Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez often says of the climate crisis that we need a solution on the scale of the problem. She’s is the first US politician to have advanced one that even comes close: the Green New Deal. But to get there, and to get something that comes close, we also need a movement on the scale of the problem. In the last couple months, we’ve just begun to see the beginnings of such a thing.

Taking profits away from people who now enjoy and benefit from them is not a mere “ask” (a funny bit of nonprofiteering jargon that has crept into current movement lingo). Transforming our economy away from fossil-fuel dependency and toward one powered by renewable energy sources is a seismic economic transformation, just as abolishing US slavery was in the nineteenth century.

Although abolition didn’t mark the end of capitalism, it was a massive expropriation of property — no wonder it couldn’t be done peacefully and by mere moral suasion. It took the violent deaths of more than six hundred thousand — 2 percent of the population — to end slavery. The change we need today can be accomplished without mass violence, but not without a mass movement, and that movement needs to be everywhere — making the current system as ungovernable as slavery was in wartime.