We are at a dangerous precipice of climate change, but there is still a chance to step back from the ledge. Will we do it? Or will the world’s billionaires be left to breed a new type of human that lives entirely underground?

Would you give up red meat or flying on an airplane for 3 years if it could save your home and community from experiencing a category 5 hurricane? What are you willing to sacrifice to ensure your grandchildren don’t ever have to experience a famine in the US?

Everyone needs to resist the knee-jerk response to immediately say these types of solutions aren’t possible and instead try to imagine what needs to be done to make them possible in a fair and economical way. For example, perhaps measures taken are only temporary.

Let beef become a luxury item. Cows and maintaining livestock has a huge impact on the environment. These are dramatic changes that could happen rapidly if politicians worked together to subsidize and incentivize changes.

Another bold step would be to regulate and limit the use of private planes. Cars and planes are two things we know for a fact contribute dramatically to greenhouse gases. Finding ways to reduce their use is how we buy time.

The Covid pandemic showed us one step that can be taken successfully to improve the environment: Embrace work-from-home business models that keep commuters off the roads, and build mass transit models that focus on making it easy for people to go short distances for errands, etc.

Climate change is real! Everything these scientists warned about has come to pass. Climate change can’t be stopped entirely (after all, ice ages came and went without human involvement), but it can be slowed dramatically to give the planet time to heal and humans time to adapt.