It's not more dire than people let on. The stakes are huge, and the ability to change it is small for any one person or even one country. However, weighing the

It's not more dire than people let on. The stakes are huge, and the ability to change it is small for any one person or even one country. However, weighing the collective action problem against the idea that we would need to completely rework the way our society works (and has worked for several hundred years) in a 20 year or shorter period, I'd say that innovation is much more likely to happen than rapid de-industrialization and a pullback to a rural subsistence lifestyle for billions of people. On the bright side, pretty much everything we need to do to dig out is stuff we would likely be doing anyway since fossil fuels are not an infinite resource. It's just the timeline for them needs to be pushed up dramatically to limit the amount of permanent damage to the climate. The other good news is that the change, while rapid in geological terms, is still slow enough that even if we fail to avoid some damage, there's still a good chance that we can make the changes that need to be made and live with the consequences. And if not, well, so long and thanks for all the fish.