If global climate change is posing an existential threat to humanity, then why don’t we do something to prevent it from happening? Parts of our planet are already experiencing temperatures that are too hot to sustain normal human activity, and thousands are dying. We are now being plagued with massive forest fires that are decimating critically important carbon sinks, and burning up homes, settlements and even whole towns. Widespread species extinction is endemic. Exotic tropical diseases are migrating northward to unprepared countries. Our oceans are heating, acidifying and rising. Glacier melt will be impossible to stop—just one, the Thwaites glacier in Antarctica, is destabilizing from its underside, threatening a 65 cm rise in the world’s oceans. The collapse of Thwaites would unleash an inevitable collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet and an eventual 3.3 metre ocean rise, likely by the end of the 23rd century, if we’re lucky. Meanwhile, greenhouse gas emission have been consistently going up rather than down. What explains this incongruity?