We live in times where history’s being made. In the last few weeks alone, two speeches are going to be remembered as turning points: first, Emmanuel Macron’s, about the end of the Age of Abundance, and then Joe Biden’s, about democracy under threat in America and around the world at the hands of neo-fascism. To those, add a third.

Sherry Rehman is one of the world’s first Climate Change Ministers. And it’s a good thing Pakistan had one, because the scale of the catastrophe which engulfed it — literally — is hard to even begin to comprehend. 90% of one of its major province’s crops are ruined. Thousands are dead — a third of them children — and the counting’s barely begun. Close to half the country — and it’s a big country, more than four times the population of England — is underwater. Tens of millions of people have been affected. Think about that. Tens of millions.

There are a few countries which are right in the crosshairs of climate change. Pakistan’s one of them. First came the searing, killing heat — birds falling dead from the sky. Then came something like a Biblical flood, torrential monsoon rain lashing the baked ground, like never before.

It wasn’t supposed to happen this fast. Not until 2050 or so. That’s when the mega-scale impacts of climate change — Exinction — were supposed to be felt. But they’re here now. Way, way ahead of schedule. So good luck making it to 2050.

Mega-scale means, quite literally, mega-scale. It’s hard for us — having grown up in an age of relative stability — to even understand, imagine, visualize, grasp the scale at which Exinction’s impacts are now happening. The American West is running dry. Europe was on fire. Britain is parched. Pakistan is drowning. China, scorched by a mega heatwave. The world’s rivers are running dry. We don’t speak of mere cities anymore. We speak of huge, huge swathes of the planet, entire countries, continents, vast nations, all being affected at once. We put the word “mega” in front of disasters now, to try and indicate the enormous, unprecedented scale of what we’re experiencing — mega-heatwave, mega-typhoon, mega-flood.

It’s in that context that Minister Rehman’s words matter, intensely. So much that they’ll be remembered by history. Taught in schools and textbooks one day, probably — to illustrate a grim, disturbing fact about our age. Fighting climate change is turning out to be much, much harder than we once naively thought.

Listen to what Minister Rehman, 61, a former journalist, senator and diplomat had to say, in one of the many recent interviews she’s been doing, desperately, tirelessly:

The whole area looks like an ocean with no horizon — nothing like this has been seen before. I wince when I hear people say these are natural disasters. This is very much the age of the anthropocene: these are man-made disasters.

What are we to do about it? Here’s why Minister Rehman’s words will make history.

Global warming is the existential crisis facing the world and Pakistan is ground zero — yet we have contributed less than 1% to [greenhouse gas] emissions. We all know that the pledges made in multilateral forums have not been fulfilled.

There is so much loss and damage with so little reparations to countries that contributed so little to the world’s carbon footprint that obviously the bargain made between the global north and global south is not working. We need to be pressing very hard for a reset of the targets because climate change is accelerating much faster than predicted, on the ground, that is very clear.

Get that? She’s one of the first Climate Change Ministers — groundbreaking enough — and then in a poor, battered country, again groundbreaking. And now she has the courage — what some will consider the gall — to go out and demand reparations. From the rich world. Which got rich, as she quite rightly says, by putting all that carbon in the sky. The carbon whose impacts are now beginning to devastate the whole world, including poor countries.

It’s not every day you see something like that — a Minister from a poor country telling it like it is. To the rich West. Yes, there have been nations before which have asked for climate reparations. But smaller, more easily ignored ones. Pakistan is, again, a big country: 220 million people. America’s 330 million. Not so easy to ignore anymore. Among poor countries, it’s one of the more powerful ones.

Consider for a moment the steel nerve of this lady.

Richer countries must do more. Historic injustices have to be heard and there must be some level of climate equation so that the brunt of the irresponsible carbon consumption is not being laid on nations near the equator which are obviously unable to create resilient infrastructure on their own.”

Now that’s speaking truth to power, quite fearlessly.

