Earth Day, oddly, has never been a huge deal for me. I’m just a little too young to really remember its remarkable debut in 1970, when one American in 10 went out in the streets to demand action on clean air and water. That unprecedented activism laid the groundwork for the swift passage of legislation, and the almost-as-swift rehabilitation of lakes and rivers. But in the years after, many Earth Day celebrations drifted in a slightly more corporate direction; there wasn’t anything wrong with them, but they didn’t seem to be helping arrest environmentalism’s slide into relative impotence.

This year, however, the holiday really resonates, because there are two heroes reminding us of the sacrifices they’ve made to move the fight forward, and the way the rest of us need to step up our game.

One is Tim DeChristopher, who will be out of federal custody today after serving 18 months for an inspired act of civil disobedience. He participated in an auction for federal leases to drill for gas and oil even though he … wasn’t a rich oilman. The federal government was unamused—instead of charging him as an activist who’d pulled off a creative stunt, they treated him as a financial criminal whose intent had been to defraud. (This was the same Department of Justice that didn’t manage to find anyone to prosecute for bringing down our financial system with their greed.) And so he’s given up a year and a half of his life.

I got to visit Tim when he was in federal prison in the California desert, and then again when he was in a halfway house in Salt Lake City. I know he’s going to be fine — I know he’s going to be more than fine, since he is already signed up to start at Harvard Divinity School come fall. I also know his story is going to inspire many to join in with Peaceful Uprising, the group he helped found. A documentary about his fight, Bidder 70, is showing all over the country on Monday night. Find a local screening (and watch a trailer for the movie below).

As Tim got out of custody, Sandra Steingraber went in. She’s been a great leader of the fight in New York state to keep the frackers at bay. A scientist by training but a great leader by force of will, she has spearheaded the so-far successful battle to keep Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) from letting the oil and gas companies do to the Empire State what they’re doing to the Keystone State just across the border to the south.

Steingraber sat down in a driveway to block access to a storage site for fracked gas, then refused to pay $375 in bail, so she’s spending 15 days in jail. She wrote to me just before she went in, with, characteristically, a list of the tasks she hoped to accomplish while behind bars, mostly writing projects that will spread her penetrating analysis yet further afield.

Hours before the jail door closed, she sat for an interview with Bill Moyers (watch a clip below). Her resolution and the great power of her love shine through every minute. They also shine through Facebook posts she’s been able to smuggle out of prison; read parts one and two of her Letter from Chemung County Jail.

It’s no accident that the emerging fossil fuel resistance has sent so many people to jail in the last few years. That’s because the overwhelming wealth of the fossil fuel industry means we can’t outspend them; we need other currencies with which to work. Passion, spirit, creativity. And sometimes we have to spend our bodies.

Others of us will have the chance soon to emulate the witness and courage of Tim DeChristopher and Sandra Steingraber. For us, today, it’s enough just to thank them for their gifts to the future.

Watch a clip of Moyers interviewing Steingraber:

Watch the trailer for Bidder 70:

A few weeks ago, TIME magazine called the fight over the Keystone XL pipeline that will bring some of the dirtiest energy on the planet from Alberta, Canada, to the U.S. Gulf Coast the “Selma and Stonewall” of the climate movement.

Which, if you think about it, may be both good news and bad news. Yes, those of us fighting the pipeline have mobilized record numbers of activists: the largest civil disobedience action in 30 years and 40,000 people on the mall in February for the biggest climate rally in American history. Right now, we’re aiming to get a million people to send in public comments about the “environmental review” the State Department is conducting on the feasibility and advisability of building the pipeline. And there’s good reason to put pressure on. After all, it’s the same State Department that, as on a previous round of reviews, hired “experts” who had once worked as consultants for TransCanada, the pipeline’s builder.

Still, let’s put things in perspective: Stonewall took place in 1969, and as of last week the Supreme Court was still trying to decide if gay people should be allowed to marry each other. If the climate movement takes that long, we’ll be rallying in scuba masks. (I’m not kidding. The section of the Washington Mall where we rallied against the pipeline this winter already has a big construction project underway: a flood barrier to keep the rising Potomac River out of downtown D.C.)

It was certainly joyful to see marriage equality being considered by our top judicial body. In some ways, however, the most depressing spectacle of the week was watching Democratic leaders decide that, in 2013, it was finally safe to proclaim gay people actual human beings. In one weekend, Democratic Sens. Mark Warner (Va.), Claire McCaskill (Mo.), Tim Johnson (S.D.), and Jay Rockefeller (W.Va.) figured out that they had “evolved” on the issue. And Bill Clinton, the greatest weathervane who ever lived, finally decided that the Defense of Marriage Act he had signed into law, boasted about in ads on Christian radio, and urged candidate John Kerry to defend as constitutional in 2004, was, you know, wrong. He, too, had “evolved,” once the polls made it clear that such an evolution was a safe bet.

