I will never forget a private meeting I attended in Toronto on May 8, 2009, with British scientist James Lovelock, whose Gaia theory explains the Earth’s biosphere as a self–regulating entity quite capable of adapting to climate change. Humans, however, will be, in his view, a casualty of that adaptation. Commenting on the impact of climate change over the next few decades, Lovelock, two months shy of his 90th birthday, painted a shockingly grim picture. “Anything that overgrows its resources gets smacked back down,” he told us. “I foresee a loss of as much as 80 or 90 percent of the people on Earth by the end of the century. It’s a distinct possibility, and I don’t think there is much we can do to stop it. You have to make sure those who remain will be able to survive it.” I still recall looking around that room at a dozen or so people seized with despair as they listened to this otherwise lovable old man throw in the towel on behalf of humanity.16 Lovelock’s perspective may be extreme in its hopelessness, but you get the picture — we’re heading in the wrong direction on energy and need to change how we use it and where we get it. Harvard University professor John Holdren, science and technology advisor to U.S. President Barack Obama and a former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, put it succinctly when he outlined the three choices we have in our faceoff against climate chan