Now why do these words matter? Just for idealistic reasons? A brave truth-teller, asking the rich world to “do more”? Is this kind of like those feed-the-world concerts in the 1980s, a feel-good moment I’m asking you to participate in? Not at all. Just the opposite, really. Her words matter because they cut to the truth of why fighting climate change has turned out to be so much harder than we once idealistically thought.

Minister Rehman’s Pakistan — like the world — is now trapped in what I sometimes call in my head the Trilemma of Climate Change. Trilemma — a dilemma is a choice between two bad options, a trilemma one among three. It’s because we’re trapped in a set of bad choices that fighting climate change is so much more difficult than we once imagined.

What are the three bad options here, exactly?

Well, imagine that, in a fit of human decency, the rich world does just what Minister Rehman says. The rich world gives the poor world more — as the poor world’s been clamoring more and more angrily for, beginning to experience the brunt of mega-scale impacts. That leaves the rich world less left over to invest in its own mega-scale impacts, which are now coming fast and furious, too. Less to fix the problems of the American West, or cities like Jackson, which have run dry completely, less to prevent tomorrow’s mega fires and mega floods and so forth. Problem hardly solved.

Yet option two is not to do what Minister Rehman says. Don’t give the poor world more, or just pennies, anyways. Then what? Well, then places like Pakistan become uninhabitable. Very, very fast. A decade, maybe two. Summer is a season that begins with killing heat, and if you survive that, then come the Biblical floods.

So what, you say? So everything. Pakistan, again, is a nation of 220 million people. Imagine even a tenth of them fleeing as their parts of the country become unsurvivable. That’s twenty million people — many of whom are going to come knocking in a massive tide of climate refugees straight on the West’s door. Now imagine those numbers growing every year, and you’ve got a crisis in flows of people that makes today’s look like a fond memory. The hard right surges as a result — in democracies already buckling under the strain of stagnation.

Then there’s the economic impact. Pakistan’s a poor country, but it’s in fact a crucial linchpin of the global economy. Everything from Europe’s soccer balls to the clothes you’re probably wearing right now to the textiles you sleep on have a pretty good chance of being made there. It’s a powerhouse in sectors like leather and textiles already, manufacturing them from its once-abundant cotton fields, and was moving up the ladder of value added towards more expensive finished goods, like electronics. A world without Pakistani textiles and leather? Might not sound like a big deal — but even in the rich West, it’d mean skyrocketing prices for everything from clothes to shoes to linens if a nation like this, a major global supplier, suddenly went offline for good.

So option two — don’t give poor nations much more help — is a bad one, too.

That brings us to option three: do what we’re doing today, which is…muddling along. Just as Minister Rehman says. Every year or so, nations head to the negotiating table, at a conference organized by the UN. There, rich ones “pledge” to cut emissions, and in exchange, poor ones promise to develop in cleaner and greener ways, basically.

It’s not a terrible system. It’s better than nothing. At least it’s a global effort.

But there’s just one problem with all that: it’s not working. It’s not working in three concrete, very real senses. Carbon emissions just keep on going up. The system isn’t enough to rein them in now, and maybe ever, because “net zero” means that the game of “pledges” can effectively go on forever, tomorrow’s hypothetical cuts balancing out today’s rises. Meanwhile, the mega-scale impacts of all those rising emissions are already here. And while all that’s happening, this system basically pretends that we’ve got until 2050 to really sort this mess out., and actually solve the existential problem of a dying planet taking our civilization with it.

Whew. When I say the system isn’t working, I mean it. That’s what Minister Rehman is talking about, too. Only it’s one thing when a dork with a website like me says it — and another thing when the Climate Change Minister for a country which, although poor, is a linchpin of the global economy, says it.