Why recite all this history? Because for me, the hardest part of the Keystone pipeline fight has been figuring out what in the world to do about the Democrats.

Fiddling while the planet burns

Let’s begin by stipulating that, taken as a whole, they’re better than the Republicans. About a year ago, in his initial campaign ad of the general election, Mitt Romney declared that his first act in office would be to approve Keystone and that, if necessary, he would “build it myself.” (A charming image, it must be said.) Every Republican in the Senate voted on a nonbinding resolution to approve the pipeline — every single one. In other words, their unity in subservience to the fossil fuel industry is complete, and almost compelling. At the least, you know exactly what you’re getting from them.

With the Democrats, not so much. Seventeen of their Senate caucus — about a third — joined the GOP in voting to approve Keystone XL. As the Washington insider website Politico proclaimed in a headline the next day, “Obama’s Achilles Heel on Climate: Senate Democrats.”

Which actually may have been generous to the president. It’s not at all clear that he wants to stop the Keystone pipeline (though he has the power to do so himself, no matter what the Senate may want), or for that matter do anything else very difficult when it comes to climate change. His new secretary of state, John Kerry, issued a preliminary environmental impact statement on the pipeline so fraught with errors that it took scientists and policy wonks about 20 minutes to shred its math.

Administration insiders keep insisting, ominously enough, that the president doesn’t think Keystone is a very big deal. Indeed, despite his amped-up post-election rhetoric on climate change, he continues to insist on an “all-of-the-above” energy policy which, as renowned climate scientist James Hansen pointed out in his valedictory shortly before retiring from NASA last week, simply can’t be squared with basic climate-change math.

All these men and women have excuses for their climate conservatism. To name just two: The oil industry has endless resources and they’re scared about reelection losses. Such excuses are perfectly realistic and pragmatic, as far as they go: If you can’t get reelected, you can’t do even marginal good and you certainly can’t block right-wing craziness. But they also hide a deep affection for oil industry money, which turns out to be an even better predictor of voting records than party affiliation.

Anyway, aren’t all those apologies wearing thin as Arctic sea ice melts with startling, planet-changing speed? It was bad enough to take four decades simply to warm up to the idea of gay rights. Innumerable lives were blighted in those in-between years, and given long-lasting official unconcern about AIDS, innumerable lives were lost. At least, however, inaction didn’t make the problem harder to solve: If the Supreme Court decides gay people should be able to marry, then they’ll be able to marry.

Unlike gay rights or similar issues of basic human justice and fairness, climate change comes with a time limit. Go past a certain point, and we may no longer be able to affect the outcome in ways that will prevent long-term global catastrophe. We’re clearly nearing that limit, and so the essential cowardice of too many Democrats is becoming an ever more fundamental problem that needs to be faced. We lack the decades needed for their positions to “evolve” along with the polling numbers. What we need, desperately, is for them to pitch in and help lead the transition in public opinion and public policy.

Instead, at best they insist on fiddling around the edges, while the planet prepares to burn. The newly formed Organizing for Action, for instance — an effort to turn Barack Obama’s fundraising list into a kind of quasi-official MoveOn.org — has taken up climate change as one of its goals. Instead of joining with the actual movement around the Keystone pipeline or turning to other central organizing issues, however, it evidently plans to devote more energy to house parties to put solar panels on people’s roofs. That’s great, but there’s no way such a “movement” will profoundly alter the trajectory of climate math, a task that instead requires deep structural reform of exactly the kind that makes the administration and congressional “moderates” nervous.

Energy independence: last century’s worry

So far, the Democrats are showing some willingness to face the issues that matter only when it comes to coal. After a decade of concentrated assault by activists led by the Sierra Club, the coal industry is now badly weakened: Plans for more than 100 new coal-fired power plants have disappeared from anyone’s drawing board. So, post-election, the White House finally seems willing to take on the industry at least in modest ways, including possibly with new Environmental Protection Agency regulations that could start closing down existing coal-fired plants (though even that approach now seems delayed).

Recently, I had a long talk with an administration insider who kept telling me that, for the next decade, we should focus all our energies on “killing coal.” Why? Because it was politically feasible.

And indeed we should, but climate-change science makes it clear that we need to put the same sort of thought and creative energy into killing oil and natural gas, too. I mean, the Arctic — from Greenland to its seas — essentially melted last summer in a way never before seen. The frozen Arctic is like a large physical feature. It’s as if you woke up one morning and your left arm was missing. You’d panic.

There is, however, no panic in Washington. Instead, the administration and Democratic moderates are reveling in new oil finds in North Dakota and in the shale gas now flowing out of Appalachia, even though exploiting both of these energy supplies is likely to lock us into more decades of fossil-fuel use. They’re pleased as punch that we’re getting nearer to “energy independence.” Unfortunately, energy independence was last century’s worry. It dates back to the crises set off by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries in the early 1970s, not long after … Stonewall.

