Public opinion on global warming has dramatically shifted. Perhaps it was the documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" or people finally feeling the heat. Eleven out of the dozen years from 1995-2006 were among the 12 hottest on record. A recent poll reveals 86% of respondents favored action to deal with the problem. An authoritative UN report in early April 2007 states, "Changes in climate are now affecting physical and biological systems on every continent." And how is the president responding? A House committee reports, " hundreds of instances in which a White House official," who previously worked for the American Petroleum Institute, the main oil industry lobbying firm, "edited government climate reports to play up uncertainty of a human role in global warming or play down evidence of such a role." The White House official is now working for ExxonMobil.

Bill McKibben, a former ew Yorker staff writer, first sounded the alarm on global climate change with his bestselling book The End of Nature. He is a leading journalist on the environment. His other books include The Age of Missing Information and Hope, Human and Wild. His articles appear in Harper's, The Atlantic and The New York Review of Books. His latest book is Deep Economy.