To meet the environmental challenges ahead, we have to take the innovative potential of science and technology revealed by the first centuries of modernization and actually unlock and fully mobilize it at a global level. Otherwise, there is every reason to think that 2020 will be only the first of an increasingly unmanageable series of global disasters. Either way, for better and for worse there is no escaping the fact that “big things” are going to happen. The continuation of the status quo is the one option we do not have.