So what to do? The narrow window of opportunity that physics provides us makes me doubt that a third party will offer a fast enough answer to come to terms with our changing planet. The Green Party certainly offered the soundest platform in our last elections, and in Germany and Australia the Greens have been decisive in nudging coalition governments towards carbon commitments. But those are parliamentary systems. Here, so far, national third parties have been more likely to serve as spoilers than as wedges (though it’s been an enlightening pleasure to engage with New York’s Working Families Party, or the Progressives in Vermont). It’s not clear to me how that will effectively lead to changes during the few years we’ve got left to deal with carbon. Climate science enforces a certain brute realism. It makes it harder to follow one’s heart.

Along with some way to make a third party truly viable, we need a genuine movement for fundamental governmental reform — not just a change in the Senate’s filibuster rules, but publicly funded elections, an end to the idea that corporations are citizens, and genuine constraints on revolving-door lobbyists. These are crucial matters, and it is wonderful to see broad new campaigns underway around them. It’s entirely possible that there’s no way to do what needs doing about climate change in this country without them. But even their most optimistic proponents talk in terms of several election cycles, when the scientists tell us that we have no hope of holding the rise in the planetary temperature below 2 degrees C unless global emissions peak by 2015.

Of course, climate-change activists can and should continue to work to make the Democrats better. At the moment, for instance, the 350.org action fund is organizing college students for the Massachusetts primary later this month. One senatorial candidate, Steven Lynch, voted to build the Keystone pipeline, and that’s not OK. Maybe electing his opponent, Ed Markey, will send at least a small signal. In fact, this strategy got considerably more promising in the last few days when California hedge fund manager and big-time Democratic donor Tom Steyer announced that he was not only going to go after Lynch, but any politician of any party who didn’t take climate change seriously. “The goal here is not to win. The goal here is to destroy these people,” he said, demonstrating precisely the level of rhetoric (and spending) that might actually start to shake things up.

It will take a while, though. According to press reports, Obama explained to the environmentalists at a fundraiser Steyer hosted that “the politics of this are tough,” because “if your house is still underwater,” then global warming is “probably not rising to your No. 1 concern.”

By underwater, he meant: worth less than the mortgage. At this rate, however, it won’t be long before presidents who use that phrase actually mean “under water.” Obama closed his remarks by saying something that perfectly summed up the problem of our moment. Dealing with climate change, he said, is “going to take people in Washington who are willing to speak truth to power, are willing to take some risks politically, are willing to get a little bit out ahead of the curve — not two miles ahead of the curve, but just a little bit ahead of it.”

That pretty much defines the Democrats: just a little bit ahead, not as bad as Bush, doing what we can.

And so, as I turn this problem over and over in my head, I keep coming to the same conclusion: We probably need to think, most of the time, about how to change the country, not the Democrats. If we build a movement strong enough to transform the national mood, then perhaps the trembling leaders of the Democrats will eventually follow. I mean, “evolve.” At which point we’ll get an end to things like the Keystone pipeline, and maybe even a price on carbon. That seems to be the lesson of Stonewall and of Selma. The movement is what matters; the Democrats are, at best, the eventual vehicle for closing the deal.

The closest thing I’ve got to a guru on American politics is my senator, Bernie Sanders. He deals with the Democrat problem all the time. He’s an independent, but he caucuses with them, which means he’s locked in the same weird dance as the rest of us working for real change.

A few weeks ago, I gave the keynote address at a global warming summit he convened in Vermont’s state capital, and afterwards I confessed to him my perplexity. “I can’t think of anything we can do except keep trying to build a big movement,” I said. “A movement vast enough to scare or hearten the weak-kneed.”

“There’s nothing else that’s ever going to do it,” he replied.

And so, down to work.

Like this morning. I opened the newspaper to read a column in the New York Times by Joe Nocera. It’s his fourth column pushing for the Keystone XL pipeline; fair enough. (Though in the third, he managed to get the economics of carbon so completely backward that he had to append a long correction to yet another column.)  This time, though, the vehicle he used was an attack on NASA scientist James Hansen, who had correctly identified the huge amount of carbon in the tar sands of Canada and Venezuela. Nocera didn’t like Hansen lending his credibility to the fight against Keystone XL, and even though Hansen been meticulous to make sure he’s always spoken as a private citizen, the columnist insinuated he should lose his job: Are these, he asked, “the sort of statements a government scientist should be making?”

If Nocera’s crusade against Hansen leads to pressure from his employers, it wouldn’t be the first time — he’s been in trouble with every presidential administration since George H.W. Bush, and for precisely the same reason: Unlike most scientists he’s been willing to loudly sound the alarm about climate change, and try like hell to get across the message that we must act. From the very first day he came to public notice, warning Congress in 1988 that global warming was real, the establishment has tried to tell him to speak more softly. He hasn’t listened — not because he’s an ideologue, but because he’s a father and a grandfather.

