Think big on climate: the transformation of society in months has been done before | George Monbiot

The astonishing story of how the US entered the second world war should be on everyone's minds as Cop26 approaches

Fatalism creeps across our movements like rust. In conversations with scientists and activists, I hear the same words, over and again: We're screwed." Government plans are too little, too late. They are unlikely to prevent the Earth's systems from flipping into new states hostile to humans and many other species.

What we need, to stand a high chance of stabilising our life support systems, is not slow and incremental change but sudden and drastic action. And this is widely considered impossible. There's no money; governments are powerless; people won't tolerate anything more ambitious than the tepid measures they have proposed. Or so we are told. It's a stark illustration of a general rule: political failure is, at heart, a failure of imagination.