Imagine, for a second, that the debate on climate change is over. Donald Trump is no longer president, of course. The political and economic influence of the fossil fuel industry is in freefall, climate change denial is an absurdity from the past that only your grandparents still talk about, and every political and business leader on the planet has made slowing global temperature rise their single most important goal. What would it be like to live in that world?

Examples of our shift away from nature-destroying activities are everywhere. There is the California town of Richmond suing Chevron, its biggest employer, for helping to cause climate change. There’s the Lubicon Lake Band installing solar panels in the heart of Canada’s tar sands, and the Los Angeles battery-storage company that’s investing $400 million in Appalachian coal country. Zoom out and view these stories in aggregate and their impact is staggering. Researchers with the London School of Economics calculated one in ten US workers are helping build the green economy. London-based analysts FTSE Russell have estimated the global green economy to be worth $4 trillion, which is comparable to the oil and gas sector.

But they warned me that if we mismanage this transition, if we don’t adhere to certain fundamental truths, we risk creating a society every bit as unequal and exploitative as the one we currently live in.

Over the past few weeks I have had long and unguarded conversations with experts who don’t see themselves as traditional environmental thinkers, yet are on the leading edge of efforts to address the most serious crisis civilization has ever faced. I asked them to describe a world where their solutions are being implemented at the highest levels of our political and economic order. And though their answers were as diverse as their backgrounds, they agreed that the future we must build to stave off environmental collapse may well be more prosperous, equitable, and democratic than the world we currently live in. That’s the good news.

Probably your mental landscape includes more solar panels and wind turbines, highways full of electric cars, energy-efficient buildings, the replacing of dirty fuels with less damaging alternatives. If that’s the case, you could be ignoring a huge part of the solution. Cleaner technology is essential if we are to have any kind of long-term future. But it’s only one piece of a transition with potential to restructure our planet-ravaging economic system and the toxic politics the system has created. Unbeknownst to most people, even those who follow climate change closely, this transition is already underway.

“The kind of chaos that most apocalyptic visions describe… like, ‘We’re going to have gunboats in the harbors shooting refugees,’ that kind of stuff rarely recognizes how bad that would be for capitalism,” Geoff Mann, co-author of Climate Leviathan, a new book explaining how geopolitics could evolve in response to climate change, told me. “All the most powerful states are tied very tightly to the health of the global capitalist system and they’re not just going to throw that up and forget about it.”

We’re still very far from where we need to be. A paper this June in Nature Energy estimated the world must invest an additional $460 billion per year in climate solutions over 12 years to have any hopes of hitting 1.5 degrees. Any warming beyond that target, which is looking less and less achievable , drastically increases humankind’s exposure to deadly heat waves, flooding, diseases, drought, and famine. Yet that doesn’t mean we’re charging headfirst to civilizational collapse.

Stories about climate change rarely dominate the news cycle. And in the Donald Trump era they’ve been pushed further to the margins. Much news coverage of this year’s G7 summit meeting in Quebec, for example, focussed on the personal feud between Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Yet a communiqué released by the summit, which Trump refused to endorse, suggested that future economic progress is inseparable from climate action. “This is something greens have been demanding for years: climate change at the core of global geopolitics,” meteorologist and Grist climate columnist Eric Holthaus wrote in the wake of that summit. “Now it’s here.”

Mann predicts we could someday see the emergence of a global authority representing the interests of powerful countries and corporations that would help coordinate and enforce drastic climate actions around the world. This world would be much more sustainable than today’s but also has the potential to be massively unequal. Which is why Mann argues that “we have to ensure this transition doesn’t lock in existing injustices or inequalities even more than it already does.”

Instead, as the impacts of climate change grow more destabilizing, business leaders are likely to push politicians to mount an aggressive response. The pressure Mann describes is already building. Last year, Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and 21 other companies placed a full-page ad in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and New York Post urging Trump to keep the US in the Paris climate agreement, arguing “climate change presents both business risks and business opportunities.” (Trump ignored this plea .) Earlier this year, the World Economic Forum, which hosts an annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, bringing together thousands of CEOs, world leaders, celebrities and economists, warned that “the world needs to move faster on climate change to avoid disaster.”