Meanwhile, a few hours later, pictures started pouring in from the Maldives, an island nation in the Indian Ocean. The images were even uglier than Nocera’s attack: They showed hooded and helmeted policemen arresting Mohammed Nasheed and carting him off to jail.

The same jail, apparently, where he was held and tortured for years by the longtime Maldivian tyrant Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, a kleptocrat who ruled for three decades. Ruled until Nasheed, the “Mandela of the Indian Ocean,” managed to force an election which he won handily. But establishments never really give up, and this one eventually ousted him in a coup some months ago. Faced with the prospect that his unabated popularity was going to win him a free election, they’ve now jailed him again on a trumped-up charge.

I know Nasheed because he’s not only a hero of democracy, he’s a hero of the climate. Since the Maldives lies a meter or two above sea level, it has an obvious interest in the temperature of the planet, and Nasheed has been one of the most charismatic and committed leaders in the so-far futile global fight against carbon. He did all he could to transform the bureaucratic U.N. process into a working forum — when the Copenhagen talks were fizzling, he at least tried to salvage something.

And now he’s behind bars again, and God knows what they’re doing to him. One guy who could find out is Secretary of State John Kerry — a phone call from him to the coup leaders would probably be enough to set him free. Kerry, oddly, could also stop the Keystone pipeline, since it requires a permit from the State Department. It will be interesting to find out if he’s a good man or a great man.

Watching the collapse of the effort to create a cap-and-trade plan for carbon emissions in 2009-10 was profoundly depressing. Reading Theda Skocpol’s insightful history [PDF] isn’t much more fun — but it’s certainly useful, in a Santayana kind of way. Since this is a mistake we can’t afford to repeat (the planet is running out of spare presidential terms and congressional sessions), Skocpol performs a real service by helping figure out what went wrong.

The first thing to be said, I think, is that this behind-the-scenes route was worth a try. Given the stakes, you would think elite players, especially in the business community, would have been willing to make the relatively small and painless changes the cap-and-trade law envisioned. Such inside-the-Beltway lobbying is how most environmental change has come, at least since the decline of the ’70s-era movement that really powered the most important legislation.

But this was too big — there was too much money at stake. The climate issue, it turned out, didn’t fundamentally resemble acid rain after all. The fossil fuel companies, which had spent a lot of money helping erect the hard-right political edifice then near its height in D.C., saw that they didn’t have to give away anything. They could block even this small change for now, and continue to put away truly record profits.

If the inside-the-Beltway groups had been able to turn to a real grassroots activist movement, the outcome might have been different. But that movement didn’t really exist, and many of the big players had only disdain for its embryonic form — they liked talking with corporate honchos more than treehuggers. And so the lobbyists from the green groups were walking naked into the offices of senators, who recognized that they lacked the ability to inflict pain or offer reward. The result was the rout we saw.

Since then two things have changed that make progress more possible, I think.

One is a public far more concerned with climate change. That’s what happens when 80 percent of counties experience a federal disaster, when the biggest drought in half a century sends food prices through the roof, when superstorm Sandy devastates the most important city on the planet. Polling data indicates a readiness for real action; few politicians would be punished by voters for taking climate seriously (though they still would be punished by donors). This is precisely what needs bolstering in Skocpol’s vision of an emergent center-left swell.

Two is a grassroots movement revived enough to be something of a force, pushing that center-left swell in the direction it must go. 350.org, for instance, began organizing months after the cap-and-trade debacle, and now works in 191 countries; we were able to organize the biggest civil disobedience action in 30 years in this country, which in turn helped at least slow the Keystone pipeline. This is no juggernaut, but it is growing steadily — at the moment 210 campuses have active fossil-fuel divestment movements, for instance. (One hopes Professor Skocpol will work hard to push the effort at Harvard. Those of us who fought to get her tenure there in the early ’80s would be grateful if she used the freedom it affords to make a difference beyond her fine scholarship.)

The best chance for these two tendencies to come together in effective climate legislation is, as she points out, something like a fee-and-dividend proposal, where most of the money collected goes to citizens. It’s certainly more just — if anyone owns the sky, it’s us, not Exxon. And it’s possible to imagine ratcheting it up fast enough to matter, since every time the fee rises, so does the size of the check that comes in the mail. Americans like checks — my Harvard bachelor’s degree in political science entitles me to say that, I think.

But that does lead me to the final point about Skocpol’s paper, one that bears remembering. Her interest is political science, not science, but it’s the latter that ultimately governs here. Political realism is nice, but physics is calling the dance.

