When it comes to climate change, the world is awash in two things: carbon and hot air.

The carbon comes from 200 years of industrialization, hundreds of thousands of mines and wells extracting coal and oil from the ground, and millions of homes, businesses and cars belching the end-products of those carbon fuels into the sky. The hot air comes from endless speeches and platitudes, elaborate climate goals and aspirational ads, and not nearly enough real action on the ground.

After four decades of global talks and political bickering here in the U.S., carbon use continues to climb, as do average global and ocean temperatures.

It turns out that taking meaningful action on climate change is an immense challenge of the kind this nation hasn’t seen since World War II. But now, the threat isn’t arriving as a spectacular attack on our soil but as a slowly approaching tsunami, whose advance waves are only now beginning to wash onto our shores.

Climate change requires us to move beyond politics as usual and old tribal conflicts. Its scale requires concerted action now to protect ourselves and future generations.

Here are some of the most pressing challenges we face:

● Climate change is invisible. When the nation rallied in the late 20th century to clean our air and water, we could see colored and stinking rivers, some even burning, and cities engulfed in smog. That led to extraordinary bipartisan action on the Clean Air and Clean Water acts. Climate change, on the other hand, is only now beginning to show itself, in the form of larger and more destructive storms, flooding, fires and droughts. This has radically changed the views of Americans on climate and opened new opportunities for a larger mobilization of Americans across the political spectrum.

● Humans are not very good at change. We want things to stay as they are, to gradually improve. When confronted with change that is too fast or that seems out of our control, our collective anxiety and anger increases, and we instinctively want to go back to the rosy past, pretend the problem isn’t real, or call upon a strongman or “law and order” to protect us. None of those reflexes mean anything to climate change, except that we’ll have more of it.

● We have become dangerously skeptical of experts, which has led us to ignore scientific warnings on climate since the 1970s, and to lose precious decades in which we could have avoided much of what lies ahead.

● We’ve allowed climate change to become a partisan issue. Today, we can largely predict what a person’s position is on climate change by knowing only two things: their party and their education. Generally, Democrats and environmentalists support climate action, and Republicans and their business supporters don’t. Without bridges built between those groups, a historic failure looms.

● Climate action is not just an environmental problem. The current climate movement is rooted in the environmental world. As a result, most media still report climate change as an environmental and political issue. But the solutions and the implications of climate change go far beyond the environment to the wrenching and disruptive changes in the economy that lie ahead, as well as effects on health, technology and communities, where many more people will be affected.

● Too much of our attention is focused on large corporations. Too many of us are relying on the playbook of the 1970s’ clean air and water battles fought in the halls of government and courtrooms. Climate change will require some of all of those things, but it’s bigger than that. When we focus too much on Washington and on distant corporations, we’re leaving a lot of people behind, including most of the 147,000 businesses in Maine that operate tens of thousands of buildings and hundreds of thousands of vehicles.

Responding to those hurdles and adapting to climate change requires a much broader and more diverse movement than we now have, one that engages people across party lines and, most specifically, engages businesses of all sizes that want to be part of the solution.

Doing that requires a whole new skillset to help us overcome our notions of who are the good guys and who are the bad. It requires of us a new kind of listening to each other, that can help us build understanding and collaboration among people who are different from one another and who disagree on many things, who may have even fought many battles, but who can now find – on this issue – a desperately needed common ground.

The good news is that those collaborations and conversations are already underway in Maine and have been building for some time. You can be part of it all on May 9, at the Augusta Civic Center, at the second annual Summit on Climate Change and Maine’s Economy.

Led by ClimateWork Maine, a new statewide organization of businesses taking action on climate, the event is hosted in partnership with more than 30 nonprofit organizations and an equal number of business sponsors. It will include some of the state’s most important business, environmental, government and local organization leaders.

You’re invited to be a part of those conversations. See climateworkmaine.org for more information.

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