So how do we resolve this trilemma? Well, the key is to reframe — and reimagine — option one. Rich countries “helping” poor countries? It’s not zero sum. It shouldn’t be seen that way — “that way” meaning less for us, in the rich West, less for the American West to have water, for parched Britain, for Europe on fire, if we give poor countries more — at all. It’s not “help,” really. So what is it? It’s an investment. A collective investment.

You see, the world’s natural systems are also concentrated in poor, largely equatorial countries. From the Amazon, the lungs of the earth, to Pakistan’s copious cotton fields. Let’s think about the clothes you wear. What are they, really? Well, they’re mostly embodied plants. Cotton. Cotton comes from…water and sunlight. The clothes you wear are embodied water and sunlight — and, for now anyways, gas, oil, and coal. Pakistan is able to provide rich Westerners cheap cotton for exactly the same reason that the Amazon is — was — able to give the world clean air: that’s where it was made, plentiful and abundant.

Climate reparations therefore, are really, investments in poor countries by rich ones — that provide the next generation public goods we are all going to need, wherever we are around the world. Clean air, water, food, medicine. Textiles. Electronics. Minerals and raw materials. The sociopolitical stability of that distant country, which helps guarantee that of our own.

You know how billionaires are building luxury bunkers — and hoping to ride it all out? When most of us see that, we chuckle with a mix of repulsion, disgust, and amusement at the stupidity of it. You can’t actually survive the collapse of a civilization that way, you idiots, we think. Who are you going to…talk to? Your butler? A thousand miles underground? Every day, forever? Give it a break.

And yet the rich West can’t survive that way, either. By imagining itself as one giant bunker, that’s going to survive the ravages of a dying planet. It’s not going to work that way. Either our civilization survives, or it doesn’t. Either our world makes, or it doesn’t. No, that’s not completely binary. Yes, there will be countries and cities and regions which suffer terribly — like Pakistan, or like Paradise, California. And yet, still, the point holds true: we are all in this together. None of us can make it by imagining ourselves like billionaires in a bunker, because, well, that’s idiotic.

It’s idiotic precisely because, just like those billionaires, the survival of a civilization isn’t just about eating canned food and talking to your butler for fifty years while you stare at the concrete wall. It’s about civilization surviving. Art, science, literature, democracy. Textiles, electronics, food, water, air, medicine. It’s about not either hurtling back to the Stone Age — or locking yourself in a prison, which is what a bunker really is — but remaining civilized.

You can’t just “lose” countries like Pakistan and shrug and say, oh well, too bad for them. Doesn’t work like that. Even in the rich West, things will be lost — too many things. Not just textiles and soccer balls and leather jackets and shoes and bed linens and clothes from Pakistan — which soon enough become iPhones and TVs from China — want to live without all that? More than that is lost, too. What it is to be civilized goes. From within, even for the rich West. Do you really think art and science and literature then survive in nations which have become billionaires’ bunkers? Don’t kid yourself — when that happens, the only values left are the survival of the most ruthless and vicious, and it’s fascism that’s going to win, even in the rich West.

All of this works together, as a system, and we must choose. If it’s civilization we want to save, then we must begin by being civilized ourselves. And being civilized — at its heart — has always meant investing collectively in the public goods everyone needs, whether it was agoras and town squares, then libraries and parks and hospitals, and now, planetary systems which aren’t about our fake national boundaries, but for all of us.

Or we make the other choice. Not to be civilized. To say, hey, that’s their problem. Us? We can survive on a dying planet, by ignoring it, pretending it’s not happening, being more ruthless and cunning and brutal and selfish and indifferent than the next set of people. Sound civilized? That way, the lunatics, the fascists, theocrats, authoritarians win, by definition, QED.

Civilization dies when we give up on being civilized. Sound trite, perhaps. It’s never been truer. These are the stakes before us this century — the moral, social, and economic scales history will judge us with, the ones which are testing whether we’re going to make it, or not. Minister Rehman, I think to myself, understands this point, what it really means, surveying the devastation of a flooded country of hundreds of millions. But do the rest of us, yet?