So designing a policy that can get through Congress is at best half the battle. What makes this different from health care is that in that case getting half a loaf actually helped; in this case it’s much less clear. This is the first time-limited giant problem we’ve ever faced (unless you count, say, World War II, which also couldn’t be postponed very long). At this point, having delayed action for so long, the easy baby steps are no longer helpful. A small price on carbon won’t get us as far as it would have a decade or two ago.

In the end, the problem isn’t getting a bill through Congress. The problem is global warming. And it may be useful to begin any discussion of strategy with that in mind.

Read more on Theda Skocpol’s report on the failure of cap-and-trade: a summary by Philip Bump; responses from Eric Pooley, Joe Romm, Mark Hertsgaard, and Mike Tidwell; three (count ‘em: one, two, three) posts from David Roberts; and a followup post from Skocpol herself.

You know what’s fun? What’s fun is watching young people figure out how to change the world they’ve inherited.

Case in point: Billy Parish. When I first met him, he’d just dropped out of Yale. Not because he couldn’t hack it. Because he didn’t think it was as important as fighting climate change. And so he built the Energy Action Coalition, the nationwide student mobilization against global warming. And he built it in a particular way, as a coalition of like-minded groups on hundreds of campuses — he was charismatic, but he put his charisma to use helping to leverage many disparate voices into one force.

As he got older, he let others take over the student movement, and he went to work looking for practical solutions to the same crisis. Given his skills and drive, he could have become a conventional entrepreneur, starting some solar start-up that would make deals and build projects and collect revenues. But his basic sense never wavered: What we needed was a way for communities to work together.

And so, Monday, Solar Mosaic starts accepting investments. If you live in New York or California, or you are an “accredited investor” in other states, you can invest money; it will be used to put up solar panels on a grand scale, and the revenues will pay you a nice rate of interest. It’s a way, one of the first, to put lots of individuals’ money to work building the future we need.

To me, it’s far more exciting than the news that Warren Buffett just bought a couple of California solar plants. Yes, that’s good confirmation that the solar business is a strong one — that it makes sense to the guys with the green eyeshades, not just the wild-eyed greens. But if we’re going to take this to scale, it’s going to require unleashing even more money than Buffett controls — it’s going to take a society-wide effort. You can see something like it underway in Germany, where the Energiewende drive has put solar panels on top of millions of roofs — most of them paid for and owned not by big utilities but by small cooperatives and churches and the like.

As of Monday, investors will be able to put their money into the roof of a New Jersey convention center — but also the roofs of two affordable housing projects in California. (As the good book notes, the sun shines on rich and poor alike). I’ve already got a solar panel on my own roof — I’d look to put one on somebody else’s. (And I wouldn’t mind making 6 percent on my investment, which is Solar Mosaic’s going rate).

Right now the student movement that Billy Parish helped spark has grown to epic proportions — on 192 campuses students are demanding that their boards of trustees divest their holdings in fossil fuel companies. If they succeed, it will help a good deal, for we need ways to reduce the political power of those companies who are holding back the future.

And it will help even more if they take those funds and put them into projects like Billy Parish’s — actuarially sound, ecologically sound, and spiritually sound. Building community is at least as important as building solar panels. If we can do both at the same time, we’ve got a fighting shot at a workable planet.

UPDATE, 1/8/13: Solar Mosaic sells out first round of public investments in less than 24 hours.

Change usually happens very slowly, even once all the serious people have decided there’s a problem. That’s because, in a country as big as the United States, public opinion moves in slow currents. Since change by definition requires going up against powerful established interests, it can take decades for those currents to erode the foundations of our special-interest fortresses.

Take, for instance, “the problem of our schools.” Don’t worry about whether there actually was a problem, or whether making every student devote her school years to filling out standardized tests would solve it. Just think about the timeline. In 1983, after some years of pundit throat clearing, the Carnegie Commission published “A Nation at Risk,” insisting that a “rising tide of mediocrity” threatened our schools. The nation’s biggest foundations and richest people slowly roused themselves to action, and for three decades we haltingly applied a series of fixes and reforms. We’ve had Race to the Top, and Teach for America, and charters, and vouchers, and … we’re still in the midst of “fixing” education, many generations of students later.

Even facing undeniably real problems — say, discrimination against gay people — one can make the case that gradual change has actually been the best option. Had some mythical liberal Supreme Court declared, in 1990, that gay marriage was now the law of the land, the backlash might have been swift and severe. There’s certainly an argument to be made that moving state by state (starting in nimbler, smaller states like Vermont) ultimately made the happy outcome more solid as the culture changed and new generations came of age.

Which is not to say that there weren’t millions of people who suffered as a result. There were. But our societies are built to move slowly. Human institutions tend to work better when they have years or even decades to make gradual course corrections, when time smooths out the conflicts between people.

