Around the middle of the last century, the chemical DDT was found to pose a risk to human and animal health. The ultimate response — after a prolonged fight between environmentalists and the chemical industry — was a federal ban on all uses of the substance found to be unsafe.

On Monday, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a daunting report, suggesting that we are currently on track for around 3 degrees Celsius of warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions. The IPCC authors promise that we will see coastal cities swallowed by the sea, global food shortages, and $54 trillion in climate-associated costs as soon as 2040.

That fast-approaching catastrophe is the motivation for the demands of Global South residents and their allies, for whom rising tides and superstorms are already a reality. They’ve long chanted “1.5 to survive” through the fluorescent-lit halls of U.N. climate talks, and this new report — which outlines pathways to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius — is a testament to that work. The figure is in line with the “well below 2 degrees” target outlined in the Paris Climate Agreement and, according to the co-chair of one of the IPCC working groups that crafted the report, Jim Skea, hitting that target “is possible within the laws of physics and chemistry.”

A social reaction on par to the approach to DDT, in other words, could yet salvage human civilization. It’ll be enormously difficult — far more so than getting a single chemical banned. And we’d eventually have to do it everywhere. Capitalism, moreover, wasn’t built around DDT the way it was around fossil fuels. “Limiting warming to 1.5 is not impossible,” IPCC chair Hoesung Lee said in a press conference last night, “but will require unprecedented transitions in all aspects of society.”

It’s not as if moving to phase out fossil fuels more directly would be unprecedented. Costa Rica is taking on the “titanic and beautiful task of abolishing the use of fossil fuels in our economy,” according to the country’s 38-year-old prime minister, Carlos Alvarado. In New Zealand, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s Labour government has banned new oil exploration on the road to a zero-carbon economy.

Yet many of the policymaking conversations around curbing greenhouse gas emissions revolve around how to incentivize fossil fuel producers to gradually wean off their bread and butter through pricing mechanisms, rather than the kind of breakneck regulatory phase-out that would pre-empt economic and environmental ruin. Oil companies — eager to paint themselves as allies in the climate fight — welcome the approach. Several fossil fuel producers are now sponsoring efforts like the Climate Leadership Council, or CLC, and its carbon tax plan, which would kneecap the government’s ability to regulate carbon dioxide directly while levying a modest fee on emissions — high enough to continue disincentivizing coal, but too low to pose a threat to oil and gas. The plan would also pay out a yearly $2,000 dividend to individuals around the U.S., without using revenue to fund things like green infrastructure or research and development.

Amid the doom and gloom that tends to accompany climate stories, it’s easy to lose site of who’s largely responsible for today’s mess, and who should pay the highest price as we navigate through it.

“Almost 50% of global carbon emissions arise from the activities of around 10% of the global population, increasing to 70% of emissions from just 20% of citizens,” climate scientist Kevin Anderson wrote in response to the new report. “Impose a limit on the per-capita carbon footprint of the top 10% of global emitters, equivalent to that of an average European citizen, and global emissions could be reduced by one third in a matter of a year or two.” To wit, just 100 companies have been responsible for 71 percent of greenhouse gas emissions since 1988.

Anderson adds that “to genuinely reduce emissions in line with 2°C of warming requires a transformation in the productive capacity of society, reminiscent of the Marshall Plan,” and that there should be “[no] more second or very large homes, SUVs, business and first-class flights, or very high levels of consumption.”

Unlike the Paris Agreement — which never mentions fossil fuels — this new IPCC report makes it painfully obvious that avoiding that fate and meeting the Paris goals also relies largely on two things: scaling up zero-carbon energy sources and rapidly phasing coal, oil, and gas out of the world’s economies. In a press conference announcing the report Sunday, Skea spelled out the situation in response to a question from The Intercept: “I think the messages are quite clear. We have four different illustrative ways in which governments could think about how to keep global warming within 1.5 degrees, and they all involve really quite significant changes in the pattern of fossil fuel use.”

The Summary for Policymakers unveiled last night makes the case still more explicitly, via the pathways Skea referenced. Those forecasts count in various degrees of negative emissions that range from simple afforestation (planting trees) to the large-scale deployment of technologies like carbon dioxide removal, which remain untested at the scale necessary to make even a small dent in global emissions. Scenarios that build in more room for negative emissions have more gradual fossil fuel phase-out timelines, but also require leagues more faith that those technologies will be both workable and cost-effective in the coming decades. If there aren’t massive technological breakthroughs that allow them to be rolled out at a to-date unheard of level, report authors recommend that by 2030, the world’s economies phase out 78 percent of coal, 37 percent of oil, and 25 percent of gas relative to 2010 usage levels. By 2050, those figures are still more stark: Coal should decline by 97 percent, oil by 87 percent, and gas by 74 percent.

“Pathways limiting global warming to 1.5°C with no or limited overshoot,” the report concludes, “would require rapid and far-reaching transitions in energy, land, urban and infrastructure (including transport and buildings), and industrial systems. These systems transitions are unprecedented in terms of scale, but not necessarily in terms of speed, and imply deep emissions reductions in all sectors.”