalism. I think it's really critical that we begin proactively with whatever remaining stability nature allows us to start to reorganize ourselves in ways that can preserve an equitable social order in the face of the coming crisis. I'm the most pedestrian level that obviously suggests a world in which we eat locally and regionally grow in food. It suggests that we conduct as much of our businesses as we can through teleconferencing and telecommuting rather than traveling. It also suggests that we take our energy from a wide array of decentralized technologies. To that end, I'll be talking, take me a few minutes to lay out three strategies that I think could help propel this global transition. But socially, I think it means that we need to reorganize ourselves so that we conduct something like 80% of our governance at the local grassroots level through some kind of consensual democracy with the other 20% conducted by our representatives at the global level. And that in turn implies our phasing out of this long historical era of nationalism, which is as outdated as it is toxic and which elevates our geographical differences over our biological similarities. We really need to start thinking of ourselves as citizens of one profoundly distressed planet. I think that understanding involves a recognition that a clean environment is about far more than endangered species, toxic substances, and the dead zones that keep spreading off our shorelines. A clean environment is a basic human right. And without it, all the other human rights for which we have fought so hard will end up as grotesque caricatures of our deepest aspirations. So here's the real challenge for all of us. How do we all, in the most immediate and compelling way, make the links between the local and the global? One way I think may be to focus on solutions. Economists tell us that every dollar invested in energy in poor countries creates far more wealth and far more jobs than the same dollar invested in any other sector of the economy. And if we in the north were to spearhead the transfer of clean energy to developing countries, that would do more in the long run than anything else I think to address the economic desperation that gives rise to so much conflict, to spare an anti-US sentiment. What we in the US must do, which lets join with the rest of the world in a common global project to rewire the world with clean energy. The main elements very quickly. One involves redirecting more than $250 billion a year in subsidies from coal and oil in industrial countries and putting them behind carbon-free technologies. It involves creating a large fund that's been estimated at about $300 billion a year for a decade to transfer clean energy to poor countries. The third element is the regulatory mechanism that would make it all work and that could work within the Kyoto framework and that would be a progressive fossil fuel efficiency standard that would go up 3 to 5 percent every year. I very much believe that a plan of this type, regardless of the details, would create millions and millions of jobs, especially in developing countries. It could begin to turn impoverished independent countries into trading partners. It would begin to reverse this obscene and widening gap between the world's wealthy and poor countries and it would jump the renewable energy industry into being a central driving engine of growth of the global economy. Ultimately, I think it could bring the people of the world together around a common global project that could transcend traditional alliances and antagonisms even in today's profoundly fractured, degraded and combative world. There's virtually no self-awareness in the U.S. that we are blinded by our own free market fundamentalism with its magical belief in the divine power of markets. Clearly any solution to the climate crisis must be global. It's equally clear that it requires a reversal of our current relationship to this de facto corporate state which has reduced our human roles to little more than agents for the movement of money. We need to take political control of these engines of production first by revoking their constitutional fiction of corporate personhood and next by a citizen mandated set of regulations that direct corporate productivity into the service of a more sustainable, global and emphatically more equitable world.