And that’s always been the difficulty with climate change — the greatest problem we’ve ever faced. It’s not a fight, like education reform or abortion or gay marriage, between conflicting groups with conflicting opinions. It couldn’t be more different at a fundamental level.

We’re talking about a fight between human beings and physics. And physics is entirely uninterested in human timetables. Physics couldn’t care less if precipitous action raises gas prices, or damages the coal industry in swing states. It could care less whether putting a price on carbon slowed the pace of development in China, or made agribusiness less profitable.

Physics doesn’t understand that rapid action on climate change threatens the most lucrative business on Earth, the fossil fuel industry. It’s implacable. It takes the carbon dioxide we produce and translates it into heat, which means into melting ice and rising oceans and gathering storms. And unlike other problems, the less you do, the worse it gets. Do nothing and you soon have a nightmare on your hands.

We could postpone healthcare reform a decade, and the cost would be terrible — all the suffering not responded to over those 10 years. But when we returned to it, the problem would be about the same size. With climate change, unless we act fairly soon in response to the timetable set by physics, there’s not much reason to act at all.

Unless you understand these distinctions, you don’t understand climate change — and it’s not at all clear that President Obama understands them.

That’s why his administration is sometimes peeved when they don’t get the credit they think they deserve for tackling the issue in his first term in office. The measure they point to most often is the increase in average mileage for automobiles, which will slowly go into effect over the next decade.

It’s precisely the kind of gradual transformation that people — and politicians — like. We should have adopted it long ago (and would have, except that it challenged the power of Detroit and its unions, and so both Republicans and Democrats kept it at bay). But here’s the terrible thing: It’s no longer a measure that impresses physics. After all, physics isn’t kidding around or negotiating. While we were discussing whether climate change was even a permissible subject to bring up in the last presidential campaign, it was melting the Arctic. If we’re to slow it down, we need to be cutting emissions globally at a sensational rate, by something like 5 percent a year to make a real difference.

It’s not Obama’s fault that that’s not happening. He can’t force it to happen. Consider the moment when the great president of the last century, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was confronted with an implacable enemy, Adolf Hitler (the closest analog to physics we’re going to get, in that he was insanely solipsistic, though in his case also evil). Even as the German armies started to roll through Europe, however, FDR couldn’t muster America to get off the couch and fight.

There were even the equivalent of climate deniers at that time, happy to make the case that Hitler presented no threat to America. Indeed, some of them were the same institutions that are opposing climate action today. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, for instance, vociferously opposed Lend-Lease.

So Roosevelt did all he could on his own authority, and then when Pearl Harbor offered him his moment, he pushed as hard as he possibly could. Hard, in this case, meant, for instance, telling the car companies that they were out of the car business for a while and instead in the tank and fighter-plane business.

For Obama, faced with a Congress bought off by the fossil fuel industry, a realistic approach would be to do absolutely everything he could on his own authority — new EPA regulations, for example; and of course, he should refuse to grant the permit for the building of the Keystone XL tar-sands pipeline, something that requires no permission from House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) or the rest of Congress.

So far, however, he’s been half-hearted at best when it comes to such measures. The White House, for instance, overruled the EPA on its proposed stronger ozone and smog regulations in 2011, and last year opened up the Arctic for oil drilling, while selling off vast swaths of Wyoming’s Powder River Basin at bargain-basement prices to coal companies. His State Department flubbed the global climate-change negotiations. (It’s hard to remember a higher-profile diplomatic failure than the Copenhagen summit.) And now Washington rings with rumors that he’ll approve the Keystone pipeline, which would deliver 900,000 barrels a day of the dirtiest crude oil on Earth. Almost to the drop, that’s the amount his new auto mileage regulations would save.

If he were serious, Obama would be doing more than just the obvious and easy. He’d also be looking for that Pearl Harbor moment. God knows he had his chances in 2012: the hottest year in the history of the continental United States, the deepest drought of his lifetime, and a melt of the Arctic so severe that the federal government’s premier climate scientist declared it a “planetary emergency.”

In fact, he didn’t even appear to notice those phenomena, campaigning for a second term as if from an air-conditioned bubble, even as people in the crowds greeting him were fainting en masse from the heat. Throughout campaign 2012, he kept declaring his love for an “all-of-the-above” energy policy, where apparently oil and natural gas were exactly as virtuous as sun and wind.

Only at the very end of the campaign, when Hurricane Sandy seemed to present a political opening, did he even hint at seizing it — his people letting reporters know on background that climate change would now be one of his top three priorities (or maybe, post-Newtown, top four) for a second term. That’s a start, I suppose, but it’s a long way from telling the car companies they better retool to start churning out wind turbines.

