Go green. Even if it makes you feel a pious twit | Susanna Rustin

Cutting your carbon footprint is good, political engagement is even better. Don't let climate cringe stop you - we have too much to lose

I interviewed the American climate activist and writer Bill McKibben five years ago. I liked the essays he wrote in the New York Review of Books, and persuaded an editor that his books about environmental science and politics merited a profile. I had been a candidate for the Green party in local elections in London earlier that year, and with hindsight I think I was wondering, what next? McKibben knew far more about green issues than I did (his first book about climate change, The End of Nature, came out in 1989). So I asked him: if a person is really worried about global warming, what should they do?

I may also have mentioned lightbulbs. As in: should this worried person change all the lightbulbs in their home to energy-saving ones first, or give up flying? I left the question out of the published article, though I admitted feeling inspired by McKibben in a paragraph that now makes me cringe. I'll come back to that cringe, but what he said, very clearly, is that a mass movement of people is the only way to beat "the raw power of the fossil fuel industry".

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