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Tim Flannery: ‘The Next Decade Is Going to Be Really Tough’

September 28, 2015

Tim Flannery: ‘The Next Decade Is Going to Be Really Tough’

A brutally honest conversation with the world-leading climate thinker, who speaks in Vancouver Oct. 14.

Tim Flannery didn’t become one of the world’s most influential climate thinkers by sugar-coating the truth. “If humans pursue a business-as-usual course for the first half of this century,” he warned in his seminal 2006 book The Weather Makers, “I believe the collapse of civilization due to climate change becomes inevitable.” But Flannery has always been clear-eyed about the opportunities we have to change our course. “The transition to a carbon-free economy is eminently achievable,” he wrote. The only things standing in our way are ignorance and pessimism and confusion.

Flannery has written about those obstacles in outlets like the New York Times and the Guardian. He’s convened business leaders at the Copenhagen Climate Council. He’s advised energy giants like India’s Tata Power. For such efforts he was recently given the Jack P. Blaney Award from Simon Fraser University’s Centre for Dialogue. When I reached him recently over Skype at his home in Australia, he was unflinchingly candid about all the hard work still ahead of us. “No matter what we do to reduce emissions the problem is going to get worse over the next decade,” he explained.

But it won’t be insurmountable. Flannery will describe the ways that our human species can solve it at a must-see discussion he’s leading in Vancouver on Oct. 14 (click here for tickets). Right now I’m writing my own book about climate change, which explores how Millennials such as myself are responding to a crisis that is defining our generation. So I appreciated Flannery’s brutal honesty when I put to him variations of the question that also happens to be the working title of my book: Are We Screwed? Our conversation below has been edited for clarity and length.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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