And anyway, he took it back at the first opportunity. At his post-election press conference, he announced that climate change was “real,” thus marking his agreement with, say, President George H.W. Bush in 1988. In deference to “future generations,” he also agreed that we should “do more.” But addressing climate change, he added, would involve “tough political choices.” Indeed, too tough, it seems, for here were his key lines:

I think the American people right now have been so focused, and will continue to be focused on our economy and jobs and growth, that if the message is somehow we’re going to ignore jobs and growth simply to address climate change, I don’t think anybody is going to go for that. I won’t go for that.

It’s as if World War II British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had declared, “I have nothing to offer except blood, toil, tears, and sweat. And God knows that polls badly, so just forget about it.”

The president must be pressed to do all he can — and more. That’s why thousands of us will descend on Washington, D.C., on President’s Day weekend, in what will be the largest environmental demonstration in years. But there’s another possibility we need to consider: that perhaps he’s simply not up to this task, and that we’re going to have to do it for him, as best we can.

If he won’t take on the fossil fuel industry, we will. That’s why on 192 campuses nationwide active divestment movements are now doing their best to highlight the fact that the fossil fuel industry threatens their futures.

If he won’t use our position as a superpower to drive international climate change negotiations out of their rut, we’ll try. That’s why young people from 190 nations are gathering in Istanbul in June in an effort to shame the U.N. into action. If he won’t listen to scientists — like the 20 top climatologists who told him that the Keystone pipeline is a mistake — then top scientists are increasingly clear that they’ll need to get arrested to make their point.

Those of us in the growing grassroots climate movement are going as fast and hard as we know how (though not, I fear, as fast as physics demands). Maybe if we go fast enough, even this all-too-patient president will get caught up in the draft. But we’re not waiting for him. We can’t.

If you want to feel optimistic about the possibilities for climate action in the wake of the election, here are the tea leaves to read.

Nineteen percent of voters were beneath the age of 30, something no one in D.C. expected. Young voter translates into “not primarily obsessed with my Medicare, hence able to think about the world.” So the pros know this is the demographic that cares about climate.

Meanwhile, 41 percent of voters told exit pollers that the response to Sandy was an important factor in their vote. The climate silence of the campaign was broken by … the climate. And then Obama got about the biggest cheer of his victory speech with a reference to wanting to save America from the destructive power of a warming planet.

Of course, if you want to feel pessimistic, there’s always: Sandy, which demonstrated we’ve waited a long time to get started. Not to mention the warmest year in American history, now concluding. Not to mention our epic drought. Or the small fact that this was the year we broke the Arctic.

The point is, since we’re running out of spare presidential terms in which to turn things around, we need to seize the moment for big, transformative change.

The first, best test will the Keystone pipeline. If Obama nerves himself up to defy the fossil fuel industry and block it, it will be the first time he’s helped to keep some carbon in the ground. This is the guy who, in his first term, opened up the Powder River Basin to Peabody, and the Arctic to Shell.

If Keystone gets built, it will carry exactly as much carbon as the president’s auto mileage standards will save. It will literally negate the one really good thing he’s done.

But say it gets blocked — say the grassroots wing of the environmental movement sees it can trust the president. Imagine the combined power of the D.C. enviros and the folks on the ground, finally building the joint movement that can amass the power necessary to, say, put a price on carbon.

They don’t call it Keystone for nothing.

This post is part of our November 2012 theme: Post-election hangover — whither the climate?

Editor’s note: During 350.org’s cross-country Do the Math tour, Grist board member Bill McKibben will be filing occasional reports from the road for us.

Your average 51-year-old book author with a receding hairline doesn’t get that many opportunities to feel cool. Still, there are moments.

Right at the moment we’re speeding south on I-5 out of Seattle, nearing the Oregon border. There are eight of us from 350.org aboard this bus, which is good since it sleeps eight — and we’re going to spend the next three weeks crisscrossing this country. I’ve got the late great Dobie Gray (“Up on the Floor”) cranked on Spotify. There are four — count ‘em, four — live wifi hotspots fired up — more internet than you can shake an iPhone 5 at. Which is good, because you need the web to find the biodiesel stations.

We’re on a high from Wednesday night’s debut of the Do The Math roadshow in Seattle before a crowd of 2,000. It was a day beyond our wildest expectations. Not just the fired-up crowd (who shouted down the heckler who tried to cut things off before they began), but also the announcement from the mayor of Seattle that he was instructing the city treasurer to start investigating how to divest city money from the fossil fuel industry. And then the news that Unity College in Maine had chosen this day to become the first college in the country to sell off its fossil fuel stock. We’re rolling in more ways than one.

The problem with fighting climate change is that it never feels like we’re getting anywhere. Right now, though, we’re getting to the outskirts of Portland. And maybe the outskirts of doing some damage to the Exxon mystique, the Chevron reputation, the Shell brand.

I’ve got my Bidder70 baseball cap on, my earphones pulled down tight, and now my northern soul playlist has turned over to the too-soon-forgotten Prince Philip Mitchell and his not-quite-a-hit “I’m So Happy.” Don’t know if we’re going to win, but we’re rolling.

