Monbiot: I have one purpose in writing Heat: to persuade you that climate change is worth fighting. I hope I have been able to demonstrate that it is not - as some people (notably the geophysiologist James Lovelock) have claimed - too late.

    In doing so I aim to encourage people not only to change the way they live but also to force their governments to make such changes easier. No one can make all the necessary changes by themselves: you can't switch to public transportation, for example, if the public transportation system has been dismantled. Nor, for that matter, can a government act unless its citizens are demanding that it do so: more loudly and more effectively than those who demand that nothing change.

    Perhaps we should allow the legislators to forget what they once were, in the hope that they can become the people they now believe themselves to be. I hope to prompt you not to lament our governments' failures to introduce the measures required to tackle it, but to force them to reverse their policies, by joining what must become the world's most powerful political movement.

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