USA Today’s Green House blog has a blurb on the new book by environmentalist Bill McKibben titled Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. An excerpt:

McKibben sees a slight chance we could still save the planet.
“If we’re very lucky and very committed,” he writes, it may be possible in several decades to bring the planet’s carbon dioxide levels — now nearly 390 parts per million — back to what climate scientist James Hansen says is the maximum safe level — 350 parts per million.
That’s why he and a handful of students at Middlebury College, where he’s a scholar in residence, started the grassroots group, 350.org, last year to raise awareness and press for political action.
“We’re not going to solve climate change one house household at a time,” McKibben, 50, says in a Green House interview. ”What we need is a law, national and international, that puts a cap on carbon and raises its price.”
Such a bill, pushed by President Obama, is now pending in the U.S. Senate. He writes:
Everyone has to keep voting for politicians who will raise the price of gasoline high enough to cause most of us to park our cars and take the bus.
McKibben says Obama has done more to fight climate change than all presidents before him but “the bar was set so low.” He says Obama’s administration still falls “way short” of what needs to happen.
He chides New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, author of the best-selling Hot, Flat and Crowded: Why We Need A Green Revolution for suggesting that a new green economy will save us. While he agrees in the need for solar and wind power, McKibben says green growth alone won’t do it — the planet is too far gone. (He also pokes fun at Friedman’s 11,000 square foot Maryland home.)
Rather, he says, people need to accept a future of less growth and less consumption.

In other words, people must accept a future of what’s known as an economic depression.