Climate change is a serious, civilization-scale challenge, and nothing here is meant to downplay it. But framing it as the single greatest and most insurmountable challenge any civilization has ever faced is both an overstatement and counterproductive.

Throughout history, civilizations have confronted existential challenges, from famine and disease to resource depletion and collapse. What determined their fate was their capacity to adapt and transform their underlying systems, more than the raw size of the challenge itself. Climate change is daunting, but it is a problem we understand, and one we already have the means to solve.

Far from being unsolvable, climate change can be addressed with technologies that already exist. The disruptions of energy, transportation, and food can eliminate the large majority of global emissions within about 15 years, and the same technologies make it affordable to draw down the carbon already in the atmosphere.

Treating climate change as a hopeless, unprecedented catastrophe carries a real cost. Despair is paralysing. If people believe the problem cannot be solved, they stop investing the attention, resources, and prosperity that solving it actually requires. Overstating the challenge as insurmountable makes it more likely that we fail to act.

Humanity's capacity to solve problems is also growing faster than at any point in history. The disruptions now underway in energy, transportation, food, and labor are giving us tools our ancestors never had. Climate change deserves to be taken seriously and acted on with urgency, but it is a challenge we are well equipped to meet.

Explore the evidence...

• The mindset problem at the heart of the climate challenge, and the case that the problem is serious yet solvable, is laid out in Rethinking Climate Change. Explore the broader climate implications.
• Why despair is counterproductive, and why prosperity and optimism are what give us the capacity to solve big problems, is the theme of Brighter Episode 9, "Why Optimism Matters", and Episode 3, "A Simple 3-Step Recipe for Success".

• For how to actually solve climate change with the tools we already have, see Brighter Episode 12, "More on Solving Climate Change", and Special Episode 2, "Even Brighter Than You Think".

Witness the transformation

The three disruptions of energy, transportation, and food can eliminate more than 90% of net greenhouse gas emissions within 15 years, using technologies that already exist and win on cost alone. This is the fastest, cheapest, and most complete path to solving climate change, and it is already underway.

The deeper shift goes beyond stopping the damage. The same technologies that mitigate emissions will make it affordable, for the first time in history, to draw down the carbon already in the atmosphere and oceans and to restore ecosystems at scale. We are moving from an extractive system that depletes the planet toward a creation-based system that can heal it.

This is the largest reduction in humanity's ecological footprint in history, and it is a choice. The regions, industries, and communities that recognize it early and act decisively will capture the greatest economic, social, and environmental rewards, and help lead the world toward a restored and abundant planet.

Learn more about the implications of the disruptions of energy, transportation, and food and agriculture in Rethinking Climate Change.