Earlier this year I stood in a draughty sports hall, facing rows of 10-year-olds sitting cross-legged on the scuffed floor. I asked them a question: “What does climate change mean?”

Small hands shot up: “The sea rises and floods everything,” one child said. “Fires are gonna burn all the forests,” another added. “We all die.”

The litany of apocalypse continued until I interrupted with a second question. “And what can we do about it?”

After some shuffling, one girl tentatively offered: “Solar panels?” Then a louder boy called out, “Recycle!” His classmates nodded.

And that was pretty much it.

I've worked in climate communication for nearly 30 years, interspersing sessions with CEOs, activists, and politicians with talks to school kids. Over those decades, I’ve watched the average 10-year-old acquire an increasingly sophisticated picture of the climate crisis they will inherit. They can imagine burning forests, flooded cities, dying species, and an uninhabitable planet. Many of them seem to understand climate science better than some CEOs.

But ask these children to picture what we do about it, and suddenly their extraordinary imaginations contract to a recycling bin.

To be clear, I am enthusiastically in favour of recycling—just not as our answer to a planetary emergency. But I understand why I’m still hearing that inadequate response. Since the greenhouse effect and global warming first entered mainstream public consciousness in the 1980s, we’ve offered people ever more detailed maps of the........

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