If I had said that in the '90s, when I was the global head of Greenpeace, it would have been dismissed as doom and gloom extremism.  Even the previous heresy, that economic growth has limits, is on the table. Belief in infinite growth was always irrational, but it is the nature of denial to ignore hard evidence. Now denial is evaporating, even in the financial markets.  Influential fund manager Jeremy Grantham of GMO recently said: "The fact is that no compound growth is sustainable. If we maintain our desperate focus on growth, we will run out of everything and crash." Or as peak oil expert Richard Heinberg argues, we are moving beyond peak oil and into "peak everything" -- arable land, food supply and many other basic inputs to our economy, as argued in Grantham's analysis.  For now, we will still push economic growth as hard as we can, at whatever cost required. As a result, the crisis will be big, it will be soon and it will be economic, not environmental. The planet will take further bludgeoning, but the economy cannot. So we'll respond not because the environment is under greater threat, but because the emerging evidence in science and economics shows something more important to us is jeopardized -- economic growth.  One example is commodity prices. Despite the recession and anemic recovery, oil and food prices have approached record highs recently, driven by underlying, long-term trends that even a recession can't slow down. Grantham calls this "the most important economic event since the Industrial Revolution."
For 50 years, environmentalists have argued we should save the planet for moral reasons, that there were more important things than money. But it will be the economic impact of climate change and