1970 was a simpler time. (February was a simpler time too, but for a moment let’s think outside the pandemic bubble.)

Simpler because our environmental troubles could be easily seen. The air above our cities was filthy, and the water in our lakes and streams was gross. There was nothing subtle about it. In New York City, the environmental lawyer Albert Butzel described a permanently yellow horizon: “I not only saw the pollution, I wiped it off my windowsills.” Or consider the testimony of a city medical examiner: “The person who spent his life in the Adirondacks has nice pink lungs. The city dweller’s are black as coal.” You’ve probably heard of Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River catching fire, but here’s how the former New York governor Nelson Rockefeller described the Hudson south of Albany: “One great septic tank that has been rendered nearly useless for water supply, for swimming, or to support the rich fish life that once abounded there.” Everything that people say about the air and water in China and India right now was said of America’s cities then.

It’s no wonder that people mobilized: 20 million Americans took to the streets for the first Earth Day in 1970 – 10% of America’s population at the time, perhaps the single greatest day of political protest in the country’s history. And it worked. Worked politically because Congress quickly passed the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act and scientifically because those laws had the desired effect. In essence, they stuck enough filters on smokestacks, car exhausts and factory effluent pipes that, before long, the air and water were unmistakably cleaner. The nascent Environmental Protection Agency commissioned a series of photos that showed just how filthy things were. Even for those of us who were alive then, it’s hard to imagine that we tolerated this.

But we should believe it, because now we face even greater challenges that we’re doing next to nothing about. And one reason is you can’t see them.

The carbon dioxide molecule is invisible; at today’s levels you can’t see it or smell it, and it doesn’t do anything to you. Carbon with one oxygen molecule? That’s what kills you in a closed garage if you leave the car running. But two oxygen molecules? All that does is trap heat in the atmosphere. Melt ice caps. Raise seas. Change weather patterns. But slowly enough that most of the time, we don’t quite see it.

And it’s a more complex moment for another reason. You can filter carbon monoxide easily. It’s a trace gas, a tiny percentage of what comes from a power plant. But carbon dioxide is the exact opposite. It’s most of what comes pouring out when you burn coal or gas or oil. There’s no catalytic converter for CO₂, which means you have to take down the fossil fuel industry.

That in turn means you have to take on not just the oil companies but also the banks, asset managers and insurance companies that invest in them (and may even own them, in the wake of the current economic crash). You have to take on, that is, the heart of global capital.

And so we are. Stop the Money Pipeline, a coalition of environmental and climate justice groups running from the small and specialized to the Sierra Club and Greenpeace, formed last fall to try to tackle the biggest money on earth. Banks like Chase – the planet’s largest by market capitalization – which has funneled a quarter – trillion dollars to the fossil fuel industry since the Paris agreement of 2015. Insurers like Liberty Mutual, still insuring tar sands projects even as pipeline builders endanger Native communities by trying to build the Keystone XL during a pandemic.

This campaign sounds quixotic, but it seemed to be getting traction until the coronavirus pandemic hit. In January, BlackRock announced that it was going to put climate at the heart of its investment analyses. Liberty Mutual, under similar pressure from activists, began to edge away from coal. And Chase – well, Earth Day would have seen activists engaging in civil disobedience in several thousand bank lobbies across America, sort of like the protest in January that helped launch the campaign (and sent me, among others, off in handcuffs). But we called that off; there’s no way we were going to risk carrying the microbe into jails, where the people already locked inside have little chance of social distancing.

Still, the pandemic may be causing as much trouble for the fossil fuel industry as our campaign hoped to. With the demand for oil cratering, it’s clear that these companies have no future. The divestment campaign that, over a decade, has enlisted $14 tn in endowments and portfolios in the climate fight has a new head of steam.

Our job – a more complex one than faced our Earth Day predecessors 50 years ago – is to force the spring. We need to speed the transition to the solar panels and wind turbines that engineers have worked so mightily to improve and are now the cheapest way to generate power. The only thing standing in the way is the political power of the fossil fuel companies, on clear display as Donald Trump does everything in his power to preserve their dominance. That’s hard to overcome. Hard but simple. Just as in 1970, it demands unrelenting pressure from citizens. That pressure is coming. Indigenous nations, frontline communities, faith groups, climate scientists and savvy investors are joining together, and their voices are getting louder. Seven million of us were in the streets last September. That’s not 20 million, but it’s on the way.

We can’t be on the streets right now. So we’ll do what we can on the boulevards of the Internet. Join us for Earth Day Live, three days of digital activism beginning 22 April. We’re in a race, and we’re gaining fast.

• Bill McKibben is an author and Schumann distinguished scholar in environmental studies at Middlebury College, Vermont. His most recent book is Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?
• This story originally appeared in The Nation and is republished here as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration committed to strengthening coverage of the climate story

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – As environmentalists celebrate the 50th anniversary of Earth Day this week, a new documentary poses a sobering question.

What if wind farms, solar panels and other green energy projects are not enough to save the planet and humanity simply cannot sustain life as we know it?

“Planet of the Humans,” executive produced by Oscar-winning filmmaker Michael Moore and written and directed by Jeff Gibbs, asks hard questions about what it sees as the failure of well-meaning efforts to halt climate change.

“It seems like we have been losing the battle,” Moore told Reuters. “We are in deep, deep trouble.”

“Planet of the Humans,” which will be released on YouTube https://youtu.be/Zk11vI-7czE on Tuesday free of charge to the public, argues that the mainstream environmental movement has sold out to corporate interests and that solar and wind energy components and electric cars rely too heavily on deforestation and electricity generated from coal and natural gas to produce them.

“What we have been calling green, renewable energy and industrial civilization are one and the same thing – desperate measures not to save the planet but to save our way of life,” Gibbs says in the film.

A better approach, Gibbs suggests, would be people having fewer children. “Infinite growth on a finite planet is suicide,” he says.

The multi-year film project includes interviews with scientists, industrialists and environmental activists, visits to wind farms, solar installations and biomass plants, and an in-depth look at the companies that collaborate and invest in green energy initiatives.

Moore said that he, like many people, thought electric cars were a good idea, “but I didn’t really think about where is the electricity coming from?”

“I assumed solar panels would last for ever. I didn’t know what went into the making of them,” Moore added, referring to raw materials, including quartz, and the fossil fuels needed to manufacture the panels.

Moore and Gibbs acknowledge the film is bleak in parts but said they hope it will stimulate discussion. Both men will take part in a live Q&A on Wednesday at 10 pm ET (0200 GMT Thursday) on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

“The film doesn’t have all the answers but it challenges us to think differently,” Gibbs said.

Gibbs and Moore said the mass shutdowns and plummeting air travel that have been one impact from the coronavirus have shown how swiftly the planet could benefit from a change.

The economic standstill could cause carbon dioxide emissions to fall this year by the largest amount since World War Two, the chair of the Global Carbon Project said earlier this month.

“The fact that within days animals are coming back and the skies are blue tells us that we don’t have to build a million square miles of solar panels or buy a zillion electric cars. If we just slow down and stop we can make a tremendous difference instantly,” said Gibbs.

“I think this is a good chance, this 50th (Earth Day)anniversary, to think through who we are, what we’ve become as an environmental movement, and where we should be going next,” he said.

(Reporting by Jill Serjeant, Editing by Rosalba O’Brien)