Almost exactly a year after we launched civil-disobedience actions in Washington to protest the Keystone XL pipeline, folks across Texas are doing the same thing today.

Or rather, they’re doing something bolder and more courageous — instead of trying to make a political point, they’re actually announcing plans to put their bodies on the line to stop the construction of a portion of the pipe.

An East Texas landowner shows his opposition to Keystone XL. (Photo courtesy of Tar Sands Blockade.)

I know what you’re thinking: We won at least a temporary victory, blocking approval of Keystone. That’s why Mitt Romney keeps talking about how his first task in office will be getting it going. Indeed, we did carry the day — but only on the portion of the pipeline that crossed the border with Canada and connected to Alberta’s tar sands. The largest civil-disobedience action in the last 30 years — 1,253 arrests over two weeks — was enough to persuade the Obama administration to postpone approval of the border-crossing permit.

But unrelenting pressure from the oil industry was enough to persuade Obama to give the pipeline companies a few slices off the loaf. In fact, the president promised to “expedite” approvals for the southern portion of the pipeline, stretching from Cushing, Okla., to Port Arthur, Texas. It was a real low point for the Obama administration, a perfect emblem of its bankrupt “all of the above” energy “strategy.”

And now Transcanada is ready to begin construction — and a brave crew of local residents is ready to try and stop them.

All along, the pipeline has drawn many different kinds of foes. In this case, environmentalists worried about oil spills and global warming are joined by Tea Party conservatives outraged that a private company is allowed to grab land from people who don’t want to sell it.

It’s hard to predict how it will all turn out. From the beginning of this fight, the oil and pipeline companies have seemed to hold all the cards. A survey of energy “insiders” conducted last fall found 91 percent thought Transcanada would win a permit for the whole route. Instead, just this one portion has been approved. But building even this portion is going to take a fight. Texans aren’t known for submitting quietly to outside authority — if a foreign corporation is going to take their land, it won’t be without a real struggle.

And this one takes place against a special backdrop — the unrelenting heat and drought that have marked one of the toughest summers in American history. If there were ever a moment to take a stand, this is it. Everyone who cares about the future owes these Texans a debt — and in fact, you can help pay their legal costs with a donation.

This comes on the heels of protests in West Virginia blocking mountaintop-removal coal mining, in Montana protesting plans for new coal-export facilities, and on the railroad tracks of the Pacific Northwest stopping trains with coal headed for Asia.

(Photo courtesy of Tar Sands Blockade.)

A lot of people are waking up — and the noise that will come from Texas in the next few weeks will add to that loud and lovely din.

The Rio+20 conference is remarkably listless; the energy of 1992 has bled into a formulaic bureaucracy-fest. The text negotiators have agreed to punts on virtually every major issue (one analysis showed that governments agreed to “encourage” and “support” actions 148 times, but only on three issues summoned the courage to say “we will” actually do something).

But it came spontaneously alive for a few hours this afternoon, when a youth-led demonstration turned into an Occupy-style sit-down that in turn agreed to a mass walkout. We’ve just marched out the front doors of this sprawling complex, 130 strong, surrounded by as many cameras and tape recorders.

The youth-led demonstration violated all the U.N. rules — security squads surrounded us at the first sound of controversy, announcing that our gathering was “unsanctioned” and if we didn’t stop immediately we’d lose our accreditation. People discussed the threat through the human mic for a few minutes, and then decided it wasn’t a threat at all — in fact, we were eager to surrender our badges, because then we wouldn’t be part of what had turned into a sham.

Almost everyone who participated was young (I can attest that there’s a certain age past which sitting on the stone floor for a few hours is less fun than you might think); as we marched we chanted “This is not the future we want.”

That meant a future filled with clouds of carbon — but it also meant a future of sitting through the U.N. process and pretending that it was getting somewhere. After Copenhagen’s failure people felt sad, disempowered. But now people seemed to feel mad — and ready to fight where it counts, out in the real world. Out where we need to change the political dynamic if international negotiations are ever going to matter.

The first Rio conference was a great jolt of energy, filled with music, art, hope. But that flash blinded us to the hollowness of the promises.

This gathering, by contrast, is dullness defined. World leaders drone on in the plenary; the bulletin boards are covered with flyers for talks with topics like “Ecovision Turkey 2050” or “A Project for Human-based Sustainability through Ontopsychological Methodology.” The once-crowded halls are half-deserted; reporters search desperately for something, anything, to report.

But against that backdrop the actual truth of this bankrupt process shone more clearly. It took, as is often the case, young people to politely point out that the U.N. has no clothes, that behind the curtain there are just small people unable to do much because of the corporate power that dominates their governments. Hillary Clinton will make a speech tomorrow — but young people really said everything worth saying this afternoon.