In 2012, Truong helped pass a law that redirects one-quarter of the revenue raised by cap and trade in California (a program that makes polluters pay for emitting carbon) to communities left out of the state’s economic boom. To date, that adds up to more than $800 million. Affordable housing near transit is a funding priority. “It wasn’t just an environmental policy,” said Truong, who is now head of Dream Corps, a social justice organization started by former Barack Obama advisor Van Jones. “It was a way of designing policy that supports healthy, whole, and safe communities.” She has since spoken to policymakers around the world about the experience. “Absolutely I do think it’s a model we can replicate,” Truong argued.

What if we treated the climate impact of buildings and transportation as a social challenge instead of an engineering challenge? California offers an interesting case study. Over the past decade or so the state has passed some of the world’s most ambitious climate legislation. Yet more and more people are getting around in private cars. Several years ago Vien Truong, an organizer from West Oakland, met with people living in lower-income communities to learn what they need to become more sustainable. Near the top of their list was affordable housing. California’s rapidly increasing housing costs have pushed lower-income people to the edges of cities, far from public transportation. “This is why you always want to talk to community members first,” she told me.

Humans need a place to live and a means of transporting themselves. Yet the way our society provides these necessities is terrible for climate change. Many people live in inefficiently designed buildings and get around in gas-powered cars. These two things—buildings and transportation— represent more than one-third of US carbon emissions. For years we’ve treated this as mainly a technological problem to be solved by designers, architects and businesspeople. In Vancouver, Canada, where I live, a developer named Westbank is building a 43-story housing tower that is certified as LEED Gold, one of the highest standards for sustainability. It has dozens of electric vehicle charging stations. Studio apartments start at $1 million.

The time to do so is dwindling. People with the least responsibility for climate change, like the Filipino typhoon survivors I met last year for VICE , are already suffering more than the wealthy people who caused it . Yet everyone I spoke to for this story thinks a planetary transition guided by the desires and experience of communities on the frontlines of climate change is still possible. Here’s what it could look like:

More Education for Girls

Many people’s image of progress on climate change involves a room full of world leaders in expensive suits signing a densely-worded treaty. But progress can also look like a classroom of children. When environmental researcher and author Paul Hawken set out to rank the 100 most effective solutions to climate change, he put expanding access to education for girls living in lower-income countries at number six. Women with more education have fewer children, which reduces stress on the planet’s resources. They also tend to earn more money and contribute to stronger communities. Hawken estimated this could help cause a 60-gigaton drop in global emissions. That’s roughly equivalent to removing 340 million cars from the road.

Melina Laboucan-Massimo, a member of the Lubicon Cree First Nation in Northern Alberta, as well as a Climate Change Fellow at the David Suzuki Foundation, has seen firsthand the transformative impact of education. Her hometown of Little Buffalo is at the center of Canada’s tar sands. In 2013, a pipeline broke and spilled 28,000 barrels of oil near the community. Horrified, she decided to lead an effort to install 80 solar panels in Little Buffalo. “It was the first time ever that solar panels were seen in our community,” she told me. When she spoke about the project with local indigenous elementary school students, “You could just see within their questioning that they were really excited,” Laboucon-Massimo recalled. “They had really started thinking about, ‘Oh these solar panels help us not burn fossil fuels.’” The children will now grow up knowing a future without oil, gas, and coal is possible.

No More Climate Denial

Much of the technology for a low-carbon shift already exists. States and cities that have embraced it are thriving economically. Yet making that shift a core priority of the US federal government is right now politically impossible. Last year, some conservative thinkers argued in the New York Times that the GOP should support a policy of taxing carbon emissions and then returning the revenues to people as tax refunds. This was not embraced by the Republican Party as a whole, however—Breitbart advised them to “shove their carbon tax.” Most Republican leaders still deny humans are at fault for climate change. In the past year, the number of GOP supporters who acknowledge humans are causing it shrunk from 40 to 35 percent, according to a Gallup poll that found up to 90 percent of Democrats accept the science.