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we’ve come to respect. When we look back physically stable, so it made emotional sense to 5
to the start of the century we are, of course, assume that stability would stretch forward as
angry that people did so little to slow the great well as past.
heating: if we’d acknowledged climate change We know much better now: we know that Bill McKibben
in earnest a decade or two earlier, we might we’ve knocked the planet off its foundations,
have shaved a degree off the temperature, and and that our job, for the foreseeable centuries,
a degree is measured in great pain and peril. is to absorb the bounces as she rolls. We’re
But we also know it was hard for people to grasp dancing as nimbly as we can, and so far we
what was happening: human history stretched haven’t crashed.
back 10,000 years, and those millennia were 2019

Understanding and Interpreting

1. Bill McKibben explains that after 2020 “we began to realize a few basic things” (para. 2).
What are the three realizations he imagines Americans having?
2. When Mckibben writes that America “did cease blocking progress” (para. 7) needed to
address climate concerns, what does he communicate about our current approach to these
concerns? What role has the government played, according to McKibben?
3. What kinds of changes does McKibben predict will happen quickly in the future world he
describes (para. 10)? What do you find striking about these kinds of changes?
4. In paragraph 12, McKibben asserts that we will have to “pay the price of delaying action for
decades.” What evidence does he include to support this claim? What is he implying about the
state of things in the early 2020s in saying that we came to this realization in the late 2020s?
5. McKibben explains in paragraph 14 that rising temperatures “kept triggering feedback loops.”
What is a “feedback loop,” and how does it function in this context?
6. In paragraph 17, what does the McKibben claim will overtake money as our primary concern?
How does this concern relate to “wild inequality” (para. 18)?
7. In paragraph 20, McKibben describes how he thinks America’s cities will look different in 2050.
What do some of the physical changes he includes reveal about the purpose of his essay?

Analyzing Language, Style, and Structure

1. Vocabulary in Context. In paragraph 8, McKibben uses the word “shorn” to describe the
effects the fossil-fuel industry experienced when others responded to the climate crisis:
Even “shorn of its easy access to capital, the industry was also shorn of much of its political
influence.” Something that has been “shorn” has been cut off. What does McKibben’s use of
this word contribute to his portrayal of the fossil-fuel industry? How does he see the climate
crisis and human nature in general?
2. The tone shifts dramatically between paragraphs 4 and 5. How would you characterize the
tone before and after this shift? How does McKibben create this shift, and what purpose
does it serve? What does the tone of paragraph 5 reveal about McKibben’s attitude toward
the trends that “first intersected powerfully on Election Day in 2020” (para. 6)?
3. Identify the rhetorical strategies and appeals McKibben employs in paragraph 8. How does
diction in particular contribute to McKibben’s purpose?
4. McKibben makes a subtle shift in focus in transitioning from paragraph 14 to paragraph 15.
How does he signal this shift, and in what ways does McKibben’s tone change as a result?
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