Africa is poor because its investors and its creditors are unspeakably rich.

In a world where profit is consistently put before both people and the planet, climate economics has everything to do with ethics and morality.

So we are left with a stark choice: allow climate disruption to change everything about our world, or change pretty much everything about our economy to avoid that fate. But we need to be very clear: because of our decades of collective denial, no gradual, incremental options are now available to us.

Our problem is that the climate crisis hatched in our laps at a moment in history when political and social conditions were uniquely hostile to a problem of this nature and magnitude-that moment being the tail end of the go-go '80s, the blastoff point for the crusade to spread deregulated capitalism around the world. Climate change is a collective problem demanding collective action the likes of which humanity has never actually accomplished. Yet it entered mainstream consciousness in the midst of an ideological war being waged on the very idea of the collective sphere.

When Nike says, just do it, that's a message of empowerment. Why aren't the rest of us speaking to young people in a voice of inspiration?

Those looking for ideology in the White House should consider this: For the men who rule our world, rules are for other people.

Anybody who claims that they know where this whole thing is all going is just lying.