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One of the chief difficulties in addressing climate change is that we are all complicit in the propagation of the warming of our world. Even those of us who are seriously concerned about this issue play a substantial role in the problem.

I ride my bike to work as often as I can, but my bike tires and even much of my clothing comes from foreign factories powered by coal fired furnaces. According to Scientific American, Producing the annual beef diet of the average American emits as much greenhouse gas as a car driven more than 1,800 miles. Just being alive in the first world and reaping the benefits of the free market and all of the infrastructure that supports it makes it dang near impossible to live a life that is entirely removed from industrial carbon cycles.

We must act humbly, but with purpose. None of us are innocent, but the whole of humanity is charged with the responsibility of doing better. The hard fact is that the world will become warmer. Retroactively reducing atmospheric CO2 content to preindustrial levels is no longer an option. People will die of hunger, thirst, heat exhaustion, extreme weather events and in myriad resource shortage conflicts. People already do worldwide, everyday. But the frequency and severity of these events will increase in direct proportion with warming trends.