But part of it is people are paying attention. In Canada, I'd say we've got a pretty strong environmental movement. I live in a city, Toronto, where every Wednesday everybody puts their green composting box outside their house. It's bigger than a garbage can. And it's amazing, the success of the composting. People don't think of it as a movement, but you know, you make it easy enough for people, and people do it. You rarely see a plastic bag in my neighborhood. In fact, my neighborhood was just totally redesigned to be less car friendly -- and people lived with two years of construction for that to happen.

But then you pick up the paper, and you read that your country has increased its emissions by 30 percent because of the tar sands. In other words, what the fossil fuel industry is doing is undoing everything we are doing. And then you just feel like a chump.

So the refusal to accept the importance of economic justice is the reason we have had no climate action. It's just that simple. And it happens every time countries get together and negotiate, because the developing world is not going to move on this issue, on the right to pull themselves out of poverty. It gets cast in the US media as the right to have as dirty a model of development as they want, but that's not the case, that's not what's being demanded at the negotiating table. So you can't have a solution to climate change without really reckoning with economic justice issues in the global arena.

But in terms of whether you can have economic justice without climate justice, I don't think we can have anything without climate action. And that's the point. This is our meta-issue. We've all gotta get inside it, because this is our home. We are already inside it, like it or not. And it's inside us. So the idea that we can somehow divorce from it is a fantasy. And it's one of the fantasies that we have to let go of, in order to have the kind of transformation we need.