Tom Athanasiou is a longtime left-green writer and climate justice activist. He is founder and executive director of EcoEquity, a think tank focusing on fair and viable solutions to the climate crisis.

What you’re really asking is “What is there to be done?” In this regard, it might help to expand your terms of reference just a wee bit. This isn’t just “the worst economic crisis in 80 years.” It’s also a governance crisis, and a legitimation crisis, and a crisis in the overall “development model.” It’s a capitalist crisis if not the capitalist crisis.

Since we’re talking big-picture here, let’s be frank. The logic of ecological crisis and that of class polarization are coming together in perfect disharmony. It’s a huge opening, and not one to be wasted.

The economic crisis is usually dated from 2008, but 2009 was big as well. It was when the Limits to Growth debate returned in earnest and when, in strange reply, the climate negotiations deadlocked. Since then, the shocks have been unrelenting, and there’s been a major political shift – suddenly, the sense that the ruling elites have sunk into ideology and oligarchy has become entirely commonplace, as has the sense that they’ve picked a very, very bad time to do so.

On the “what to do,” front, two points:

First, the stakes are now so high, and so manifest, that we have a real chance of rebooting the left project. And by this I mean the global, cosmopolitan, visionary, stands-for-something, playing for keeps, world-historical left that hasn’t been seen for the better part of a century. Why do we have this chance? Because the only promising solution to the riddle of history (aside from eco-fascism, which won’t work in any case) is some new kind of global commonwealth. Which is now a historical necessity.

Second, we have to make this necessity plain, first of all to ourselves. It’s not enough to resist. Indeed the fetishism of resistance, like most fetishism, is counter-productive. What’s needed is a resistance that’s informed by a positive transition story, a story of emancipation and sustainability, that (here’s the hard part) we actually believe.

I’ve been on the climate-justice front for over 10 years, and I’m struck, repeatedly, by the sense that the more people know about the science, the less they believe that we’re going to rise to the occasion. This pessimism seems to me to be key. To oppose it, we have to remember one equally simple thing—we have the resources and the technology that we need to build the future. We really do. But the climate transition is not a techno-economic problem. It’s a political-economic problem, and we can’t leave it to the incrementalists.

Why fucking bother? Let me answer this way – I’ve been a left green for decades, and pissing in the wind is something I’m used to. And, lately, it seems to me that the wind has begun to shift. The problems of social exclusion and economic injustice are lurching onto the stage, and will not easily be led off again. And no matter what strange sounds emerge from the great right-wing-echo chamber, the physical world is nonetheless real. Real and constrained. The denialists, of course, say otherwise, but here too history will have its revenge. Their own grandchildren will curse their memories.

In the end, will we be so trivial as to allow the snake-oil salesmen to destroy us? I’d rather think that we’ll rise to the occasion. As evidence, I cite only one fact: my son, a bright, fifteen-year old sci-fi fan, football player and sign of the times, has announced that he’s bored with dystopia. Following in his footsteps, I’ll do the same. I’m done with doom and resignation. The question now is how to promise some modicum of equality and opportunity to everyone, and upon that promise to rebuild.

As the gas-station man says at the end of The Terminator, “a storm is coming.” It’s a bad time to throw in the towel.